Leaders of the Iowa Cattlemen’s Association, and officials of the federal EPA and state Department of Natural Resources, are still trying to find “the middle ground” on EPA’s enforcement of Clean Water Act regulations.
The big issue is how far state and federal officials can or should go in forcing medium-sized cattle feeders—those with less than one-thousand head—to comply with the regulations. Kent Pruisman is the president of Iowa Cattlemen.
“Our small producers in these communities around Iowa where we have cattle feeding operations, they’re the backbones of those communities—and we need to do this in a way that doesn’t economically harm them,” Pruisman says, “because there isn’t a single producer that I’ve talked to in the two years that I’ve been the president of the association that’s opposed to clean water. That’s the goal of all of us, and I think how we get there is what we need to do as we go forward.”
AUDIO: Kent Pruisman (5:30 MP3)
Dan Breedlove, an attorney for Region 7 of the EPA, says the agency’s goal is to protect water quality.
“There’s times when misapplication or timing of application of waste, and runoff from feedlots, has impacted the drinking water for some of the urban areas,” Breedlove says, “and overall, I think it’s pretty well documented, that there are areas where streams have been significantly impaired from the constituents that are associated with feedlots—and so really the focus in trying to limit the impact of a vital industry as much as we possibly can.”
AUDIO: Dan Breedlove (6:30 MP3)
ICA’s Pruisman says, to this point, he has been pleased with the EPA’s willingness to find “the middle ground” on enforcement of those regulations. Pruisman and Breedlove were both participants in a “Doing Things Right” conference this week, sponsored by the Coalition to Support Iowa’s Farmers.
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