To the editor,

Communities throughout Pierce, St. Croix and Pepin counties are the latest target of Corporate Ag's drive into western Wisconsin. Your towns are in the bull's eye of a proposal by Breeze Dairy Group to more than triple the size of an operation in Pierce County's Town of Salem.

Hundreds of citizens recently presented their well-researched concerns to the Wisconsin DNR about Breeze's draft permit. The numbers are jaw-dropping. If permitted, Appleton-based Breeze would build a nearly quarter-mile long factory filled with 6,500 cows producing an estimated 88 million gallons of raw feces, urine and wash water every year. Waste would be dumped on 7,300 acres in more than 250 fields. Some 3,255 acres of these fields already have soil phosphorus levels which the University of Wisconsin classifies as “excessively high.”

Local roads would be pummeled by convoys of rumbling trucks carrying an estimated 12,000 loads of manure to distant fields.

But there is good news!

Working together, elected officials and citizens recently got the DNR to reject a huge hog operation proposed for the Town of Trade Lake in Burnett County. Six towns in Burnett and Polk County also got together and developed cutting-edge ordinances to protect our health and property values.

Go to GRO-WW.org for info on a forum about tools you can use to protect your community. Join us at the Elmwood Auditorium at 2 p.m. on Oct. 5.

Working together, western Wisconsin does not need to suffer the destruction already wrought on eastern Wisconsin, southern Minnesota and Iowa.

Lisa Doerr

Town of Laketown

Polk County