Pressures for the Inland Empire's dairy industry to leave for greener pastures are about to get stronger. The 270 dairies in a 50-square-mile area known as the Chino Basin soon may pay a lot more to deal with an inevitable byproduct of their milk operations -- cow manure.

"It is one more hassle . . . one more thing you have to worry about," said Mary Parente, a dairy owner and crop farmer in Ontario, who, like many of her peers, is worrying about proposed stringent manure handling regulations designed to halt further degradation of the area's groundwater and the Santa Ana River.

The Santa Ana Regional Water Quality Control Board may adopt restrictions at its meeting Friday that include the removal of about 2 million tons of salt-laden manure from the basin by Dec. 31, 2001 -- a little over two years. That much manure, by one estimate, would fill 80,000 40-foot flatbed trucks stretched bumper-to-bumper across 600 miles -- from Chino almost to Provo, Utah. One expert estimates the cost of removal at $30 million.

Parente said the proposed regulations illustrate what prompted her and other dairy owners to lobby Ontario more than a decade ago to begin planning for development of dairy land.

"We had a premonition there would be a day of reckoning," said Parente who, along with most of the area's dairy owners, expects someday to relocate to California's Central Valley or out of state. But the exodus won't happen overnight. While some farmers already have signed contracts to sell their land, for others it could be a decade or two before their property is desirable to developers.

Whether farmers will milk cows on the property all that time is uncertain. A major factor is whether dairies can continue to compete with their peers in the San Joaquin Valley when they have to bear higher costs for both manure management and importing feed.

Because of lower land prices, San Joaquin Valley dairies are larger and can grow their feed or buy it from local farmers. Also, they are closer to crop land on which to spread manure without harming the environment.

Adrian Kroes, owner of a 1,400-cow Chino dairy, said Chino Basin dairies are now doing well enough financially because of low feed prices and adequate milk prices. So, at least for now, they can afford to bear a higher cost for manure management, he said. But he added there may be financial disaster ahead when the industry inevitably hits a down cycle.

"If it doesn't work out, you might see some empty dairies along the freeways," Kroes predicted.

Water quality experts blame the dairies for the continuing build-up of salts and nitrate in the groundwater and for overflows of manure-tainted wash water into the river during rainstorms. But, ironically, they also concede that an immediate exodus by the dairies would create new problems.

They explain that dairy farmers, by pumping 40,000 acre-feet of water from the Chino Basin each year, are preventing the polluted groundwater from rising into the Santa Ana River. The river, in turn, feeds an underground reservoir that downstream communities in Orange County depend on for drinking water.

Mark Norton, senior water resource engineer for the Santa Ana Watershed Project Authority, a joint powers authority comprised of water agencies along the Santa Ana River, said the authority has a 20-year plan to build three desalters in the Chino Basin engineered to pump the same volume of basin water that the dairies currently draw.

"The hope would be to match the transition of dairies (to housing, industrial and commercial development) as it occurs," with desalters gradually coming on line, Norton said. The basin's first desalter, located in the heart of the dairy country and funded with federal and state loans, is scheduled to be producing drinking water by next March. The water will be sold to the cities of Chino and Chino Hills and the Jurupa Community Services District, Norton said.

Dairies that remain another decade or longer can expect to struggle with tighter manure management requirements, such as those proposed by the Santa Ana Regional Water Quality Control Board as part of a new 5-year dairy waste discharge permit.

While the regional board has long advocated better manure management, dairy farmers say that now, under intense pressure from the federal Environmental Protection Agency and Orange County water agencies, the board definitely means business.

Jerry Thibeault, the Santa Ana Regional Water Quality Control Board's executive officer, said "for the first time we will have downstream support" for tougher Chino Basin enforcement measures. He said that is because Orange County agencies have finally recognized the link between the upper basin and the river and because in recent years that link has grown stronger. A rash of development in Rancho Cucamonga and Ontario has increased runoff through the dairies to the river, he said. And the start of the dairies' northern migration already means there is less basin pumping to protect the river.

The water board staff is recommending that dairies not only get rid of the long accumulated manure stockpile, but that they promptly remove new manure. On an ongoing basis, dairies would have to ship manure out of the basin within 180 days of scraping their corrals.

The Chino Basin has had increasing trouble disposing of its manure because most of the nearby farmland that once used cow waste as a soil enhancer has been developed.

Dairy owners acknowledge past instances of abuse, when manure has been heaped too thick on scarce farm land within the basin for the nitrate and dissolved solids to be adequately assimilated by crops.

Under the latest draft of the water board's permit proposal, farmers in the Chino Basin could continue using manure as fertilizer, but only in agriculturally recognized amounts and only if the first basin desalter is built on schedule.

Officials at the Milk Producers Council, a dairy trade organization based in Chino, say two years is not enough time to remove the stockpile and contend the deadline should be stretched to four or five years. They also want the 180-day deadline for removing new waste extended during the rainy season to give the manure time to dry.

The Milk Producers Council is calling on federal, state and local government for financial assistance, starting with help to comply with requirements to prevent manure from washing off dairies into the watershed. The dairies' task is complicated by heavy runoff from upland urbanized areas that courses downhill through the dairies toward the Santa Ana River.

The Santa Ana River Watershed Group, consisting of a wide range of Inland Empire and Orange County public and private agencies, is asking the United States Department of Agriculture for $15 million to be used to build a second catch basin above the dairies and to fund a task force to assist dairies in engineering waste containment plans.

Subsidies also are on the wish list of many Chino Basin dairy farmers. "I think there should be a subsidy for the dairymen who stay here to help them haul the manure out," said Parente, whose farm has been zoned for commercial development that she expects won't happen for at least 20 years.

Nathan DeBoom, the Milk Producers Council's environmental specialist, said it will take time to ascertain how much financial help the dairymen need. He said it depends on their ability to find a market for such a huge amount of manure and the cost of converting it to compost or trucking it to farms in the San Joaquin Valley where it can be legally spread as fertilizer.

Under a proposed "cease and desist order," the dairies would need to meet deadlines to size up and remove all accumulated manure from their property and have the job completed by Dec. 31, 2001.

The dairies generate an estimated 950,000 tons of manure a year, and until now less than half of that has been adequately disposed of by sending it to Chino Basin composters or farmers. The rest has been stockpiled.

While dairy farmers in the past have disposed of their manure at local composters for $6 a ton, including the cost of trucking it to the facility and the composting fee, the estimated cost of hauling it to the San Joaquin Valley is as high as $15 a ton. On top of that are the costs of engineering and building berms and lagoons at the dairies to prevent runoff.

DeBoom said that in 1998 Chino Basin dairyman spent an estimated $7 million on manure cleanup. He said this year they will have to spend $12 million to remove all the ongoing waste their cows produce, not including efforts to make a dent in the stockpile.

By 2001, the Milk Producers Council estimates, the annual cost of removing new manure from the Chino Basin will soar to $18 million -- reflecting the longer hauls that DeBoom said will be necessary because of new restrictions on spreading manure in other sensitive water basins.

John Borges, a field representative for Western United Dairymen, said he has been scouting the Central Valley trying to find farmers willing to take uncomposted Chino Basin manure as fertilizer.

"The easy part is locating the ground and lining up the trucks," Borges said. "The hard part," he added, is telling the owner of a 1,000-cow dairy in the Chino Basin that hauling his cow waste to the central valley will cost $30,000 to $40,000 a year.

Borges said another difficulty is matching trucks delivering manure to the Central Valley with loads of grain and other feeds returning to the Chino dairies. Such "back hauling" can reduce transportation costs but is not always possible, he said.

"It is a large logistical project," observed Pete Vander Poel, a Chino dairyman with 1,600 milk cows on more than 100 acres. Vander Poel said he has considered buying a truck for shipping manure north. "But I am not crazy about getting into the trucking business," he added.

Like many other dairy farmers, Vander Poel was distressed recently when Earthwise Organics, a manure composter in Chino, raised its per-ton rate from $2.65 to $7.75. Sam Monaco, the composting firm's president, said the rates had to be raised because of difficulty arranging back hauls. Dairies that can guarantee a return load of feed, he said, can win a discount for their manure haul.

Several dairy farmers said they fear that haulers and composters may take advantage of the dairies' predicament by raising their fees if the proposed water quality control regulations pass.

Not everyone is satisfied that trucking manure north is the best solution. Lindell L. Marsh, coordinator of the Santa Ana River Watershed Group, contends that spending $15 a ton for shipping manure to the Central Valley -- or $30 million to remove the Chino Basin's estimated 2-million-ton stockpile -- is "a waste of money and we ought to find a more creative solution."

As one alternative, a pilot project at San Joaquin Valley Composting in Kern County has been established to determine the feasibility of adding manure to that facility's compost of sludge and green waste.

William Skinner, general manger of McCarthy Family Farms, which owns the composting facility, said it could process between 300,000 and 500,000 tons of Chino Basin manure a year. But the service won't come cheap. He estimates the dairies would have to pay $16 a ton for trucking their manure 175 miles to the plant and a per-ton processing fee of $4 to $6.

An even more ambitious alternative strongly supported by Robert Feenstra, executive director of the Milk Producers Council, is the creation of a national "organic center" within the Chino Basin, possibly with a link to the University of California campuses in Riverside and Davis, to explore the most cost-effective way to treat and reuse the entire spectrum of municipal and agricultural waste.

Feenstra says he expects the combined waste could be converted into soil for organic farming. Concentrated salts in manure could be diluted with other waste matter, he observed.

Marsh, whose group is including the organic center idea in its manure management strategy, said cow waste could be used not only to produce fertilizer but to generate energy and manufacture building materials.

"The Chino area ought to be a prototype to do the environmentally correct thing," agreed Richard Atwater, the new general manager of the Inland Empire Utilities Agency. Atwater said: "It is definitely going to be a public/private partnership" to develop the financing, marketing and business strategy.

Del Perry, general manager of Kellogg's Supply Inc., a manure composter in the Chino Basin that supplies fertilizer to nurseries, contends a multi-waste processing operation in the basin would require government subsidy. He also expects that a federal subsidy would be needed to ship the manure out of the basin or to burn it.

"The best thing I see happening," Perry said, is that (the challenge of dealing with manure) is sort of bringing everybody together: the composters, the California Regional Water Quality Control Board and the Milk Producers Council. We all know we have a problem and everybody is trying to find a way to make it work."

Published 8/15/1999