To the editor,
We all need clean groundwater — it’s what we all drink, whether we draw it from a municipal or a private water well. We all want our groundwater to be protected from pollution …
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To the editor,
We all need clean groundwater — it’s what we all drink, whether we draw it from a municipal or a private water well. We all want our groundwater to be protected from pollution that makes us sick—such as bacteria and nitrates that leach into groundwater when too much manure is spread on fields.
We all owe a big THANK YOU to our Pierce County neighbors, who just won a major victory in their more than three-year fight to get the Wisconsin Dept. of Natural Resources (WDNR) to effectively protect our groundwater under its permit for the massive expansion of the Ridge Breeze Dairy Concentrated Animal Feeding Operation (CAFO).
Our Pierce County neighbors, with the help of Midwest Environmental Advocates, challenged the WDNR permit for the Ridge Breeze CAFO’s huge expansion—from about 1,700 cows to 6,500 cows, producing about 78-million gallons of liquid manure every year, with all that manure spread on surrounding fields.
In the March 2026 WDNR contested case hearing, our Pierce County neighbors pointed out that although the WDNR told Ridge Breeze CAFO to meet groundwater protection standards, the WDNR failed to require any way to tell whether the corporate factory farm was polluting our groundwater.
The administrative law judge agreed on Aug. 24 that the WDNR permit was unreasonable and wrote: “By omitting a mechanism to verify actual compliance, the Department has issued a mandate while simultaneously denying itself the tools or data necessary to know whether the mandate is broken.”
Although the judge didn’t stop this giant CAFO expansion, the judge did send its expansion permit back to the WDNR with directions to add safeguards for our groundwater—such as requiring groundwater monitoring wells that can detect violations of groundwater protection standards.
We all need and want clean water to drink.
Tell your elected representatives in local, state, and federal government to effectively protect our groundwater from pollution by industrial agriculture operations.
And this November, vote to elect the candidates who will best protect our groundwater.
Joyce Santo
Hudson
