Hang onto your wallets – here comes another Big Ag scheme.
Despite cutting $775 million from Ohio’s spending, mostly for schools and Medicaid, Governor DeWine’s H2Ohio program will still give the Ohio Department of Agriculture $50 million (taxpayer $$) this year. Some of this money will be spent for more “voluntary” farming practices to address the toxic algal blooms in western Lake Erie, including “manure transformation and conversion technologies.”
One of the ODA’s new programs offers grain farmers a cost-share payment up to $60 per acre if they allow animal manure to be applied to their fields – even on fields that have phosphorus levels already much higher than the agronomic rate recommended by OSU Extension. So, this new ODA program actually encourages unlawful behavior!
In fact, this program violates the ODA’s own rules which require factory farm owners to plan for nutrient utilization at “recommended agronomic rates to minimize nutrient runoff that may impact waters of the state.” According to a legal opinion from a Columbus law firm – if a person receives manure from a factory farm, then fails to utilize it according to applicable state laws, the manure applicator and the landowner could both be found negligent and liable in a nuisance lawsuit.
The Wood County dairy factory farms have been applying hundreds of tanker loads of untreated liquid manure to wheat stubble fields in southern Wood County – so much manure the stubble fields turn black! The mega dairies utilize numerous tankers to haul millions of gallons of manure so they pass each other for days loading and unloading which is destroying our roads (repaired with taxpayer $$).
USDA data reveals that dairies have a cost of production much higher than what they earn from the marketplace (subsidized with hundreds of millions of taxpayers $$ every year). Traditional milk sales have plummeted by over $1 billion a year as the demand for milk has significantly decreased. Ironically, the ODA keeps approving permits for more dairy factory farms even though U.S. dairies have dumped over one hundred million gallons of milk during the past few years.
Why are taxpayers being forced to prop up this failed model of industrial animal agriculture – especially since Ohio’s voluntary manure practices have failed to stop factory farms from using Lake Erie as a free toilet?
Vickie Askins
Cygnet
