ATLANTA – A large daily operation in Sumter County has entered into a consent decree with several surrounding row crop and orchard farmers resolving a federal lawsuit over pollution of creeks in the Flint River basin.
The lawsuit, filed in 2019 in U.S. District Court for the Middle District of Georgia, accused Leatherbrook Holsteins LLC of violating the federal Clean Water Act by discharging manure and wastewater from a confined animal feeding operation (CAFO).
The complaint also alleged pollution from the CAFO was entering creeks from various sources, including center-pivot spraying partially treated wastewater onto crop fields, leachate from bunkers used to store silage – fodder that has been preserved by fermentation – and erosion from lots holding thousands of cattle.
In the consent decree, which the court entered Tuesday, Leatherbrook agreed to undertake a number of steps, including removing thousands of heifers from certain fields, fencing off and grassing gullies to protect the fields, and installing clay-lined catch basins to collect stormwater and silage leachate. The company also will install groundwater monitoring wells on certain fields for sampling and conduct remedial activities if the wells exceed specified levels of nitrate concentration.
The Flint Riverkeeper joined the lawsuit, represented by the Southern Environmental Law Center and Atlanta-based Stack & Associates.
“Flint Riverkeeper applauds the owners and operators of Leatherbrook for agreeing to some truly meaningful means of monitoring the cleanup, including transformative changes to their operations and other creative actions that will achieve both,” said Gordon Rogers, executive director of Flint Riverkeeper.
“We look forward to a productive relationship as the quality of the water in Bear Branch, Muckaloochee Creek, and Muckalee Creek is improved over the next several years and are then maintained at a higher level of cleanliness.”
“This consent decree is the result of years of hard work by Flint Riverkeeper to improve the water quality in its basin,” added Hutton Brown, senior attorney at the Southern Environmental Law Center. “We appreciate the collaborative effort to achieve this outcome, and we hope that this will be an example for other efforts to improve water quality throughout Georgia.”