Community and environmental groups have pushed back against the Supreme Beef project since 2017, when it was initially proposed as an industrial waste-to-energy biogas facility. The company’s stormwater permit was pending when Iowa DNR officials found that Supreme Beef wasn’t using silt fences to prevent soil erosion, resulting in the turbidity of the water downstream of the construction site to be 500 times worse than nearby waterways. The DNR fined Supreme Beef $10,000 — the maximum penalty the agency can issue for environmental violations — and ordered the company to improve stormwater controls. In 2019, Supreme Beef was fined another $10,000 for continued incompliance. The company then modified the project, reapplied as an animal feeding operation instead of an industrial biogas facility, and resumed work on the site. By last year, the DNR still hadn’t approved Supreme Beef’s nutrient management plan because they said the company hadn’t done the correct tests to determine how capable the soil was of holding phosphorus — a critical measure to confirm that nutrients wouldn’t run off into surface and ground water and cause contamination. Supreme Beef also failed to update Iowa environmental regulators on how it would manage the 35.4 million gallons of manure produced by its animal feedlot, compared to its original biogas facility plan, which has different regulations, explained Wally Taylor, the legal and conservation chair for the Iowa chapter of the Sierra Club. “But the DNR was willing to manipulate around all that and approved the nutrient management plan anyway,” he said. A 2020 email obtained by the Sierra Club through an open records request shows that Supreme Beef also tried to bend the rules of the required nutrient management plan. “Can he [Jared Walz, co-owner of Supreme Beef] pull back on the number of animals for his permit at this time so he can get permitted and later re-apply for the remaining numbers?,” an environmental consultant for Supreme Beef wrote to the DNR. In response, DNR officials denied the exemption and reiterated the full requirements needed in Supreme Beef’s plan. Later that same day, however, after a phone conversation between State Senator Dan Zumbach, father-in-law to Walz, and Kayla Lyon, director of the DNR, the agency gave Supreme Beef permission to apply for a smaller CAFO of 2,750 animals, and reapply later for an additional 8,900. Activists point out that the site of the Supreme Beef CAFO in Clayton County is not within Zumbach’s constituency. “The DNR is putting this company and their relationships with state senators and state representatives above the environment, which is their mission,” Jessica Mazour, conservation coordinator for the Iowa chapter of the Sierra Club, told Grist. “The factory farm industry gets what it wants,” she continued. “Right now the immediate next step is exposing how much power this industry has at the expense of the taxpayers.” The DNR and Supreme Beef both declined to comment for this story. Bloody Run Creek is “just absolutely the wrong place for this,” Larry Stone, a Clayton County resident who fishes at the creek, told Grist, pointing to the animal feedlot’s proximity to a high-quality trout stream, karst topography, and location near U.S. Highway 1852, a popular tourist route. Stone was one of 100 local residents and environmental groups that spoke out against the CAFO at a virtual meeting held by the DNR in March. When asked by agency officials during that same meeting to detail how Supreme Beef would manage runoff of manure into nearby Bloody Run, co-owner Walz said, “I really don’t have much to say. I just want to thank you for your time and your support and thoughts and your prayers for planning for our site. God bless and hopefully everybody has a wonderful evening.”
This story was originally published by Grist with the headline How a massive new cattle feedlot threatens one of Iowa’s last pristine waterways on Apr 26, 2021.