(All photos courtesy of Helping Others Maintain Environmental Standards)

Workers set up two hoses to pump water that leaked into a manure pond under construction at the Tradition Dairy site.

By Lauren Williamson, Medill

Despite a water leak that occurred while workers dug a manure pond in Jo Daviess County last week, plans remain on schedule for a 5,000-cow concentrated animal feeding operation a mile west of Nora, Ill., officials said this week.

“They were working on the uplands water pit and they hit a spring,” Ron Fournier, a spokesman for the Rock Island District of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, said yesterday.

Today, he sought to clarify his comments, saying, “It could possibly be a spring, but it could also be the groundwater table.” The Army Corps of Engineers does not have jurisdiction over this part of the Tradition Dairy site. It did, however, grant the dairy a provisional “nationwide permit,” a type of authorization for activity with little anticipated water impact, to construct in a wetland area on another part of the property where corps jurisdiction applies.

If a spring is present, it means the groundwater could easily be contaminated with manure should the pit leak or overflow, said Sam Panno, a senior geochemist with the Illinois State Geological Survey.

Nic Anderson, a business developer with the Illinois Livestock Development Group, said the source of the leak is a broken tile, which is a structure used to drain excess water from fields.

“It is surface water, and it is a broken tile,” Anderson said today. “I was actually on the site down on the ground and looked at the situation.”

Tradition Dairy owner A.J. Bos, of Bakersfield, Calif., plans to redirect the tiles so water never enters the site, Anderson said.

Bos did not return repeated calls for comment.

But not all experts are on the same page. After examining photos of the site, Panno said that while it could be a broken tile, the nature of the leak signified that the area is likely underlined with a spring. Water poured into the pond last week from a point near the base of the colossal trench, which is expected to hold tens of millions of gallons of animal waste when complete.

Plans for the 700-acre dairy, which is scheduled to begin operation by the end of this year, estimate the cows will produce 90 million gallons of waste per year.

“What [a spring] means is that they’ve intersected the underlying aquifer,” Panno said, “which we interpreted to be karst.”

An aerial view of the entire Tradition Dairy complex shows the manure pond filling with water along the upper right-hand corner of the construction site.

Karstic areas are characterized by vertical fissures that allow water to flow from the surface into the aquifer, or groundwater, more rapidly than in areas with horizontal fractures.

Opponents of the dairy, who filed a complaint in Jo Daviess County Circuit Court against Bos and the Illinois Department of Agriculture in June, are expressing hopes that the leak – whatever its cause – will give momentum to their case. The plaintiffs, members of the activist group Helping Others Maintain Environmental Standards and other community members, allege the industrial-scale farm has the potential to substantially pollute area groundwater and that the IDOA irresponsibly approved the dairy proposal.

“One of the best indicators of karst areas are naturally occurring springs,” said Matthew Alschuler, a representative of HOMES. “If he hit a spring right where he’s building his manure pond, it kind of makes our case.”

But the IDOA released a final opinion on May 30, based on research conducted by Tradition Dairy project engineer Terry Feldmann, that the bedrock under the site is not karstic.

The presence of karst does not preclude construction of the dairy, though it would require modifications to the waste ponds, according to Warren Goetsch, bureau chief of environmental programs with the IDOA, in a report from a Jan. 31 meeting of the Jo Daviess County Development and Planning Committee. Goetsch was unavailable for comment this week.

Water flows into a manure pond that, when complete, will hold tens of millions of gallons of animal waste.

State Agriculture Department officials haven’t visited the site since the water leak occurred, said Brad Beaver, program manager for the IDOA’s Livestock Management Facilities Program, which oversees siting criteria for animal operations. He declined to comment on the source of the water and how it will impact construction plans until the Agriculture Department inspects the leak.

“So many variables go into” how it could affect the plans, he said. “A lot would just depend on what we found for sure and where it is in relation to [the manure pond].”

Though the IDOA has not been to the site since the leak, Beaver said IDOA inspectors have visited multiple times in the past and, so far, Bos is following proper construction protocol.

“They need to build what they proposed,” he said. “If there is some sort of change, we need to determine if that change would be allowable.”

By Lauren Williamson, Medill

“Go up the road that way, then turn this way when you get to the grocery store, and once you make it around the corner, you’ll go between the pickup truck and the bushes. And turn that way again.”

As a city dweller married to internet mapping and a highway atlas that proved worthless to find unpaved back roads, I relied on word-of-mouth directions such as these during my trip to Jo Daviess County in northwest Illinois. I definitely wasn’t in Chicago anymore.

But Nora is experiencing a culture-shock of its own as corporate farming moves into the village, population 116, bringing with it the kind of environmental and economic controversies associated with industrial complexes on Lake Michigan rather than the sun-dappled banks of the Apple River.

A.J. Bos, a California-based dairy farmer, obtained authorization from the state of Illinois at the end of May to begin construction on a concentrated animal feeding operation, or CAFO, one mile west of Nora. It could conceivably house 10,000 dairy cows within the next few years.

So divisive is the CAFO that people in Nora who talk about it are reluctant to give their names and point to one family where the children no longer speak to their mother after she sold her property to Bos.

Construction on the dairy operation began in June after the county court denied a request for an emergency restraining order from residents who said they fear the environmental havoc of the manure from such a large-scale facility.

But other townspeople see the dairy as an opportunity to revitalize the sagging Nora economy. We met with Mayor Mark Mullen and local farmers on Tuesday night at the Nora Bar, the sole business downtown.

Many people we spoke with are desperate to bring more jobs to the area. With the population dropping between each census, Nora can’t spare any more migration to cities with better opportunities.

On the other side of the mega-dairy controversy, there’s Tom Bergstrom. As vice president of Helping Others Maintain Environmental Standards, he said that everyone will move out of Nora anyway within five years if the dairy pollutes at the level some researchers expect. A report from the Iowa Center for Agricultural Health and Safety supports Bergstrom’s assertion, saying CAFOs like the one under construction outside of Nora often cause “declines in local business purchases, physical infrastructure and population.”

There’s a lot to lose in Jo Daviess County. The Apple River Canyon State Park shelters one of the most biologically diverse and pristine natural habitats in Illinois. Limestone bluffs that cradle the river provide a home to eagles, more than 500 plant species and, as we discovered, very large and very brave wild turkeys.

The riches in wildlife throughout the county are staggering. Based on the number of birds, foxes and rodents who ventured fearlessly into my car’s path, it’s a near-miracle none of them fell victim to my tires. My cameraman and News21 reporter Rob Runyan would add his survival to that list of graces. He claimed I “scared him to death” each time I swerved to avoid yet another creature.

People were nice but suspicious of me and I can understand why. I was advised not to ask questions in the Nora Bar that could suggest I had a leaning one way or another on the dairy. At one point, I mentioned contact I’d had with H.O.M.E.S., the activist group opposing the dairy, and a line of heads at the bar turned in my direction. I assured the patrons my only job is to fairly present all sides of the situation.

Coming soon to News21projects.org is a video documentary of my two days in Jo Daviess County covering the dairy controversy through interviews with residents, activists and local politicians.