After a relative lull, sludge is back in the spotlight this spring as the Missouri Department of Natural Resources (DNR) prepares to announce a public meeting, a preliminary step before issuing new operating permits for three storage tanks which can hold over 800,000 gallons of meat and food-processing residuals. 

One of those tanks will be located two miles north of Cassville. (A previous article mistakenly stated “one mile.”)

As dismaying as the idea of a local sludge-storage tank may be, what lies on the horizon for Barry County residents could be more unsettling yet.

DNR Water Protection Program Director Heather Peters said after the storage tank permits are approved, her department will get on with perfecting the language of the sludge land-application operating permits, which have been pending for over two years.

In 2023, Synagro Central and HydroAg Environmental, LLC, submitted applications to the DNR to land-apply processing residuals to almost 9,000 acres in Barry County. However, approval of those permits was put on hiatus after the Missouri legislature enacted changes to the Clean Water Law in July 2024. Since then, Peters’ department has been developing new language for those permits that reflects the changes in law.

Meanwhile, growing season is upon us, and free sludge — offered as “fertilizer” — sounds appealing to many area farmers when compared with the cost of commercial fertilizer.

You get what you pay for, and the same goes for sludge. By whatever name, sludge consists of industrial cast-offs: the byproducts of meat and other food-processing that can’t be sold, and can barely be given away.  Residuals include the likes of raw meat scraps, fat, blood, feathers, and whatever else might hit the floor and get washed down the drain during processing — in addition to the grease clumps, chemicals and dissolved air flotation (DAF) skimmings (globby solids) removed during wastewater pre-treatment.

Speaking as a former insider in our local chicken plant, washdowns are not one-time events during an eight-hour shift. Rightfully not. Without constant — almost ongoing — washdowns, floors would quickly become covered and caked with the debris that occurs with bird slaughtering and processing. 

Some details from my time at George’s Processing remain with me.

The “Picking Room,” as it was known, was the scene of all-out slaughterhouse carnage, and was arguably the smelliest area of processing. Birds, hanging by shackled feet, met their demise as their dangling heads exposed their necks to the to the swift blade of a constantly-circulating bandsaw. Blood exploded from the birds, splattering the surrounding floors and walls and draining into floor-channels designed to carry it away. Seconds later, partially (or fully) decapitated birds, still shackled, plunged into and out of scalders, and feathers joined the blood flowing through the floor channels below. The picking room reeked of death. 

The sweet-sour odor of fresh blood, made riper by the hot temperatures created by the scalders, enveloped a person. The stench permeated nostrils, clung to clothing, and followed a person home at the end of the day.

I suspect that this same smell of death, mingled with decay and the chemicals used in wash-downs and wastewater pretreatment, are what neighbors who live close to properties where sludge has been land-applied take notice of. 

The smell may only be part of the problem. 

Disease is also a concern. Spreading decaying body parts on open fields provides a ripe vector for the likes of avian flu, among many other nasty possibilities. There’s a valid reason why we bury our dead and otherwise dispose of animal carcasses.

Some people point out that farming is an inherently smelly business. Sure, it is. But most farm smells emanate from bodily excrements, not from dead bodies themselves – unless you’re talking about a pile of dead chickens pulled from a broiler house or a dead cow in a field.

Dumping massive quantities of raw, dead body-parts called “meat-processing residuals,” the majority from out of state, on farmland in southwest Missouri is a relatively new practice, one ushered in when voters approved Missouri’s “Right to Farm” bill in 2014.

During the following years, Denali Water Solutions (with headquarters in Russellville, Ark.) carved out two 15-million-gallon storage lagoons in rural Newton County, then proceeded to fill them with foul-smelling sludge hauled in from states with tighter regulations. Due to Missouri legislative changes, those lagoons are now in the process of being emptied. Land-application of sludge in the state, however, will continue.

I fear that, in Barry County, we ain’t seen nothin’ yet.

Synagro, a sludge-hauler in good standing, has continued to operate under the “enforcement discretion” of the DNR in Barry County. However, the approval of new land-application permits will open the door for Barry County newcomer, HydroAg Environmental, who applied in 2023 to apply its refuse to over 5,000 acres here, in addition to the 3,000-plus acres Synagro applied for. It’s unknown whether Denali Water Solutions has permits pending for Barry County. A 2023 application indicates that, then, they intended to land apply in Lawrence and Jasper Counties.

According to wording in the DNR’s past proposed permits, sludge-haulers will be allowed to add acreage to their site-permits under certain conditions.

Wait, though, it gets smellier!

HydroAg doesn’t propose to limit their sludge content to chicken-processing waste. They plan to bring a veritable smorgasbord of beef- and pork-processing castoffs into the county as well.

Can you think of even one industrial-scale beef and pork processor within our county? I can’t. But here we are, targeted for somebody else’s goo.

Of perhaps greater concern, many intended land-application sites are located alongside Flat Creek and near resorts within Roaring River Spring’s recharge basin, where smell will be a factor and contaminants can easily infiltrate groundwater because of our karst hydrogeology.

What could possibly go wrong?

A litany of past articles in the Cassville Democrat pertaining to problems that Newton and McDonald Counties have faced can give you partial answers to that question, and those counties aren’t perched above Roaring River State Park, which draws over one million visitors per year.

Barry County has a lot invested in this question; we have a lot at stake.

One area farmer asked what can be done.

Vallerie Steele, Newton County resident who teamed with neighbors to form Stop Land Use Damaging our Ground and Environment (S.L.U.D.G.E.), an environmental group that helped influence legislative changes and recommends reaching out to our legislators, forming an anti-sludge group, reaching out to the DNR, researching the law on permits and land-application and having a townhall meeting — all actions taken by S.L.U.D.G.E. 

Rise up, get noisy, she says.

Can we afford to keep quiet?.

Sheila Harris is a long-time Barry County resident and a sales executive and investigative reporter for the Cassville Democrat with a particular interest in environmental topics. She may be reached at [email protected].