The Environmental Protection Agency is backing off from a controversial lawsuit that brought farming groups out of the woodwork to defend a West Virginia farmer against charges that chicken droppings violated the Clean Water Act because rains could carry them into a stream located two football fields away.
The case mobilized agriculture organizations against what they saw as bureaucratic bullying that could impact thousands of other farmers. Green groups saw it as an opportunity to give the EPA tighter control over what they have derisively called “factory farms.”
The EPA said in November 2011 that Lois Alt and her husband needed a Clean Water Act discharge permit because rainwater on their farm could come into contact with dust, feathers or small amounts of chicken manure that strayed out of the large barns where they raise their flocks. Rainwater at Eight Is Enough Farms empties into Mudlick Run, a stream 200 yards away from the edge of the property.
The agency had warned the Alts that they could be fined up to $37,500 — per day — if they failed to apply for the permit, and another $37,500 per day if the government moved to enforce the Clean Water Act against them. But in a Dec. 13 letter, the EPA told their attorney it had withdrawn last year’s order entirely.
Alt told the agency in February that she intended to ignore the order. She sued the federal government in June, insisting that the threat was “arbitrary, capricious, not in accordance with the law, and in excess of the EPA’s jurisdiction and authority.”
The EPA’s threat was an attempt to define rainwater on livestock farms as a pollution “point source” under the Clean Water Act if it comes into contact with animal waste.
While the Clean Water Act considers animal barns themselves pollution point sources in some cases — if manure spills and seeps into rivers, lakes or streams, for instance — a sweeping 1972 amendment to the law specifically said point sources do “not include agricultural stormwater discharges.”
Via: Daily Caller
