One of Iowa's largest egg farms is defending itself against legal action by the state. The legal action of the state was triggered by the wastewater spill that fouled 18 miles of stream in Northwest Iowa and killed 163,000 fish.
According to Daily Globe, the Environmental Protection Commission has referred Iowa's egg farm, Sunrise Farms, to the attorney general for enforcement of violations of state laws and administrative regulations. This is regarding the contamination of around 18 miles of the Stoney Creek. The company operates its egg-laying barns near the Harris, which is designed to hold up to 8 million hens.
The lawyer of the Sunrise Farms, which is an affiliate of Sioux Falls Sonstegard Foods, allegedly stated that the wastewater release happened a few months after the bird flu outbreak which killed 3.8 million chickens. The egg farm also claimed that they never experienced such kind of production issue since they started in the egg farm industry.
The Des Moines Register claimed that the egg industry in Iowa hires approximately 8,000 people. It also contributes around $2 billion in total sales in the industry.
Also, almost 6 years ago, Iowa's egg business affected almost thousands of individuals due to salmonella outbreak. In fact, a study conducted by the Iowa Farm Bureau in 2015 estimated that Iowa's bird flu related deaths reached to $1.2 billion.
But an on-site farm manager denied the issue. He claimed that he had known the whole story behind the wastewater spill, but the DNR still grilled the insider. Moreover, the manager said that following the probe of the DNR agents, he acknowledged telling the farm's night shift workers to dump 12 truckloads of wastewater.
The DNR revealed that each truckload of wastewater holds as much as 1,500 gallons. With that, the dumping of wastewater made a violation in a section of the Iowa law that prohibits the release of pollutants in waterways.
It also violates an administrative regulation of DNR that restricts farms from dumping wastewater contrary to their licenses and banning the wastewater toxic plants, animals, and human life from being discharged. But the Sunrise Farms is still with high hope that the complaints will soon be resolved.
It will also use the process to improve the issues raised by Eldon McAfee and the DNR. The documents submitted by the DNR point out that the farm is allowed to treat and hold wastewater from its egg breaking operations in the lagoons, as reported by the Miami Herald.
Meanwhile, DNR already approved 474 permits for new and expanding livestock farm. They produce an estimated 22 billion gallons of liquid manure annually, most of which is utilized untreated on cropland.
