Ralph Lettinga & Family, Registered Holsteins
Nine waste pits later, farm gets first permit
Michigan Farm News - January 30, 2004
by Paul W. Jackson
By farm standards, the Walnutdale Farms office is surprisingly comfortable and uncluttered, in defiance to the legal discomfort and clutter of the last few years.
Near the picture window that provides a view of the lazy-Susan milking parlor is a computer and work-stained keyboard. Nearer the barn entrance are a desk, a Spartan block S clock and a rolling chair, which son Kevin Lettinga vacates when father Ralph walks in.
Near the ceiling, shelves hold trophies with busts of Holsteins and framed photographs of genetically-prized cows and bulls that once proved that the Lettingas were good farmers, pioneers in artificial insemination and animal husbandry; able to breed animals for superior production, type and honor.
But that was years ago, when a cow's excellence was a standard that could be quantified by numbers in a sire book or by comparison to "grade" animals. Mention of manure was considered impolite, if not downright crude. People knew what fertilizer meant.
Back then, newspaper reports about farmers detailed blue ribbons won, county fair prices, the syndication of a particularly awe-inspiring bull. Back then, Ralph's name was in the paper for his accomplishments as a young farmer. Today, Kevin's is in print for the discomfort of manure smells and ominous "discharges;" for the clutter of lawsuits and now-acceptable language that has changed the former showplace from farm into factory.
But this is no factory office. It's too comfortable for that. But it is where Ralph once sat and took pride in the photographs that represented the legacy he could pass down to his sons. And today, it's where his sons must decide if a fourth generation will look up at those shelves.
For Kevin, there's not much question. None of his four children will farm. He says they won't and smiles, but there's no pride behind it. Farming has changed too much for that. Speaking for Brother Ken, Kevin says none of his three kids will farm, either, which means when Kevin and Ken finally stop their fight, it's all over. The Sierra Club, Kevin says, will have finally gotten its way.
Until then, however, it's clear there's still some fight left in the Lettinga farm legacy. Not all the good times have been left on the shelves. It's just that the game plan, at least right now, is being dictated by the government and the environmental group, and the Lettingas will need to pay their dues - again - before they move on.
The thought of moving on seems comforting for Kevin and Ralph, although neither can say how they're going to raise the $100,000 fine imposed for alleged discharges of manure and silage juice into a creek that feeds - miles downstream - into the Rabbit River.
"I don't think we'll add cows," Kevin said, grinning at the irony. More cows, enough to make Walnutdale Farms a Concentrated Animal Feeding Operation (CAFO), was what got the farm into this clutter to begin with.
"We'll just have to find a way to get more milk out of the ones we have," he said, "and hope milk prices go up. We can't go through another year like last year or we'll be done anyway."
It may be just a matter of time until the farm becomes a place for real factories, when people driving past the highly-visible farm on U.S. 131 in Allegan County can hold their noses for industry smells rather than silage or cattle smells.
Maybe by then, Kevin said - showing the inability to quit that apparently is bred into this family - he and Ken will have relocated to another farm, a place where they can build environmental safeguards into the business right from the start. Doing things right from the beginning, he said, will eliminate the clutter of regulations that he, Ken and Ralph tried to comply with, only to find another regulation from another agency that demanded more money for more manure pits.
That dream would keep the farm moving forward, Kevin said, if he could be sure the clutter would be cleaned. He's relatively sure things will be clean soon, after the farm pays the fine and spends more money on a ninth waste containment pit.
"At this point," Kevin said, "I think we can stay here if this is the end of the lawsuits and regulations. But we may not be done. Who knows what kind of new regulations will come up?"
How did this happen?
Kevin's tendency to be gun shy about all this clutter is understandable, given the farm's history. One of the first farms in the western Michigan region to build a waste containment system - a SlurryStore in 1979 - the farm then was applauded for being on the cutting edge of environmentalism as well as animal husbandry. But at that same time, embryo transfers were just getting started, and the top Lettinga cows and bulls were in demand. Other dairymen wanted the genetics the Lettinga's had already achieved, and soon they would have it. That, Ralph said, was the beginning of the slide toward today's clutter and discomfort.
"One calf out of the top cow was worth quite a bit of money," Ralph said. "But when that cow was flushed over a few years and she could produce 40 or 50 calves, registered cattle lost all their value. Before embryo transfers, we had non-farm investors who came in and gave us some much-needed cash flow. Investors could use registered cattle as tax shelters. But when everybody began flushing their best cows, the genetic base suddenly meant nothing. Everybody had the same bull and everybody started producing too much milk. Before long, registered cattle lost all their value. At one time, about half my income came from purebred cattle. We were milking 150 to 175 head and making money for three families. We had almost zero debt."
Despite a new, level genetic playing field, Kevin said, competition among farmers continued. Ralph was looking at two sons who wanted to continue the family legacy, so, right or wrong, the family took the advice and got bigger, just like everybody else.
Bigger, assumed to be better by American society, many agriculture advisors and a government that encouraged "fencerow to fencerow" crops is what seems to be the puddle into which farmers and environmentalists alike stepped.
"I'd love to milk 30 or 40 cows if I could make a living," Kevin said. "If the price of milk was $5 a gallon, maybe we could. But the public wants $2 milk without environmental problems. They want cheap food but refuse to understand that volume is the only way for a farmer to compete. I don't want to promote this argument between big farming and small farming, but if the small guys have to comply with these same environmental regulations - and sooner or later they will - there's no way they'll stay in business."
Kevin will remain, however, as long as he needs to, just to pay the fine. Hopefully, he said, this will be the last fine. Once the farm has a six-million-gallon pit to hold storm water runoff, he said, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) will be satisfied that Walnutdale Farms are doing all they can to minimize or eliminate manure discharges into surface waters of a nearby creek.
First permit holders
To be certain of that, the Lettinga's became the state's first federally-licensed farm under Michigan's general permit system. Holding their National Pollution Discharge Elimination System (NPDES) permit includes a mandatory Comprehensive Nutrient Management Plan (CNMP) and a prohibition on manure application on frozen ground. The newest 180-day holding pit, supposedly, guarantees that no manure will be applied in winter, even though Kevin said the NPDES is what the Sierra Club - which brought the original lawsuit against the farm - really wanted.
"They want all farms to hold permits, and we, unfortunately, got in the way and had to be made an example of," he said. "Some of our problem was because of the location so near the highway. Part of it was because we're a CAFO. The Sierra Club wanted to go after someone with visibility, and we were it."
The Sierra Club, incidentally, gets half of the $100,000 fine the Lettingas must pay. But monetary gain is in no way behind its motives, said Anne Woiwode, director of the Sierra Club's Mackinac chapter.
"Fifty thousand dollars doesn't come close to covering our costs (of the lawsuit)," she said. "It covers none of our costs in time, salary or expenses. We worked with Sierra Club attorneys - many of whom make significantly less than they could in private practice - and private attorneys. Our efforts from the start have been to bring the farm into compliance, not to drive them out of business.
"The goal of any regulation," Woiwode said, "is to make the water and air clean. The key to this settlement is to be sure they're doing a good job. My belief is that farmers are trying to be the best stewards of the land, because they rely on the land more than any other industry. But they're being told by state agencies and the University that farmers need to pollute. That's a lousy message to send to anybody. Farmers have been told they have to get bigger in order to compete, and that has been such an emphasis that it drove farmers to become bigger who weren't prepared to get bigger."
While the Lettingas may agree in part with Woiwode's analysis, they certainly disagree with Sierra Club tactics, which Ralph said create problems that may not have existed in the first place.
"I'd walk right down there and drink the water right out of that creek," he said.
The creek, now known by some as the Lettinga Drain, is not yet fit to drink from, but it's getting better, said Phillippa Cannon, a spokesperson with the EPA.
"Because the Lettingas were cooperative and have complied with rules imposed on them, there is an increase in diversity of aquatic life in the stream," she said. "We're seeing mayfly and caddis larvae there, and while it's still not healthy, we're seeing signs of improvement."
While the Lettingas say they know that much of the pollution for which they're blamed has come from sources other than their farm, they're more concerned now about paying their bills, about complying with terms of their NPDES permit and moving forward, even if their momentum won't survive the present generation. They agree that they wish the Michigan Agriculture Environmental Assurance Program (MAEAP) had been available before things got to this point, but there's no use crying over spilled milk.
Future generations of farmers, MAEAP or not, Ralph predicts, will need to employ a full-time waste manager, which will be difficult to justify financially since, he said, "there's no cash flow from a manure pit." But it will be necessary, he said, since he believes that government regulations will drive 20 percent of today's farmers out of business.
Kevin may well be among them.
"It's a good life, but there are easier ways to live," he said. "You work 24 hours a day, seven days a week, and yet it all boils down to money. There are a lot of farmers out there who just want to farm, and I'm one of them. But if we decide to stay in it, we'll definitely have to move. And if we do, we'll have to double our size."
Maybe, at that point, Kevin said, there will be better systems designed to handle manure in the volumes that are sure to become the industry norm. But until then, he'll go into that office every day, maybe take a fleeting glance at the pictures that document his heritage and keep working.
"Do I have any regrets? I guess not," he said. "The lawsuits took some of the fight out of us, and there's no fighting anymore. You just do the best you can and hope things don't get worse to the point where you can't live through it. I'm still a positive thinker. If you're a farmer, you have to be. And at this point, we're too deep to get out. I would guess we've spent at least $80,000 just for digging holes in the ground for pits, so we're in too deep to get out of business. We have to keep going if we're ever going to get out of debt."
And as for the loss of reputation that has occurred, Kevin said he can no more take it to heart that he's been called a polluter than he can dwell on the animals in the pictures.
"You can't beat your head against the wall and ask 'why me?' he said. "The answer is that political groups wanted to force farmers to get permits, and we were used to do that. I hate it when I'm being called a criminal, but all I can do now is worry about how to proceed from here."
Read the original story about Walnutdale's battle with environmental issues in the Feb. 15, 2001, issue of Michigan Farm News, on the Web at www.michiganfarmnews.com.
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