State ag leaders are working to shoot down a bill in the Indiana Senate that would increase the number of inspections at Confined Feeding Operations (CFOs) across the state.
“[If they’re] trying to double the inspection frequency, those dynamics don’t shake out to anything productive, as far as I can tell,” says Josh Trenary, Executive Director of the Indiana Pork Producers Association.
In Indiana, you must be licensed as a Confined Feeding Operation if you meet the following criteria on your farm or facility:
- 300 or more cattle
- 600 or more swine or sheep
- 30,000 or more poultry (chicken, turkey or ducks)
- 500 horses in confinement
Senate Bill 193, which was introduced by State Sen. Rick Niemeyer (R-District 6), would require that the Indiana Department of Environment Management (IDEM) inspect each of the state’s 1,634 licensed CFOs twice during each five-year permit term, which would double the number of visits from IDEM inspectors.
The bill was assigned to the Senate Environmental Affairs Committee, of which Niemeyer is the chair. Trenary says he was called first to testify against the bill in the hearing
“I was there to testify in opposition and I was incredibly surprised when [Niemeyer] called my name first, because I’ve never been in a hearing where the first testimony about a bill is opposition testimony, so it was kind of an odd situation,” he says.
Even though Trenary says no one had shown up at the hearing to testify in favor of the bill, it was still approved by the committee by a 9-1 vote. The bill will now be considered by the full Senate.
“We’re very frustrated with [IDEM] right now because when they’re asked about it, they indicate that it won’t have any fiscal impact on the agency, even though essentially, they’re doubling their inspection frequency. They’re saying they won’t have to hire any new inspectors,” he says.
“All I can figure is that they have inspectors that aren’t fully deployed, which is an issue in-and-of itself, or that they have fully deployed inspectors, but they’re going to have to pull them off of some of these discretionary inspections—which are the ones we want them to do—in favor of meeting some blanket statutory requirement that’s nothing more than a talking point,” says Trenary.
A fiscal study of the bill says that IDEM would have to hire up to six additional full-time inspectors and spend an additional $565,000 a year to make up for the increased workload.
Most of all, Trenary says the system is not broken. He says that livestock producers are already careful about the manure that is stored as fertilizer from these facilities because of the value that the fertilizer holds because it replaces very costly commercial fertilizer that crop producers would otherwise have to buy.
“A 4,000-head CAFO (Concentrated Animal Feeding Operation), which is a typical size in our state for hogs is housing about $87,000 worth of manure—based on current commercial nutrient costs—at one of those facilities in a year’s time, so that’s not something that a farmer’s going to be flippant with,” he adds.
Trenary is encouraging Indiana’s ag community to contact their respective State Senators and ask them to vote NO on Senate Bill 193.
“Reach out to your Senator and say that for this past reporting year for IDEM, there were six water quality violations in our industry in a year’s time out of more than 1,600 permits,” says Trenary. “I think there are more beneficial uses and more environmental benefit you could do elsewhere, but if you’re going to reallocate IDEM resources, and I think you should just let your Senators know that.”
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CLICK BELOW to hear Hoosier Ag Today’s full conversation with Josh Trenary with Indiana Pork, as he goes into further detail why Senate Bill 193 should be voted down by Indiana’s State Senators.
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