22 billion gallons of manure: who’s responsible, where does it go?
Strengthen the Factory Farm Rules - Part 1
The Iowa Department of Natural Resources reviews factory farm rules only once every five years. Now is our chance to strengthen the rules. Iowa is in a water crisis because voluntary compliance isn’t working. It’s time to close factory farm loopholes in order to protect People and Planet!Why do we want a stronger rule? Factory farms produce 22 billion gallons of manure every year in Iowa and that manure is polluting our water. This is an opportunity to hold factory farms accountable and help us achieve a clean water Iowa IF it is strengthened.Take action to hold factory farms accountable for their water pollution here! We have several demands to make this rule stronger, and below, we lay out two of them.
22 billion gallons of manure: who’s responsible, where does it go?
Sac County - all fields & watersheds
We hear two questions about the factory farm industry often:Where do the billions of gallons of manure go? Who really owns these factory farms? But, the exact answers to those questions are not public knowledge. Last year, we discovered why they absolutely must be.A team of Iowa CCI members mapped and audited over 200 factory farm Manure Management Plans – a plan factory farms must submit to the Iowa Department of Natural Resources indicating what they plan to do with the manure they produce.The DNR attempted to brush what we found under the rug: incorrect application rates (how much manure is applied to the fields), double-dumping, and more. Iowa has too much manure to handle and one way we can prove that is by having access to manure application records – not just the plans. That is one of our demands from the DNR’s consideration of the factory farm rule: we need access to those records. One of our other demands is being able to access the names of factory farm stakeholders – who is actually involved in these projects? Most factory farms in Iowa are “contract growers”, meaning the local person owns the building and the manure but a big ag corporation owns the hogs – like Cargill, Iowa Select, Maschoff, etc. But, the corporate contract company’s name and contact information are not required to be included in all Manure Management Plans. We’re asking the DNR to strengthen the factory farm rule by including the corporation’s name and contact information in the Manure Management Plan.These are two of our demands for Iowa DNR to strengthen the rules for Iowa’s 9,000 factory farms. We have 11 total demands to deliver to the DNR. Click here to take action and tell the DNR that we need more transparency of manure records and who’s actually running the show out in rural Iowa! We need 1,000 comments by June – let’s do this!