Iowa’s Attorney General today (Tuesday) filed lawsuits against four large hog operations that failed to submit manure management plans to the state. Bob Brammer, a spokesman for the Attorney General, says Iowa law requires such plans to be filed with the Department of Natural Resources.
Brammer says the plans are a very important “environmental protection tool” because they help guarantee large animal feeding operations have enough land to apply the manure that comes from large groups of hogs, cattle or chickens housed in confinement buildings. Too much manure in one area can harm the soil and prevent plant growth.
Brammer says nearly every Iowa livestock operation that’s required by law to file a manure management plan has done so. “The D-N-R in the last year or two had found…that there were four operations that basically refused to comply with their requirement to provide manure management plans to the D-N-R and ultimately it was referred to (the Attorney General) for legal action,” Brammer says.
Each of the operations cited had not only failed to submit manure management plans to the state but had refused to pay any penalties. One of the cases is nearly resolved. David Kass has now paid eight-thousand dollars in fines and submitted a manure management plan for his two-thousand hog facility in Plymouth County. The other three are still unresolved. James Dos has about eight-hundred hogs and 172-thousand chickens in his Black Hawk County operation. Travis Aldag has had about 16-hundred hogs in Ida County and Dean Gettler has a confinement feeding operation with about 1350 hogs in Montgomery County. The courts are being asked to order the men to file manure management plans with the state and pay thousands of dollars in fines.