indiana

By Keith Schneider

EDON, OH – For 60 years, this one stoplight Ohio town has been known as a place where time appears to stand still. With more than 400 Amish residents settled in and around the rural community that straddles the Ohio, Indiana, and Michigan state lines, it has been common to see large families traveling by horse-drawn black buggies to and from farms where they milk dairy cows and grow corn.

Adhering to a strict religious doctrine that resists new technology, Amish farmers here spent decades largely eschewing industrial farming practices that have become common around the United States.

But that bucolic tableau of plain people earnestly cultivating the rich soil is eroding here, splintered by an industrial farm alliance between one of the area’s leading Amish farming families and JBS Foods, the world’s largest beef producer. Over the last two years, the partnership has established a mammoth vertically integrated concentrated cattle feeding operation that is confining more than 100,000 male calves and steers in large concrete, steel, and vinyl-covered feeding barns, and generating thousands of tons of solid manure each day.

The operations have prompted complaints of odor and contamination, and state investigators have found uncontained manure running off waste piles and out of barns, draining into streams and wetlands. Water samples collected by state inspectors contained high concentrations of nitrogen ammonia, a contaminant of manure. Following the inspections, regulators cited multiple farms for manure mismanagement, and issued modest penalties to some farms for failing to secure proper operating permits.

Nine Amish farms were cited for violations of manure management regulations in August alone. The state also ordered the largest mounds of manure, some towering two and three stories tall, to be removed. The cited farms are close to each other in Williams County, Ohio and are all owned by one extended Amish family.

Area residents say the manure contaminants, which are often spread on farm fields as fertilizer, are leaching into waterways, polluting streams, lakes, and the St. Joseph River. Water samples collected by two area environmental groups showed persistently high concentrations of nitrates, phosphorus, and dangerous E-coli bacteria in streams and lakes in the region. The animal waste is considered a source of the pollutants that cause an annual toxic algae bloom in Lake Erie.

Five years ago, Ohio launched a $172 million multi-year project aimed at bringing algal blooms under control by encouraging farmers to to limit contaminants coming from their farms. But with the new large feeding operations on multiple farms, the effort seems doomed, critics say.