By ANN ALLEN
Indiana Correspondent

LAKEVILLE, Ind. — With opposing voices saying, “Build it; we need milk,” and “Don’t build it; it will ruin our community,” the battle among neighbors of Walnut Grove Dairy LLC, the St. Joseph County Health Department and the Indiana Department of Environmental Management (IDEM) continues.

At stake is a proposed dairy farm that would move 3,500 cows onto a 103-acre site east of this northern Indiana community, located 10 miles south of South Bend.

IDEM recently revoked the permit for Walnut Grove to build the Concentrated Animal Feeding Operation (CAFO) that stipulated construction should begin between April 2008 and April 2010. It did not, but property owner Peter van der Vegt, a fifth-generation dairy farmer from the Netherlands, has said the project is far from finished.

Though unavailable for a Farm World interview, he had previously told the South Bend Tribune that he hopes to start construction and be finished by the end of this year. His proposed neighbors, however, continue to worry about water well contamination, stream pollution, road damage and odor.

“These aren’t dairies, they’re factories,” neighbor Dean Carbiener told WSBT-News. “One cow produces 80 pounds of waste a day. This community cannot absorb that much waste.”

Ohio-based Vreba-Hoff Dairy Equipment LLC, the company planning to develop Walnut Grove, was formed in 1998. This was after its predecessor, Vreba-Hoff Dairy, built a 3,000-cow dairy facility that paved the way for it to recruit and broker large-scale dairy leases with expansion-minded European farmers settling in Ohio, Indiana and Michigan.

But, in spite of the need for milk, it was manure that prompted Dutch dairy farmers to move to the Midwest. “The overabundance of manure in the Netherlands is a major environmental problem,” the Dutch Ministry of Agriculture reported in 2001.

Farmers looking for expansion and seeking an escape from that overabundance soon took Vreba-Hoff’s advice and began an exodus to the United States, where more acreage was available than their tiny country afforded (the Netherlands is about twice the size of the state of New Jersey).

It didn’t take long for the public to make a stink about the new farms because of their size, odors, manure spills and construction violations. By 2004, 16 Vreba-Hoff-built dairy farms had received 16 U.S. Environmental Protection Agency finds of violations and administrative orders to make changes to prevent contamination of creeks and ditches.

In spite of those violations and lawsuits alleging nonpayment of financial obligations, Vreba-Hoff spokespersons deny any wrongdoing and plan to pursue plans to build Walnut Grove. They already have had an appeals hearing with IDEM.

“Now it’s up to the administrative judge to render a decision,” said Marc Nelson of the St. Joseph County Health Department.

A new CAFO ordinance, adopted during the period Vreba-Hoff was supposed to begin construction, could make it more difficult to locate the dairy in that county. Had the work been completed as first requested, it would have been “grandfathered” into the previous CAFO ordinance.

Saying CAFO rules protect the county, the South Bend Tribune editorialized, “Any CAFO, including Walnut Grove, growing forward, ought to conform to all the latest, well-reasoned regulation.”