The windrows at J&K Dairy in Sunnyside look and smell like mounds of rich, loamy earth. The only visible difference between these windrows and other regularly composted piles on the dairy are a scattering of bones and a yellow ear tag buried in the soil.
The bones and compost are all that’s left of the hundreds of cows that dairyman Jason Sheehan lost in February’s blizzard.
J&K Dairy and FRH Dairy were hit hardest, with about 900 deaths among the two. Both chose to compost their dead cows on site, a process recognized as a suitable option by the Washington state departments of Agriculture and Ecology, the regulatory agencies that oversee the process.
Almost a dozen agencies were involved in some way with the composting process on the two dairies after the storm. The effort is ongoing, with inspections handled by Ecology, Agriculture, and the Yakima Health District. Nathan Johnson, a local emergency response coordinator for the Yakima Health District, and Joye Redfield-Wilder, spokesperson for Ecology, said properly implemented composting practices prevented possible health risks.
“We believe the emergency response at these farms was handled in a professional and timely manner,” Redfield-Wilder said. “There are no known health or environmental impacts at these sites.”
Environmental advocacy groups, including Friends of Toppenish Creek, have concerns that regulations for casualty composting are insufficient to ensure public health and safety. The topic of the cow composting came up at a November meeting at the Henry Beauchamp Community Center in Yakima, where community members were preparing for a meeting with the state’s newly created Environmental Justice Task Force. At that meeting, Jean Mendoza, executive director of Friends of Toppenish Creek, said she had unanswered questions about the on-site composting and why no air, water, or soil quality testing had taken place around the composted areas.
Agriculture spokesman Chris McGann said the testing isn’t required by state law. He added that the department hasn’t received any complaints that could be tied conclusively to the dairies’ composting activity and that both dairies’ composting procedures have satisfied state requirements.
“It’s a terrible tragedy for the cows and dairies that were hurt,” McGann said. “But in a lot of ways, this is a success story.”
Weather emergency
The National Weather Service issued a rare blizzard warning in the Yakima area Feb. 9.
The unusually strong storm brought snowdrifts several feet deep, freezing temperatures and average winds of 40 to 50 miles per hour, with gusts up to 80 miles per hour, leaving Sheehan and other Yakima Valley dairies scrambling. Part of the problem was that dairy farms had shelters based on prevailing winds, but the storm came from an unexpected direction, putting the cattle in the storm’s path with no shelter. By the end of the storm, more than 1,800 cows had perished across 15 Lower Valley dairies, an estimated loss to the dairy industry of about $3.7 million.
Gov. Jay Inslee declared a state of emergency ahead of the storm on Feb. 8. Yakima County commissioners followed with a winter weather emergency proclamation on Feb. 9.
The Yakima Health District issued a news release Feb. 20 in English and Spanish that said impacted dairies were considering options. Several had contacted rendering facilities. Others had a solid waste company haul off and dispose of the remains. The only reference to possible composting in the Feb. 20 release is that “producers who could manage the deaths on their farms did so.”
In a follow-up interview, Redfield-Wilder said that about 600 of them — from Cow Palace, Liberty, and George DeRuyter dairies — ended up at a landfill in Arlington, Ore. About 900 were composted on-site at J&K and FRH dairies. Agencies used about $74,000 of the emergency funding for hauling and landfill disposal costs, as well as to obtain additional carbon-heavy material for the two dairies that composted, and returned the leftover funds to the governor’s fund, Redfield-Wilder said.
Dairies that did not receive disposal assistance either used professional rendering services or incorporated the carcasses into routine on-farm disposal operations, Redfield-Wilder added.
Composting casualties
State law requires farmers to dispose of dead animals within 72 hours. Every dairy has an individual plan for managing animal mortalities that must be approved through the state Department of Agriculture. McGann, of the Agriculture Department, said proper protocols include composting on a hardened pad, having a system to remove accumulated leachate and having enough proper material covering the carcasses.
The primary disposal method identified in J&K Dairy’s nutrient management plan since 2013 has been composting. So when February’s disaster struck, Sheehan and his dairymen followed the procedures outlined in their plans.
First they saw the living cows to safety — a task Sheehan said took more than 40 hours of straight work. Then they created the windrows: hauling the carcasses to hardened pads of soil in a designated area of the dairy and covering them with carbon-rich material to start the decomposition process.
“When this happened, we knew we needed to move quickly, and we knew what our options were,” Sheehan said. “We didn’t know that the agencies were going to receive money to haul the animals away, and we weren’t going to leave the casualties lying around.”
Ruurd Veldhuis, owner of FRH Dairy, said that composting casualties is also a part of his dairy’s nutrient management plan. Veldhuis said he knew that some assistance might be available to the dairies, but wasn’t willing to leave the carcasses exposed — particularly since his dairy suffered the highest number of casualties.
“We’ve always followed our plan, and we knew what to do,” he said. “We weren’t going to sit around for two or three days and twiddle our thumbs. We’re dairymen. We take action. And I’m glad we did, because with the time it took to haul off some of the other cows, ours could have been out there for a month.”
Redfield-Wilder said that by the time Ecology became involved with J&K and FRH dairies on Feb. 11, the cows already had started to decompose and could not be moved to a landfill. Even if the cows could have been moved, Sheehan said he wasn’t going to ask his workers to do it.
“We had just spent hours of emotionally and physically exhausting work to get the cows buried,” he said. “I wasn’t going to ask my guys to turn around and go dig them up.”
Both dairies placed their casualties on hardened pads of packed earth — a practice that improves dairies’ abilities to control leachate and stormwater runoff and reduces risk of contamination to groundwater and surface water, according to Ecology’s 2005 guidelines.
Agencies completed 14 routine technical assistance inspections, as well as four follow-up inspections from Feb. 28 to Dec. 26.
Issues that cropped up included leachate accumulating between windrows, the need for additional carbon material to help keep the compost piles’ internal temperatures in the target range, and uneven moisture in the piles, according to a log provided by Agriculture. McGann said both dairies responded to the technical tips offered.
“Each time an issue was identified, the dairies were responsive, as documented by follow-up inspections,” McGann said. “The dairies have complied with the laws and rules that (Agriculture) is required to enforce.”
Agriculture and Ecology normally oversee mortality composting. Sheehan said he also requested that the Yakima Health District, the Yakima Regional Clean Air Agency and the South Yakima Conservation District attend the initial site visits to ensure protocols were satisfactorily followed. He also requested inspections every two weeks, instead of the monthly inspections the departments usually suggest.
“I wanted to take the adversity I was facing and do things right,” he said. “I’m rooted in the Valley. This is my livelihood. I’ve got four kids and a wife, and I want to make something for them.”
Veldhuis said he was grateful for the technical assistance, as his dairy had never before had so many casualties at the same time. Veldhuis said his dairy obtained hop waste and wood chips to add to the compost piles, as well as collaborating with Ecology to minimize any odors, ensure compost temperatures met requirements and that all parts of the carcasses were covered.
Both men also chose an area on their dairies to compost that was farthest away from their neighbors, the closest of whom were about a half-mile away from each dairy’s land, according to a log of activity from Agriculture.
Inspections now are taking place monthly, with Ecology, Agriculture and the health district overseeing the remaining visits. The most recent inspection was Dec. 11, McGann said.
Redfield-Wilder said the carcasses on both dairies have decomposed to a soil-like compost that will be used on the dairies’ farmland, although compost application doesn’t happen in the winter months. Bones that haven’t decomposed will be packed off to a landfill, she said.
Composting concerns
Yakima Regional Clean Air Agency Executive Director Keith Hurley said his agency participated in an initial site visit and did not identify any air quality concerns. The agency also has not received any complaints about odors, Hurley said via an email dated Dec. 5.
Mendoza noted dairies and the agencies regulating the composting process were not required to notify neighbors of the composting operations. She provided the Herald-Republic with complaints she had compiled from public records requests.
Kathy Rogers, who lives about two miles from FRH Dairy, emailed Agriculture staff Oct. 3 with concerns about smells and flies from the dairy. Rogers received a response about two hours later, saying that the regional inspector had been notified and that, while the program did not regulate complaints about flies or odors, Rogers’ concerns would be shared with the dairies.
Agriculture’s log of the dairy inspections through July 1 noted “minimal odors” only once, at FRH Dairies, on June 20, with the log noting no odors during a follow-up inspection July 1.
Notes of the other inspection visits indicate staff found no odors and no evidence that the carcasses had been disturbed.
Lynne Carpenter-Boggs, a professor of soil science and sustainable agriculture at Washington State University, reviewed Agriculture’s log about the dairies’ activities through July 1. She noted the Pullman campus has been practicing livestock mortality composting routinely for the past 12 years as a viable disposal option.
“Generally, mortality composting is a beneficial practice, a safe way to dispose of dead animals,” she said. “Not every dead animal can be composted, but it’s a good option for cases like this when the cows were healthy when they died.”
Carpenter-Boggs noted that maintaining correct temperatures, moisture levels and carbon-to-nitrogen ratios in the composting piles are most critical to successful composting. Regarding Agriculture’s log, she said that the leachate accumulation between the windrows was an indicator there was likely not enough carbon material in the piles. She added that the leachate pooling on the hardened pads was also a good indicator that the leachate wasn’t leaking into the ground.
She said she wasn’t surprised the dairies may not have had enough carbon-rich material stockpiled on their farms.
“The facilities doing this had never dealt with this number of casualties, so there was a learning curve,” Carpenter-Boggs said. “What I like to see in this document is that there is monitoring and technical assistance offered from people with experience, and the agencies noted the dairies responded to the technical assistance offered, which is the most you can hope for.
“This goes to show it does matter to have people checking in on this who have done this before,” she said.
Legislation limits
Mendoza, in a follow-up interview in December, said she likely would have turned to composting as well if faced with the mass mortality.
“J&K Dairy, in many respects, is trying to do this right,” she said. “They are one of the better-run dairies.”
But Mendoza also echoed her concerns from the open public meeting in November, saying existing regulations are insufficient to guarantee that there are no adverse public health effects from composting or other dairy operations. For years, she’s been fighting for additional requirements for dairies, including air, water, and soil testing for possible pathogens, toxins or leachate leakage.
Mendoza said the lack of additional testing is unconscionable. She wrote to the EPA on Nov. 15 and the director of Agriculture’s Dairy Nutrient Management on Dec. 27 to voice her organization’s continued concerns that local and state officials had shown a “callous disregard” for the health and welfare of residents in the Lower Valley.
“Local and state officials are in a state of denial,” she wrote in the Nov. 15 letter. “They sniffed the air and it didn’t smell too bad. They stomped on the ground and it seemed pretty hard. They apparently concluded that this was good enough.”
Sheehan noted a state board had rejected an appeal from Friends of Toppenish Creek that asked for stricter monitoring requirements in 2017. He said the nonprofit’s concerns over the composting operations were “crying wolf.”
“They’ve already brought forth these concerns and had them rejected by the court,” he said. “Nothing the dairies do will ever be enough.”
Mendoza also voiced concerns that the composting operations at the two dairies set a precedent, a “new normal” of composting a thousand animals at a time.
Dan Wood, executive director of the Washington State Dairy Federation, said he doubts that composting thousands of dairy cows will ever be a “new normal” for the state.
“I think the answer is in this being described as a freak catastrophe,” Wood said. “I think everyone hopes that this was a once-in-a-lifetime event.”
New protocols in place
A drive around J&K Dairy in late December showed walls of corn stalk and wheat bales stacked high near cows grazing in a nearby corral.
Sheehan said the bales are added protection against any north wind this winter might bring — a lesson from last year’s catastrophe. Veldhuis said his farm staff also stacked hay bales differently this year on FRH Dairy to offer extra protection in the event of another blizzard. Both men said they are proud of how their dairies handled the situation.
“I think the dairymen handled it the best of anyone,” Sheehan said. “We were proactive, and I think we deserve to be praised.”
Horace Ward, operations manager for the Yakima Valley Office of Emergency Management, said there was not much more the dairies could have done in the February emergency. But his staff are looking at how to improve their emergency response plans should a similar disaster strike again.
“Our plans did not cover an animal mortality situation of this scope but have since been updated or are in the process of being updated,” he said. “We would like to be able to better communicate with farmers about weather advisories and protective measures.”
Ongoing collaboration involves Agriculture, Ecology, the Yakima Health District, and the Washington State Military Department’s emergency management division to update plans and further clarify roles and responsibilities for mass animal mortalities not caused by disease.
“Every emergency provides an opportunity to learn and improve,” Redfield-Wilder said.
