Throwback Thursday: EPA Study Finds That Manure Pollutes Water
In 1978, the Environmental Protection Agency spent $38,174 — $173,405 in 2022 dollars — on a two-year study “to find out that runoff from open stacks of cow manure on Vermont farms causes the pollution of the water in nearby small streams and ponds.”
The use of taxpayer funds to study what every farmer already knows, earned the EPA a Golden Fleece Award in October 1978.
Sen. William Proxmire, a Democrat from Wisconsin, gave awards to wasteful and nonsensical spending, eventually handing out 168 Golden Fleece Awards between 1975 and 1988.
“In this case, the award is for redundancy,” Proxmire said then in giving out the award. “There is not a dairy farmer in all of Wisconsin or Vermont who didn’t know the results and findings of this study before it was made.”
The study, “Alternate Methods of Manure Handling” was split between two sites: what was then called the University of Vermont Animal Sciences Research Center and a local dairy farm.
The publicly-funded university contributed $29,040 toward the research, bringing the total cost to $67,214.
The unsurprising findings from the study included that “the concentrations and amounts of nutrients in runoff from the manure storage facility were high enough to cause deterioration of water quality in small streams and ponds.”
The report recommended that “the manure stack should be covered to eliminate the large volume of contaminated runoff. Covering for the facility should probably be a permanent roof rather than a thin plastic sheet placed directly on the pile. The latter is cumbersome and not very efficient.”
The research “strongly suggested” that if the manure storage area isn’t covered, then the runoff should be contained in a lagoon and used to irrigate crops.
“This is one case where there was too much bull and not enough common sense,” Proxmire said. “There was not only a deterioration in water quality but in the thinking of those who authorized this study.”
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