The op-ed by Ben Tindall published on April 30 is nothing more than propaganda from the dairy industry after it has lost time and time again trying to defend defenseless positions.

The truth is that the large CAFOs (concentrated animal feeding operations) in the Lower Yakima Valley have contaminated tens, if not hundreds, of square miles of precious drinking water that thousands of people depend on.

The facts presented in the courts prove it.

It is time for the dairy industry to stop the pretending, posturin, and propaganda. Industrial dairy operations produce vast quantities of animal feces and urine that, left uncontained and improperly treated, threaten the health and safety of Washington communities. A responsible industry will clean up its act, not vilify those of us holding these operations to their public responsibility.

Starting in the 1970s, California dairymen moved to the Lower Yakima Valley to escape the regulation caused by their contamination, and until CARE (Community Association for Restoration of the Environment) brought the first citizen enforcement actions in the late 1990s, they repeated the same mistakes.

For decades, the large dairies often used the irrigation return drains, formerly intermittent streams that carried trout, as their means of manure disposal. Other times, they simply pumped their manure pits and collection pipes directly to the Granger Drain. When these systems failed, they created earthen pits to store the manure, but as any farmer knows, the soil didn’t hold all the water. From leaking lagoons to overapplied fields, the CAFOs in the Lower Yakima Valley, just as CAFOs across the U.S., failed to account for the back end of the milk production process.

Now, because they have been forced, through painstaking legal work and community activism, to take responsibility for actual management of the massive amounts of manure produced, they “can’t make ends meet.”

What this means is that their profit is at the expense of the people who rely upon groundwater to sustain their families and livestock: people who can’t afford to drill new wells or pay the costs of bottled water. And they want sympathy? Sympathy for a problem they knew of, created, and imposed upon the good people of the valley? How dare they!

It is damaging and disingenuous to suggest that holding these operations accountable for the pollution of Yakima Valley’s groundwater is somehow a means to bankrupt or otherwise harm family farmers. The impetus of this work was to protect both the local community and smaller dairies on the ground who are negatively impacted by this pollution — 60% of the wells within a mile of the main cluster of Yakima County CAFO dairies have been rendered unsafe for drinking.

Tens of thousands of people live in Yakima Valley, and they deserve access to clean and safe drinking water. The problem is so severe that the EPA even set up a webpage for residents of the Lower Yakima Valley to get information about well testing and nitrate contamination.

It’s undeniable that the nitrate contamination from these CAFOs is an issue that needs to be addressed.

The Center for Food Safety has worked to protect small and family farmers since our inception over 25 years ago, and this case was no different. To stop this pollution, we worked with community organizations like Puget Soundkeeper Alliance, CARE, Friends of Toppenish Creek, and the Waterkeeper Alliance who have members directly harmed by these CAFOs. After more than two decades of successful court actions by community residents (CARE and Friends of Toppenish Creek) based on bedrock environmental laws passed by a bipartisan Congress in the 1970s, EPA finally caught up to the problem.

Until recently, the state of Washington has also ignored the pollution — as evidenced by the Department of Ecology’s useless permits that allowed the problem to proliferate until they were finally thrown out by the Washington Court of Appeals thanks to the legal work of Center for Food Safety and our local allies. While the evidence is overwhelming — after much resistance, even the industry’s experts agreed that Cow Palace, Bosma Dairies and George DeRuyter & Sons were the cause of the groundwater contamination — EPA is likely to once again be neutered by an administration determined to send us back to the dark ages.

None of the claims made by the industry’s hired crisis managers are grounded in fact. Attacking those who have documented the truth of the contamination is all they believe they have left. Rather than continue to spout manure, they should take responsibility and clean it up.

George Kimbrell is co-executive director and legal director for the Center for Food Safety. Sylvia Wu is also co-executive director.