Another year of “unprecedented” rain and snow has prompted state officials to allow farmers to spread manure on snow-covered fields, a practice banned in 2016.
Agriculture Secretary Anson Tebbetts is considering extending the exemption through next week to help farmers still trying to empty manure pits.
Environmental groups are opposing the move, saying it represents a threat to public health and clean water.
The 2016 overhaul of on-farm water quality practices required by the state’s Clean Water Act put restrictions on manure spreading, including a prohibition to spread on frozen or snow-covered fields at any time, unless an exemption is granted.
There is also a seasonal ban on spreading manure on any field, snow-covered or not, from Dec. 15 to April 1 because of concerns about runoff on frozen land.
On Nov. 22, the Vermont Agency of Agriculture, Food and Markets issued “an emergency exemption” until Dec. 15 allowing manure to be spread on snow-covered fields. The agency cited 10 inches of additional precipitation over the past year as creating a “historic and unrelenting weather crisis” for dairy farmers.
Last year, the agency issued over 60 individual exemptions to farms due to early season snow and calls from farmers about manure storage areas filling up. The letter sent this year cites the persistent snow this November as the agency’s reason for issuing an “emergency exemption” to the ban on spreading manure on snow.
Farmers are required by law to collect not just manure but also any runoff from surfaces like barnyards or roofs. The intense winter last year was followed by a wet spring, which prevented farmers from spreading on some fields. That meant many farmers already had a backlog coming into the fall, said Ryan Patch, deputy director of water quality for the Agency of Agriculture.
The Halloween storm and other precipitation events this fall put further stress on manure storage areas. Each additional inch of rainfall leads to an additional 27,000 gallons of liquid per acre that farms have to collect, said Patch.
“These are not normal situations that farmers have had to deal with or that the regulatory framework” was designed for, he added.
The exemption notice contains a list of steps farmers spreading manure must take including identifying fields with a lower risk for runoff, not applying manure when it’s raining or snowing and maintaining prescribed setbacks from water bodies and wells.
“While the agency has issued an emergency exemption to spreading on snow, it can’t run off,” stressed Patch.
The Agency of Agriculture has received numerous calls this past week from manure applicators ahead of the Dec. 15 ban concerned that they are nowhere near done spreading, said Patch. With the weather next week “potentially looking like the best spreading conditions” in months, Tebbetts is considering lifting that ban on Sunday for the next week, depending on this weekend’s rain, he added.
On Friday, Audubon Vermont, Conservation Law Foundation, Vermont Natural Resources Council and the Lake Champlain Committee called on the agency to put ban on the manure spreading on snow back in place.
Jen Duggan, director of CLF Vermont, said in an interview that the ban should remain due to the “greater risk” of manure spread on snow running off into water. The Vermont Attorney General’s Office is looking into possible stream pollution by a Highgate dairy farm based on an Agency of Agriculture enforcement staff video of manure-laden water flowing off a field into a nearby ditch.
“I think that what is disturbing is that these emergency exemptions … are being used as the new standard of practice whenever we have a little more rain or a little more snow,” she said, adding, “This is the new normal, we’re a wet state and we’re only getting wetter with climate change.”
Duggan added that in issuing a blanket exemption, the agency was not working with farmers on a case by case basis to ensure that manure application would not pollute waters.
“The state should really be focused on thinking through what the solutions are,” she said.
Julie Moore, secretary of the state Agency of Natural Resources, said that the agriculture agency contacted her agency about the exemption prior to notifying farmers. ANR made a few additional recommendations about measures farmers should take to minimize the chance of manure running off into waterways.
“Certainly we do know that this is not the ideal set of conditions under which to be spreading manure,” she said. “But we’re also confronted with the fact that many manure pits at the time the exemption was issued … clearly were not going to have the capacity necessary to store manure for the duration of the upcoming winter, or the winter spreading ban period.”
Moore added that there are “long term measures,” like sizing standards for waste storage areas and stormwater treatment, that may need to be taken to help farmers deal with increased precipitation from climate change.
“I think the challenge is, we have a lot of this infrastructure that’s already built,” she said. “And it’s a matter of being able to prioritize investments and whether those go into farms with truly substandard existing infrastructure.”
ANR has received a “handful” of complaints about spreading on snow after Nov. 22 that are still being investigated, she said.
Patch said the agency, farmers and other agricultural water quality officials have been working to help dairy farmers better adapt to changing weather patterns from climate change. Some farms separately store manure and runoff, so there are efforts afoot to use that runoff, which is mostly water, to irrigate fields during summer droughts, Patch said.
Also, using manure injection and drag lines, both of which are starting to become more popular, could play more of a role in emptying manure storage areas during “edge months” — when there could be some snow — to better incorporate manure into fields, he said. And many of the water quality practices farmers are already doing more of, like cover cropping and no till farming, build up organic matter in the soil, which can help retain additional water, Patch said.
