[JURIST] The Ohio Farmers Union (OFU) [official website] is looking to modify H.B.No.490 bill [text, pdf], a water quality and agriculture-related bill that is currently pending in the state legislature. As stated in the Ohio Legislative Service Commission’s bill analysis [text, pdf], one of the main provisions of the bill will “Transfer, effective January 1, 2015, the administration of the Agricultural Pollution Abatement Program from the Department of Natural Resources to the Department of Agriculture.” Joe Logan, president of OFU, stated [press release] that H.B. 490 could be an important part of Ohio’s effort to control nutrient runoff and the algal blooms they can feed. Algal blooms, which are fed by sewage runoffs, have been forming in greater numbers on Lake Erie. The situation reached a very serious point in August when over 400,000 people in Ohio and Michigan had their water supply contaminated from the algae. In regards to fixing the algal bloom problem, Logan stated “The information we have to work with today tells us that the there is a problem in the Lake Erie watershed, but not the specific sources or locations. There’s a hole in the data; we need to fill that hole.”

The OFU will be looking to change the bill to eliminate a loophole that allows manure distribution from a regulated location to be outsourced. In March Governor John Kasich [official website] and his administration released a statement [press release] regarding the bill, describing it as a “one-stop-shop” for agricultural nutrient oversight of Ohio farmers. The statement provides:

Current law gives oversight of agricultural pollution and manure management responsibility for smaller livestock farms to the Ohio Department of Natural Resources (ODNR) [official website] while the Ohio Department of Agriculture [official website] regulates the large livestock farms. Under this proposal, ODNR’s authority over manure management on small-scale farms would be transferred to the state agriculture department which already runs a robust manure management program has the authority over other agricultural nutrients. While the proposal does not amend existing manure use regulations, it would create uniformity in how those regulations are enforced by bringing small-scale farmers under the same department as large-scale producers and farmers applying commercial fertilizer.