Kewaunee CARES’ Fight for Clean Water
A violently ill six-month-old Samantha Treml was rushed to the emergency room one cold December evening. She contracted E. coli after her parents bathed her in polluted water, not realizing their private well had been contaminated.
On top of E. coli, water in Kewaunee County contains nitrate levels at least twice as high as the EPA deems safe. According to the Wisconsin DNR, consuming water with high levels of nitrates can cause a wide range of health risks, especially for infants and the elderly. Thirty-four percent of the tested wells in Kewaunee County are contaminated, a cattle farmer who focuses on environmental issues in the region said, adding that people cannot use the water to cook or bathe without risking infection. The state and federal governments have provided some low-income citizens with bottled water, and others are able to use water from area schools or other institutions that draw water from deeper and more strictly regulated wells. However, many Kewaunee County residents have been forced to use the contaminated water, and because of this, many have gotten sick.
Lynn Utesch was the Tremls’ neighbor and remembers when their baby got sick. That incident and his disappointment in the lack of government assistance provoked him to take matters into his own hands. “We finally realized that nobody is doing anything to help the citizens in our community, so we formed an organization called Kewaunee Citizens Advocating Responsible Environmental Stewardship (Kewaunee CARES),” Utesch said.
Kewaunee CARES wanted to find the source of the contamination, so it began sampling the three rivers that run through Kewaunee County. Water tests run by Marquette University revealed that these rivers have high levels of antibiotics and antibiotic-resistant bacteria and are now on the EPA’s impaired waters list.
The source of the pollution in both the rivers and citizens’ private wells is cow manure from large-scale dairy farms, Utesch alleged.
Cattle in Kewaunee County outnumber people five to one, Utesch said, adding that it’s the only county in Wisconsin where the number of livestock is continually increasing. Kewaunee County is home to 16 concentrated animal feeding operations (CAFOs), which the USDA defines as a farm that has over 1,000 “animal units” confined for over 45 days a year. The cattle in Kewaunee County produce 700 million gallons of liquid waste every year, nine times the amount that is produced by the nearby city of Green Bay. Until it’s applied to crops as a fertilizer, CAFOs store the manure in enormous pits, the largest of which can hold up to 76 million gallons.
According to Utesch, these pits are responsible for some of the water contamination, but much of it occurs after the manure is spread onto the fields and seeps through the thin layer of topsoil and the cracks in the underlying limestone into the groundwater.
Kewaunee CARES argues that the contamination levels are so high because the Wisconsin DNR has not enforced clean water regulations on CAFOs, so it petitioned the EPA under the Safe Drinking Water Act to invoke their emergency powers. The group had three requests: to provide clean drinking water, to further investigate the source of the contamination, and to increase enforcement of regulations to prevent contamination levels from rising.
Utesch said he doesn’t believe that CAFOs can exist in Kewaunee County if clean water regulations are enforced. However, large-scale dairy farmers in Kewaunee County say they are invested in finding a solution and think CAFOs can guide the water cleanup initiative.
“Our farmers rely on clean water, too. Big farms don’t want polluted wells any more than small farms do,” said John Holevoet, a spokesman for CAFOs in Kewaunee County.
Many large dairy farmers are members of Peninsula Pride Farms, a watershed group in Kewaunee County that provides reverse osmosis water treatment systems to people who can show they have a contamination issue. Peninsula Pride Farms is primarily funded by farmers and the agribusiness community.
CAFOs are also implementing new technologies like anaerobic digesters, which separate manure into clean water, gas that can be used for energy, and solid waste that can be applied as a fertilizer without seeping into the groundwater. Large-scale farms may be better equipped to reduce contamination than smaller farms since they have space for large digesters and the finances to install and maintain them, according to Holevoet.
Large dairy farms are not entirely responsible for the water contamination, Holevoet alleged. Although 60 percent or so of water pathogens come from animal agriculture, the other 40 percent is from human waste, Holevoet said. He added that there is no correlation between high numbers of dairy animals and high levels of nitrates in the water, since high levels of nitrates are often from commercial fertilizers.
“I am very skeptical that anything we do could make all the water fine in Kewaunee County. If our expectation is that Kewaunee County won’t have any nitrates, I think that is very unlikely. You could get rid of all the cows, and those goals would still be unreachable,” Holevoet said.
With the dairy industry making up a large part of Kewaunee County’s economy, Holevoet said the ultimate goal is that people can still dairy farm well into the future while minimizing any adverse environmental impacts and safeguarding people’s wells so they have safe water to drink. According to Utesch, Kewaunee CARES’ end goal is similar: to make it so that people can actually use their water. He said this would mean that the DNR would crack down on farms that are not following safe manure-handling procedures.
The state will soon be implementing regulations that prevent any farm from spreading manure where there is two feet or less of topsoil, according to Holevoet. Additionally, Kewaunee County farmers and citizens recently passed by 70 percent a winter spreading ordinance that bans manure application between January 1st and April 15th, which is when much of the groundwater contamination occurs. Kewaunee CARES hopes that these new regulations will help to reduce the level of pollution, but if nothing about the current large-scale farming system changes, Utesch thinks the future looks pretty bleak.
“Our soil will continue to be depleted, and our groundwater in Kewaunee County is not going to be the only groundwater that is contaminated,” he said. However, Utesch remains hopeful and is encouraged by how Kewaunee County farmers and citizens have come together to fight for their right to clean water. “We lost our water but we gained our community,” he said.