Leaking animal-waste lagoons revive worry in Mo.

Heavy rains caused huge animal-waste lagoons in northern Missouri to leak and overflow, Karen Dillon reports for The Kansas City Star. "It's a dire situation," says Karl Fett, regional director of the state Department of Natural Resources office in Lee's Summit. Officials said lagoon levels can be lowered by spraying the waste on fields even though ground was saturated. State officials and environmentalists say the state has never faced such widespread failure of the lagoon and the potential stream pollution that could follow. Premium Standard Farms, a major operator of confined animal feeding operations, reported that lagoon waste spills reached a creek and a ditch.

Many lagoons cover one to three acres, are eight to 15 feet deep and can contain up to 25 million gallons of animal waste. Years of pollution runoffs and odors have created an ongoing dispute in Missouri over "factory farms," but concerns are now heightened. "This could result in an unprecedented environmental disaster," said Scott Dye, national director of the Sierra Club's Water Sentinel Program. A stream flowing through Dye's farm was contaminated by several thousands gallons of waste from a leaking lagoon, but a collapsed lagoon would be much worse, he said. "I have no idea how you clean up 25 million gallons of hog [waste]. This is exactly why people are opposed to them."

Factory-farm animals present significant, increasing threats to humans, animals and the environment, according to a recent study by the Pew Commission on Industrial Farm Animal Production, but the Missouri Farm Bureau argues the study only focused on negative aspects of industrial farming -- a phenomenon that it says keeps food affordable and plentiful. Read more here.