Press release: Minnesota Court of Appeals affirms local county’s right to protect drinking water from pollution from large industrial feedlot
Minnesota Court of Appeals affirms local county’s right to protect drinking water from pollution from large industrial feedlot
DATE: 12/09//24 CONTACT: Sarah Horner, MCEA, shorner@mncenter.org, 612-868-3024
St. Paul, Minnesota – The Minnesota Court of Appeals Monday upheld a southeastern Minnesota community’s decision to limit the size of large animal feedlots operating within its borders to protect residents’ drinking water from nitrate pollution caused by manure and fertilizer runoff.
The decision is a win for local control as well as the ongoing effort to address the drinking water crisis impacting residents in Minnesota’s sensitive karst and Central Sands regions.
In its opinion, the Court of Appeals affirmed the Winona County Board of Adjustment’s decision to deny a variance request from the area’s largest feedlot - Daley Farm. The farm sought an exemption from the county’s feedlot size restriction ordinance so that it could expand to quadruple the size of any other farm permitted in the County.
If granted, Daley Farm, located in Lewiston, would have created more than 46 million gallons of manure and wastewater annually that would have needed to be spread on local farmland. That’s more than twice the waste produced by the entire human population of Rochester. Due to the area’s karst topography, land-applied fertilizer and manure seep largely uninterrupted into the groundwater, which is already well above nitrate-levels deemed safe in Winona County. This groundwater is the only source of drinking water for much of the County.
Defenders of Drinking Water, a group of Winona County residents whose water stood to be impacted by the expansion, intervened in the ongoing court battle last January. Working with Land Stewardship Project, the Minnesota Center for Environmental Advocacy (MCEA) represented the residents in the case.
“Today, the Court of Appeals affirmed, once again, that Winona County has the right to determine how best to balance the economic interests of its growing agricultural sector with the community’s right to safe drinking water,” said Amelia Vohs, staff attorney at MCEA. “Local ordinances are an important tool to help protect the public from nitrate-contamination tied to factory feedlots and we are glad the Court affirmed their authority in its decision.”
Winona County adopted its animal cap ordinance in 1998 to balance the interests of farmers with the unique risks industrial agricultural practices pose to groundwater within the region’s unusual karst topography. Groundwater is the area’s main source of drinking water for residents, whether they use city drinking water or have a private well. That means that large feedlots such as Daley Farm are particularly hazardous in Winona County because the nitrate from the liquid manure used on farm fields is quickly absorbed into the groundwater below the surface. To make matters worse, nitrate levels are already well above recommended levels in Winona County.
Nitrate contaminated drinking water is dangerous as nitrate pollution can be toxic and in some cases fatal for infants. Elevated levels of nitrate are also linked to health conditions including colon cancer, bladder cancer, and birth defects.
Given the severity of the problem in the karst region, MCEA and ten other environmental organizations filed a petition to the EPA in 2023 asking the federal agency to use its emergency authority to intervene in the crisis because the state response to date has proven inadequate. The EPA sent a letter to state agencies, urging swift action. In response, state agencies created a plan to both help people with contaminated drinking water and work toward long-term reductions in nitrate pollution. Last spring, the Minnesota Legislature appropriated millions of dollars to fund public health and conservation measures requested by the agencies. Already, the state has begun outreach to vulnerable well owners and is in the process of revising water pollution permits for industrial feedlots.
That said, nitrate levels in lakes, rivers, and groundwater in areas around Minnesota–particularly in the karst region–remain dangerously high, and more must be done to address this public health threat.
Questions about today’s decision can be addressed to Sarah Horner at the contact information listed at the top of this release.
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