Forest, Kathy, Edie, Ellen and some of our supporters attended the KD Partners public hearing at the Crawford County Administration Building. KD Partners in Haney Township, Crawford County, off of county road W have submitted an Application and Nutrient Management Plan to the County to expand their dairy herd to 748 Animal Units. These documents are public information and are available to any who are interested at the Crawford County Land Conservation Department website: http://www.crawfordcountywi.org/landconservation/
Crawford Stewardship Project has completed its initial review of these documents and find them generally lacking due to the following concerns:
– According to the Nutrient Management Plan, the farm is expected to produce nearly 6 million gallons of manure and yet it only has 2 million gallons of storage capacity in the manure lagoon.
– The majority of the fields where spreading is proposed are quite steep and yet no conservation plan has been included to ensure compliance with maintaining tolerable soil loss levels and accurate manure spreading restrictions.
– There are no soil tests, nutrient recommendations, or field data provided for the neighboring Lazy K and Busy B fields even though the NMP narrative states that KD Partners has a “partnership” with these farms “for manure application” and they would be receiving 90% of the manure produced.
– The lack of manure tests, nutrient crediting, manure spreader calibration, and soil samples.
We look to the County and the Land Conservation Committee to work with the farmer to put together a solid plan and address concerns that came forward at the hearing and continue to come forward in the next days.
We had shared the above concerns about the major flaws and gaps in the application before the meeting and had received word from Dave Troester that there was really no chance that this would be approved at the public input hearing, so we were able to be a little less assertive at this meeting and everything went rather cordially. The farmers, Amy and Ed Doskocil and their children (young adults who hope to return to the farm) were all very friendly and Forest knew them from North Crawford. The turnout of immediate neighbors was quite low, despite quite a few calls and even a few door to door visits.
Forest delivered CSP’s more technical comments, Kathy addressed water quality monitoring and offered to help the farmers, Edie gave a broader vision and spoke to trends and alternate pathways to conventional confinement “get big or get out” methods, and Ellen, Dave, and Jennifer spoke as concerned Haney citizens. These seemed to be received well even by the farm owners, who actually thanked us for being there a couple times. We learned (during the roughly 45 minutes of unstructured time where no one else was officially “commenting” and we were allowed to schmooze) that KD Partners only realized they had to do the Nutrient Management Plan and apply to the county for approval in late April! This unstructured time seemed actually quite helpful in building a sense of collaborative problem-solving, rather than antagonistic vying for position and many good conversations were had with the farm owners and others. They were told in the end that they had to include the 90% of the land they planned to spread on in their NMP and generally that their application was incomplete (CSP’s position). They will be providing more information to Dave Troester as it becomes available and he will pass it on to us and we will pass it to Steve.
The application must be approved if it follows the livestock siting law specifications by August 14th +/- a day.
It seems unlikely that the LCV will require additional criteria (more than the minimum manure storage, water quality monitoring, well testing, etc) at this point. We will work with Harriet and Dave to come up with some recommendations at least and hopefully they will take us up on our offers of assistance managing 6 million gallons of manure.