WISCONSIN RAPIDS, Wis. (WSAU) — Wood County supervisors adjusted a recently-enacted ordinance that deals with protecting groundwater from manure and chemical fertilizers used in agriculture. The ordinance allows for increased enforcement of nutrient management plans, and the amendment passed Tuesday allows Wood County more regulatory authority over the storage of animal waste and fertilizer.
The ordinance passed in June was strongly supported by residents in the Town of Saratoga and by their local group called Protect Wood County and its Neighbors. The group has been actively trying to stop the development of a concentrated animal feeding operation (CAFO) called Golden Sands Dairy, proposed by Wysocki Farms.
County Board Chairman Lance Pliml says the ordinance doesn’t really address the large farm issues, since those are handled by the state, but it will help the county better protect the water. “The ordinance handles nutrient management, and how that will be handled out of our Land Conservation office. It allows for a little bit more inspection in conjunction with our Health Department so we can be proactive instead of reactive to some of those problems that might occur.”
Pliml says the ordinance was passed in the spring and amended Tuesday, but most of the support for making farms create a nutrient management plan and following these guidelines was from the Saratoga area. “From a county-wide perspective, that’s probably the township that’s most interested. The rest of the county, geographically, probably did not want to see that ordinance pass. I think that would be a fairly fair assumption of what I heard from the feedback that I got both at the meeting and prior to the meeting.”
Even though Saratoga residents and the Protect Wood County and its Neighbors group successfully pushed for the ordinance, Pliml thinks they will be disappointed if they try to use this to stop Wysocki Farms from starting a 7-thousand acre farm in the Town of Saratoga that would manage 5,300 dairy cattle, plus the crops and support services for the farm. He says that’s because the large farms are regulated by the state. “I highly doubt that it has any effect on that operation, should it come to existence in the Town of Saratoga. It will certainly have an effect on some of the smaller operations as they go forward, as they look at their nutrient management plans. At the end of the day, you hope it has some effect, but the reality of it is I don’t think that it necessarily affected the people that the group who spoke today would like to see it affect.”
Pliml says Saratoga and Wood County don’t have a CAFO yet, and he doesn’t believe Saratoga even has a single dairy farm right now. He believes when the court battles are done and the permitting process is complete, the mega-dairy will come. “My personal guess on this is that the CAFO will eventually be sited. I don’t think that there’s anything that has been done or anything that I’ve heard that would stop that from happening at some point. I think that the people down there, the residents want to make sure that if it is there, that their groundwater is protected and that they have some recourse should that not occur.”
It’s unclear when the final permitting and legal hurdles will end, allowing Golden Sands Dairy to be built.
(Listen to our interview with Lance Pliml on our website, here.)
