Michigan Responds to EPA’s Proposed CAFO Rule Change

The EPA published proposed rules in response to the Second Circuit Court of Appeals’ Waterkeeper Alliance case. The comment period on these proposed rules ended Monday.

One of the commenters was the Michigan Department of Environmental Quality (MDEQ) which started out its comments as follows:

We strongly recommend that the USEPA withdraw the proposal for the voluntary option for CAFOs to certify that the CAFO does not discharge or propose to discharge. We believe that this option as proposed is seriously flawed. This provision appears to have been advanced by the lobbyists for the factory farms as a self-serving means of exempting factory farms from regulation, contrary to any other sector regulated under the Clean Water Act. Instead, we recommend that the USEPA refocus its efforts on clearly identifying the attributes that will constitute a discharge or proposal to discharge, and how these would be determined.

The whole comment is worth a read.

The state of Michigan has had a history of problems with CAFO’s including maga-dairy firm Vreba-Hoff which is bringing a dairy to Union County which I talked about Tuesday. MDEQ had an issue with alleged discharges of manure from some Vreba-Hoff dairies (remember, these dairies are “zero emission” facilities). your can read up on the problems MDEQ had with the dairy here and the settlement documents here. You can see a broader list of CAFO discharges in South Central Michigan at NoCAFOS.org.

This entry was posted on Thursday, April 10th, 2008 at 10:19 am and is filed under CAFO, CAFOs!. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.