HSUS Ally’s Operation Cited for Clean Water Act Violations

We’ve written before about Mike Callicrate, a member of the Colorado Agriculture Council of the anti-agriculture Humane Society of the United States. He lost an HSUS-backed lawsuit that he brought against the beef checkoff, and he has flip-flopped on an ag practice that he apparently benefited from financially which he is now against. And it turns out he’s had a run-in with the Environmental Protection Agency regarding his feedlot in Kansas.

In 2011 the EPA issued a Findings of Violation against Callicrate Feeding Company for failure to maintain adequate records, failure to maintain adequate storage capacity for livestock waste, and failure to meet Nutrient Management Plan requirements, and failure to conduct all production area operations within areas that are controlled in a manner capable of preventing pollution.

Callicrate, in his defense, claimed the EPA was being heavy-handed and targeting him over hay. The EPA said otherwise. An agency spokesman told Farm Futures that “the violation was on the basis of uncontrolled, unmanaged feedstocks that included things like distillers grain and other feeds… It was distillers grain, silage and other feeds that leech water pollutant.” The EPA further called Callicrate’s claim “not factual, it is wrong, it is incorrect and really it’s kind of inflammatory… Mr. Callicrate was engaging in unnecessary and inflammatory misstatements.”

Strong words from a government bureaucracy.

If Callicrate is worried about arbitrary and overzealous environmental actions, why is he buddies with HSUS? In one particularly hypocritical situation, HSUS sued a foie gras farm in upstate New York over pollution—after suing to try to stop the same farm from receiving a $400,000 grant to make environmental improvements. Here’s how Wesley J. Smith relates it in A Rat Is a Pig Is a Dog Is a Boy:

The pollution case was not the first time HSUS had filed suit against Hudson Valley Foie Gras. In another case, the animal rights group claimed that the company was delivering tainted food to the marketplace. And just months before filing the pollution suit against the farm, HSUS had lost a suit that sought to prevent New York’s Empire State Development Corporation from awarding the farm a $400,000 grant intended to help it upgrade and expand its water treatment facilities.

In other words, HSUS first tried to prevent Hudson Valley Foie Gras from receiving state money that would help it run a cleaner operation with regard to water pollution, and then turned right around and charged the company with polluting water.

It’s strange that any farmer or rancher, including Mike Callicrate, would think of HSUS as an ally, when HSUS has the admitted goal of eliminating animal agriculture. Maybe it’s something in the water.