A proposal being considered by the Ohio Department of Agriculture to permit a 2.2-million chicken farm in Van Wert County is raising concerns about the impact the farm could have on Western Lake Erie and its annual toxic algae problem.

Van Wert is more than an hour and a half drive southwest of Toledo, but environmentalists say chicken manure from the farm will eventually find its way to the lake, increasing the algal blooms.

Most experts on Lake Erie, on water, on CAFOs (concentrated animal feeding operations) — heck, many of the remaining family farmers in the region — say this part of Ohio simply cannot absorb another factory farm or its run-off. And 2.2 million chickens is a factory farm. 

What is being proposed near Van Wert is an egg factory. Conveyor belts would run constantly under the caged chickens to transport 18,333 tons of manure a year from the birds to two barns, which will each hold 214,880 cubic feet of chicken droppings.

The waste from the egg factory will be spread on nearby farm fields — 18,333 tons of manure a year, year in and year out.

What environmentalists fear, based on experience, is that rain will eventually transport some of that waste into ditches, creeks, the Maumee River, and finally into the waters of Lake Erie. 

Here is what is at stake: Our end of the lake is one of the most productive fisheries on the planet, but it is also the drinking water supply for millions of Americans and Canadians.

An especially toxic algae bloom in August, 2014, resulted in the shutdown of Toledo’s water treatment plant for a couple of scary and stressful days. State environmental protection regulators blamed poor water treatment by the city, but mostly pointed to the amount of phosphorus dumped into Lake Erie from its largest tributary, the Maumee River, as the ultimate cause of the algae bloom.

But while state and federal environmental grants are helping farmers to slow the drainage of water from their fields and teach farmers how to grow their crops with less fertilizer, Ohio agriculture regulators continue to permit more and more factory farms in northwest Ohio.

To date, according to the Toledo area environmental group, Advocates for a Clean Lake Erie, the Western Lake Erie watershed is overburdened with manure from 11.2 million chickens, 292,000 hogs, and 97,000 cows at already permitted factory farms.

Any other factory in the state is regulated, in part, by the Ohio Environmental Protection Agency, but because these massive operations are called “farms,” state lawmakers have decided they don’t warrant OEPA review. That’s wrongheaded policy and it hasn’t always been the case.

In 2000, the Ohio Farm Bureau lobbied lawmakers in Columbus to drop the OEPA as a regulator of massive farms, turning that job over to the Department of Agriculture, one of the biggest proponents of agribusiness in this state.

This is the ultimate in the fox guarding the assembly-line henhouse.

We need to go back to the future — back to regulation. We need the Ohio Department of Environmental Protection to protect our water.

Let the agriculture bureaucrats have their say about proposed megafarms, but let environmental regulators also review these factory farms for environmental impact — to make sure they aren’t creating a tipping point with toxic algae that could endanger the health of millions of Ohioans and kill a Great Lake.

First Published June 19, 2016, 4:00 a.m.