In recent years, things have been looking up for the Darby watershed. In 2006, six Franklin County communities reached a historic agreement that balances development and conservation in the watersheds of Big and Little Darby creeks. This agreement, known as the Big Darby Accord, complements actions taken in recent years by the Ohio Environmental Protection Agency and the Ohio Department of Natural Resources, which have established some of the highest standards in Ohio for protecting stream quality.

But there is a new threat to Ohio’s most sensitive stream. The State of Ohio is now considering a proposal to allow 5,400 head of cattle on an enormous dairy in Madison County along the banks of Spring Fork, a major tributary of Little Darby Creek. This facility would generate twice the amount of sewage that would be generated in the Accord area, without the requirement that this waste be treated in a sewage plant.

Manure from the Orleton Farms Confined Animal Feeding Operation (known as a CAFO in the world of industrial agriculture), would be sent to open lagoons holding as much as 160 million gallons of liquefied sewage. After settling, this waste would be spread on the open ground of the property, where it could contaminate stormwater runoff and water flowing through drainage pipes into Spring Fork, Little Darby, and Big Darby downstream.

“Super-sized” farms have been notorious for polluting streams and fouling the air, with Buckeye Egg being the most infamous example in Ohio. Spills, misapplied manure, and general runoff from these sites have plagued countless waterways throughout the Midwest, and Ohio and other states have struggled to regulate them effectively. Typical pollutants include ammonia, phosphorus, bacteria and the hormone and disease-control additives typically found on these facilities.

The owners of this proposed mega-dairy could not have picked a more inappropriate location to site their operation. The section of Little Darby just downstream ranks in the top one percent of Ohio streams, according to data from the Ohio EPA. Numerous rare or endangered fish and mussels are found in the area, including Ohio’s last viable population of the federally endangered clubshell mussel.

The track record of the parent company sponsoring Orleton—the Dutch Vreba-Hoff Dairy—is not encouraging. The company and its satellite dairies have been cited for numerous environmental violations in Michigan, including citations for illegal discharges into streams.

The risks to Darby are great. In 2000, a relatively small 20,000 gallon spill of fermented grain, molasses, and other organic substances eliminated most aquatic life from a six-mile stretch of Big Darby Creek. A single spill from this giant new facility, or chronic pollution at inadequately regulated levels, could result in catastrophic impacts over a much larger area.

Farms of this size are regulated not by the Ohio EPA but by the Ohio Department of Agriculture, which lacks the comprehensive program or resources to fully assess environmental impacts on stream quality. Before this proposal proceeds any further, the Department of Agriculture should work closely with the Ohio EPA. The EPA has recommended that the applicants go through an EPA review before the Department of Agriculture approves the dairy, but this recommendation has not been heeded.

The first step ought to be to determine whether this facility can be permitted at all by reviewing its potential for meeting the special environmental constraints of a stream of Little Darby’s caliber. It is possible that the risks inherent in a dairy this size are so great that adequate safeguards would be impossible or impractical.

If, however, the State of Ohio determines that this facility can be permitted, it must then mandate stringent steps to assure the preservation of the watershed’s biological diversity. It must reduce pollutants that would reach the streams through surface runoff and subsurface drainage, provide multiple safety backup systems, and require verifiable inspections, at minimum, to ensure that we are not saddled with a bovine Buckeye Egg.

Protecting high quality streams such as the Darby creeks in our modern world is a difficult challenge. The people of Franklin County, its townships and cities have invested millions of dollars in innovative, science-based land use planning toward this end. It would be a shame if these efforts were undermined by a high risk proposal such as Orleton Farms.