DNR director Doyle Childers is a brick wall. Environmentalists and ordinary rural people are welcome to bat their heads against him on the CAFO issue, but he knows their warnings about leaky lagoons are a bunch of henny penny the sky is falling nonsense. But sometimes even a brick wall can’t hold back a flood. Six days ago, the K.C. Star reported that officials are worried about CAFO lagoons overflowing or collapsing.

Along the Mississippi River, they’re watching the levees. In northern Missouri, they’re watching the walls of lagoons holding back millions of gallons of animal waste.

Rains this week were filling waste lagoons on industrial farms, and some were leaking and overflowing.

State officials, worried that lagoon walls might collapse, have told farmers that they can lower lagoon levels by spraying the waste on fields, even though the ground was soaked from rainfall.

No doubt spraying the waste on the fields is better than watching a lagoon wall break, but spraying is no solution either. When the ground is soaked, the excrement still flows off into local streams.

“This could result in an unprecedented environmental disaster,” said Scott Dye, national director of the Sierra Club’s Water Sentinel program. Several thousand gallons of waste from a lagoon leaked Thursday into a stream that flows through Dye’s family farm near Unionville.

A collapsed lagoon would be even worse, Dye said.

“I have no idea how you clean up 25 million gallons of hog (waste),” he said. “This is exactly why people are opposed to them.”

Fifteen years ago, before CAFOs proliferated in Missouri, we had the flood of ’93. Remember that? I do. But nobody worried about CAFO levees then because hogs–and their waste–were scattered all over the state, not concentrated in an acre here and another acre there.

Jeff Harris, running for Attorney General, wants to see these disasters-in-the-making reined in. This year, he sponsored legislation (that went nowhere in the Republican General Assembly) to keep CAFOs at least five miles from state parks and to grant local control of CAFOs.

His latest press release says:

“Right now, our local communities have no control over where these corporate farms get built, and that has got to stop,” said Harris. “Right now, the state closes its doors and prevents the people who know the land best from even being heard. As Attorney General, I will stand up for Missourians and against Big Ag, corporate interests and the political appointees who let them have their way.”

Harris will force DNR to pay attention to local communities and to consider their concerns and opposition before approving new CAFOs. Harris will go after corporate farms that contaminate the ground and water, holding them accountable and making them pay to clean up the mess they leave behind.

Good ‘tude, dude. But how do you “force” the DNR to listen? I called him and asked.

Harris said that the AG cannot, of course, pass laws or regulations, but he can certainly propose them, and the weight of the office goes a long way toward making them happen. He assumes that if and when Jay is governor, Childers will be history, and the new DNR director will be more amenable to passing regulations that control some of the CAFO problems.

On the other hand, I pointed out, Harris would have no vote in the legislature. And yet his press release speaks of giving local communities control over the building of CAFOs. Jeff responded:

“I believe that I would have an even stronger position as Attorney General to advocate for those things that we want changed. As an example, in ’03–the winter of ’03, the 2004 session–I sponsored the legislation–but Jay was the one pushing it–that upgraded the Sunshine Law. In fact, we did a fly around. We went to Hannibal and St. Louis and Columbia, and some, one other place, did a big press fly around, followed up with joint press releases. And even though it was my legislation, it was clearly part of his legislative agenda.”

Getting such CAFO legislation passed should be easier next year than this year because there will almost surely be a larger proportion of Democrats in the legislature, enough so that with a few Republican allies, and a governor who wouldn’t veto it, local control could happen. Jeff added:

“Correct. I could build on my legislative leadership experience to get my agenda through the general assembly. I mean, I understand how the process works, having been the leader, and on top of that I know a lot of the personalities involved.”

All this is not to say that Harris’ opponent, Margaret Donnelly, feels any differently about CAFOs than he does. She has opposed them and shown it in her votes.

His other opponent, Chris Koster, on the other hand, last year introduced legislation to strip away whatever minimal local control existed. It would have been bad enough to have voted for such legislation, but to introduce it?

The threat of a broken lagoon wall hovers over much of the state. It would make the Taum Sauk reservoir failure look like a bubble bath. And it is raining even as I type. But Lord willin’ and the creek lagoon don’t rise, we’ll start to take sensible measures on this issue once the Democrats have more power in Missouri.

The photo, from flickr, is an aerial view of Whitetail Hog Cafo, Missouri. Those things that look like steps are hog barns, and the barns in the center of the picture are flanked by two lagoons.