![]() ![]() McCorkle had overseen oil and gas exploration activities in some of the most remote places on earth, including desert locations in the Middle East with no access to energy or water for hundreds of miles. In 2010, the Scott Brothers met Steve McCorkle, an engineer with experience in the oil and gas industry. He knew regulators would want them to have implemented something new, not just prove what he was already doing was working. However, in the back of his mind, Bruce wasn’t convinced it would be enough to get his family’s permit renewed. ![]() “We had many pats on the back for our accomplishments,” Bruce recalls. They also created an integrated regional dairy management plan. Over the next several years, Bruce and his group would publish several scientific papers about nutrient management and leaching mitigation. ![]() The group would later become a non-profit organization, known as the Western Riverside County Ag Coalition, and seek grant funds to continue studying the valley’s salt-loading issues. “Total dissolved solids means mitigating just about the entire chemistry chart.”īruce and his allies used money collected from a regional milk assessment to hire a full-time executive director, Pat Bolt, and fund the overhead of their infant organization for the first year. “In most watersheds, you’re dealing with nitrogen or phosphorus impairments, and those are uniquely identifiable,” Bruce says. They banned the discharge of manure unless it had “zero total dissolved solids.” That means it must be cleaner than bottled water before applied to a field. Without knowing the real cause of the saltier groundwater, regulators had settled on stricter regulations. “It had never been identified or even quantified.” “The problem was we didn’t know what the real problem was,” he says. Their goal: Prove that they weren’t the only ones contributing to the groundwater’s salt-loading problem. The days to their 2012 deadline were short.īruce and others first set out to identify the number of livestock units in the valley, the amount of manure they produced and where that manure was being applied. “I personally promised the regional water quality control board that I would come back in five years with a deliverable solution that I was proud of or I would not be back to renew my permit,” Bruce Scott recalls of the tenuous situation in 2007. So they fought back, although quietly and behind-the-scenes, for themselves and their neighbors. The brothers didn’t want to shutter the two family businesses. And relocating the dairy would have jeopardized the family’s nearly century-old creamery 50 miles away in Chino, California, where all of the 1,100-cow dairy’s milk is processed into world-renowned frozen yogurt, locally distributed fluid milk and other soft dairy products. Officials gave them three alternatives: move the manure, move the dairy or go out of business. The officials claimed that their dairy manure, and that from 26 other dairies in the valley just over the mountains from Los Angeles, California, was adding too much salt to the area’s groundwater. ![]()
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