Ohio fears megafarms' manure piling up

COLUMBUS -- Under the best conditions, raising livestock is a dirty, smelly business.

And right now in Ohio, the conditions are far from good.

Record rainfall in the fall kept most farmers from spreading manure on muddy fields. Agriculture officials are concerned that farmers soon will run out of storage space and spread manure on snow-covered, frozen fields this winter. That's bad because, instead of fertilizing soil, the manure can be washed off fields by sudden thaws or unseasonal rain.

Once it's in streams, the manure can kill fish and help grow toxic algae in ponds and lakes.

"We go to two dozen to three dozen of these pollutions a year, easily," said Ken Fitz, wildlife law-enforcement administrator with the Ohio Department of Natural Resources.

Ohio Environmental Protection Agency records show 39 manure spills in streams across Ohio last year, four during winter. Spills also happen when liquid manure is spread on rain-soaked farm fields or after rainstorms.

The worst spill last year occurred July 21 in Columbiana County when heavy rain washed manure from two dairy farm feedlots into Sandy Creek. The spill killed 7,419 fish; the Whiteleather dairy farm paid a $4,816 fine.

Manure is an increasingly serious problem in Ohio. The state has as many as 40 million chickens, hogs, and cows that altogether produce more than 17 million tons of manure each year, according to state and U.S. estimates.

Phosphorus from manure that rain washes off farms helps grow large summertime blooms of toxic blue-green algae in waterways, including Grand Lake St. Marys and Lake Erie.

At stake is billions of dollars in fishing and tourism.

As farming has grown more concentrated, so has the manure. Large dairy operations typically store millions of gallons of liquid manure in large lagoons.

Ohio has 185 megafarms with permits. They house at least 700 dairy cows, 82,000 chickens, or 2,500 pigs.

The owners must get emergency approval from the Ohio Department of Agriculture before they can spread manure on frozen ground.

Pete Dull, owner of a 6,000-pig farm near Brookville, said the relatively warm weather this past week gave him a desperately needed window to haul out 400,000 gallons of manure stored under his hog houses. "We've got two more buildings that we would still like to haul," Mr. Dull said.

Kevin Elder, chief of the state's Livestock Environmental Permitting Program, said he thinks a great deal of megafarm manure has been moved to fields in two weeks.

"We've gotten lucky," he said.

He said thousands of smaller farms -- as many as 30,000 in Ohio -- operate under no oversight and can spread manure whenever. Small farms just south of Grand Lake St. Marys, which has been declared a distressed watershed, are the only ones in Ohio that cannot spread manure during winter months.

Ohio State University Extension officials are urging farmers to follow voluntary precautions intended to prevent winter spills.