Judge delivers reprieve to Missouri farmers fighting plan to house 10,000 hogs nearby
A Missouri judge has temporarily halted the Department of Natural Resources from changing how it defines groundwater near concentrated animal feeding operations (CAFO) as residents in Livingston County fight a proposed site for 10,000 hogs.
Neighbors of the proposed CAFO northeast of Kansas City sued DNR and the Missouri Clean Water Commission on Tuesday to stop state officials from moving forward with the rule change on an expedited schedule. Cole County Circuit Court Judge Daniel Green then barred DNR from moving forward until further notice.
The lawsuit and order mark the start of the latest legal fight against industrial agriculture in Missouri, which has gained a greater foothold in recent years. Both the General Assembly and Gov. Mike Parson have pushed to make the state more inviting to large feeding operations.
The court filings come after The Star published a story on Sunday detailing the planned CAFO and DNR’s efforts to accelerate a change to the groundwater definition. It also comes a week before the emergency rule was set to go into effect.
The massive site would be operated by United Hog Systems, a Marshall, Mo-based company. Its hogs are owned by JBS, a Brazilian company and the world’s largest producer of fresh pork and beef.
“Any delay is a win,” said Todd Parnell, a former chairman of the Missouri Clean Water Commission, and a plaintiff in the case. “Anything you can do to just slow this thing down and let people think about it and think about the consequences of not protecting our water is good.”
In its application to DNR, United Hog proposes building three barns, one nearly the length of three football fields. Collectively, the structures would span more than 253,000 square feet, nearly twice the size of the average Costco warehouse.
They would accomodate more than 10,000 breeding sows, boars and piglets and will include a 4,000-square-foot building to compost dead animals. Under the proposal, no manure is supposed to be discharged into groundwater.
But opponents say they found shallow—or “perched”—groundwater on the proposed site, posing a possible regulatory obstacle for the company.
Perched groundwater isn’t currently defined in Missouri’s CAFO regulations. But the rules require a massive underground holding tank for liquid manure on the site to be at least two feet above the groundwater table. Opponents of the proposal argue that means DNR should deny United Hog permission to operate.
DNR wants to change the regulations to explicitly exclude perched groundwater from the definition of groundwater. Officials say the reference was inadvertently deleted during a push to cut red tape under Gov. Eric Greitens and that the proposed change is simply a restoration of the earlier definition.
But CAFO opponents, represented by St. Louis environmental attorney Stephen Jeffery, accuse the agency of trying to clear the way for United Hog.
In a petition filed Tuesday, Jeffery wrote that “by eliminating the protection of ‘perched groundwater’” the emergency rule is “actually less protective of the environment” and that there is no evidence an emergency actually exists.
DNR and the Clean Water Commission “do not even bother to claim that the emergency rule is protective of public health, safety, or welfare, or the environment,” he wrote.
Parnell, a retired president of Drury University in Springfield, said environmentalists are fighting industrial agriculture on many fronts across the state, including the DNR rule change. But he said it’s getting harder to push back.
The Missouri Clean Water Commission, for example, has been reshaped since Parnell’s tenure as Republican lawmakers stacked the board with agricultural interests. The commission has the power to deny CAFO applications that have potential to harm Missouri waterways.
“There are steps and pieces, but it’s a very tough battle,” Parnell said. “Because from the governor to the legislature, they are intent on expanding corporate agriculture without regard for what it does to our water.”
A DNR spokeswoman said the agency could not comment on pending litigation. Previously, officials described the rule change as correcting an error.
“We are reinstating the rules exactly how they were written during previous rulemakings so that such structures may be designed and operated in a manner that is protective of human health and the environment,” Heather Peters, who works in DNR’s water protection program, said in an email last week.
DNR and the Clean Water Commission have until Jan. 11 to respond to Jeffery’s petition, under a preliminary order of prohibition from Green. The order pauses the rulemaking process for the moment.
This isn’t the only Missouri lawsuit challenging CAFOs. A separate action filed by Cedar County officials and others seeks more power to regulate the operations locally. A 2019 law, Senate Bill 391 that was signed by Parson, prohibits local governments from imposing regulations on CAFOs that are stricter than statewide rules.
Robert Brundage, the attorney who has represented United Hog and other corporate agricultural interests in Missouri, said he had not heard about Jeffery’s filing on Wednesday morning.
In a November stakeholder meeting about the proposed rule change, Brundage pushed the agency to advance the rule change as quickly as possible. He argued the old definition had been in place for a long time without complaints.
“So it’s not fair to the regulated community who has to go out and hire engineers to go out and design these facilities when definitions have been taken out of the rule and then it’s unclear what definition you’re supposed to apply to certain words in the regulation,” Brundage said at the time.
This story was originally published December 16, 2020 at 11:57 AM.
