Food Industry’s Liquid Leftovers Stir Up a Battle

WILLIAMS, Calif. —  For a decade, former truck driver Chris Rufer has been processing tomatoes at a towering white plant amid northern Sacramento Valley farms, building his Morning Star Packing Co. into one of the world’s biggest makers of bulk tomato products that eventually grace spaghetti, pizza, tacos and hamburgers.

The pungent leftovers from tomato cleaning -- including muddy water, tomato juice and salts -- are routinely spread on neighboring fields, where they seep into the soil, feed crops and dry in the hot Colusa County sun.

But state water quality officials say they suspect Rufer has flooded so much wastewater onto the land that it has harmed the groundwater -- and that some escaped last year, killing hundreds of fish in a canal.

Like Rufer, more than 200 other food processors and wineries in the Central Valley have been legally spreading their wastewater on farmland. His tomato paste plant here is one of 168 sites where state regulators say they have found or suspect that land discharges have contaminated groundwater, usually with salts or nitrate.

In a report early this year, the staff of the Central Valley Regional Water Quality Control Board said two-thirds of the sites -- some operated by industry leaders such as E & J Gallo Winery and Hilmar Cheese Co. -- already have a history of violations and other enforcement actions. And the regulators declared that now is the time for tougher enforcement of water protection laws and a state policy against degrading groundwater.

The report drew a battle line with major industries that had already considered themselves overregulated and besieged in recent years by demands for technical reports, monitoring wells and stricter wastewater handling.

Rufer, a member of the California League of Food Processors’ board, says he has gone to great lengths and expense to try to be a good environmental steward. He denies that his discharges have harmed either groundwater or fish and questions why the state would even want to safeguard shallow groundwater.

“We are protecting water that no one drinks,” Rufer said in a phone interview. “Some of this water is so bad cattle can’t drink it

Water quality officials say degradation of shallow groundwater is significant because it can travel deeper, posing a potential threat to precious water supplies in the fast-growing region. And they say they have already discovered pockets of pollution around processing facilities from north of Sacramento to south of Fresno.

The Central Valley’s wastewater problem, said environmental activist Bill Jennings, “has been regarded like the crazy aunt locked in the basement back home that nobody wants to talk about. Only now is it coming on the radar screen.”

The water board report swiftly became a rallying point for the powerful agriculture industry, a worldwide leader in winemaking and the canning, freezing and drying of produce.

Overzealous regulators had already been squeezing food processors for years, said Ed Yates, president of the food processors league. “The regional board staff started a very aggressive campaign of greatly increasing the requirements to obtain a permit for putting process water onto land,” he said.

Outraged by the threat of a crackdown and of costly new anti-pollution measures, trade associations challenged the report and enlisted a protest letter from 16 key legislators from the farm belt.

The multibillion-dollar industry was caught off guard because discharges had long been considered beneficial, said Assemblywoman Barbara Matthews (D-Tracy), chairwoman of the Assembly Agriculture Committee and one of the letter’s signers. “We were reusing ... food-processing waters, which are clean in our mind.... What about that is a problem?”

For decades, food processors had been discharging to the fields. The organic material would fertilize crops. The watery waste would supplement costly imported irrigation water and well water. And the processors could avoid high treatment and disposal costs.

Water quality officials accepted the practice, unless excess discharges produced complaints of odor and flies. And they considered enforcement a much lower priority than dealing with surface water pollution from farms and dairies.

“Historically, it was assumed that these discharges were innocuous with respect to water quality,” said Jo Anne Kipps, a supervising engineer in the water board’s Fresno office. It later “became apparent that groundwater was being impacted.”

Five years ago, the regional staff warned of growing groundwater contamination. The wine and food-processing industries responded by developing voluntary guidelines, which have still not been finalized and are not acceptable to state regulators.

Meanwhile, officials began requiring more plants to drill monitoring wells. They say the results showed that salts and potentially toxic nitrate were often working their way into groundwater, along with minerals leached from the soil, degrading the water and sometimes drawing it below drinking standards.

The regional board reviewed its enforcement efforts after the Sacramento Bee reported last December that Hilmar Cheese in Merced County had accumulated thousands of violations and had exceeded its waste discharge permit for many years.

In January, the regional board proposed a $4-million fine, which is the subject of settlement talks with the state. And the company’s co-owner, Chuck Ahlem, who once sat on the regional water board, resigned as undersecretary of the state Agriculture Department, saying he wanted to address Hilmar’s environmental issues.

The same month, the regional board staff issued a sweeping indictment of its own agency’s “low-intensity regulatory oversight,” saying, “The regional board has placed great trust in food-processing dischargers to be prudent.”

The staff concluded that fewer than half of the dischargers had been required to monitor groundwater -- and that when contamination was discovered, the agency did not order a cleanup or an investigation of the extent of the problem.

Finally, the report proposed more enforcement staff and less reliance on cooperation from resistant dischargers.

“It puts the industry on notice that we have tools and will use them instead of being friendly and trying to work things out as gentlemen,” said Bert Van Voris, head of the Fresno regulatory unit handling processing-waste cases. “We tried the other way for 20 or 30 years.”

The processors, however, question the legality of the board’s shift in regulatory strategy without formal hearings. And they are incensed that the staff report listed more than 100 companies that were only suspected of degrading groundwater.

One of them, Musco Family Olive Co. in Tracy, began to feel the sting of regulators in 2002 after the plant combined its operations with those of an acquired company. Musco paid more than $650,000 in settlements with state and San Joaquin County officials for excess discharges of salty water.

Much of the money, said plant manager Ben Hall, was for technical deficiencies in voluminous monitoring reports.

“I’ve been here 22 years,” he said. “Back then, a report might be five pages long. Today ... our quarterly reports run typically 250 to 300 pages each.”

Since the first settlement, the company -- with about $100 million in annual sales -- has spent about $5.5 million to help prevent groundwater degradation, Hall said. And it is still trying to solve a problem that besets most food processors -- removal of salts that can harm groundwater and crops.

State regulators say their biggest fear is contamination of drinking water supplies.

That happened more than a decade ago in a small privately owned water district in Fresno, according to the owner, Tim Bakman, who sued Gallo Winery in 1992, alleging that the company had contaminated three of its 15 wells with nitrate. Bakman said the case was settled for $375,000 without Gallo admitting responsibility.

Now Fresno water officials want to know whether Gallo is responsible for nitrate that caused the city to stop using one of its many wells.

“It is one of the most likely sources,” said field operations chief Doug Kirk.

A spokesman said Gallo officials were not available for comment.

Wine Institute General Counsel Wendell Lee said, “I am not aware of any particular circumstance where there is persuasive evidence of groundwater degradation caused by wineries.”

Like the wine industry, food processors question the state’s scientific basis for determinations that groundwater has been degraded.

The issue came up early this year when Rufer’s Morning Star plant was accused of discharging wastewater to neighboring surface waters on several occasions last year.

Regulators suspected groundwater degradation, partly because the concentrations of salts were greater below the facility -- or down gradient -- than above it.

State officials also suspected that the company was responsible for two September 2004 fish kills downstream in a neighboring irrigation canal.

Morning Star acknowledges some unintentional discharges but denies that any coincided with fish kills. The company’s attorney, Jeffrey Scharff, said farms along the canal had been applying pesticides that are toxic to fish.

The company said monitoring of wells required by the state showed that concentrations of contaminants stayed constant from 1995, when the plant opened, through 2004.

“How do they come to the conclusion that we are degrading groundwater?” asked Rufer.

But state officials question the quality of the monitoring and have ordered additional wells.

“I think Morning Star is typical of a lot of facilities,” said Wendy Wyels, a manager with the regional board in Sacramento. “When the season starts, I think their main concern is to get tomatoes in to process ... and at times the amount of wastewater they generate may overwhelm them.”