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An Important Message About CAFO From President Logan Bower
The deadline for responses is APRIL 9, 2007
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PDMP has been working on your behalf on an issue that will have tremendous impact on dairy operations throughout Pennsylvania. I want to let you know what we have been doing and provide you the necessary information to understand and communicate the dairy industry’s position on this important matter.
As you may know, DEP will be implementing guidelines that will establish requirements for CAFO permitting that will have an impact on our operations. On March 10, 2007 DEP published a draft of the guidelines and has invited response from interested parties.
Representing our members, PDMP worked with partnering organizations to quickly establish a Dairy Industry CAFO Ad Hoc Workgroup. This group is composed of dairy producers who have been involved with DEP in recent CAFO and water quality permit situations, so they have first hand experience on the issue, and leading engineering consultants such as Team Ag and Red Barn who have worked with dairy producers on these permits. Also in the Workgroup are representatives of animal agriculture and leading state farm organizations. I participated in this effort as did several PDMP dairy producers.
Our workgroup produced a very thorough response to DEP and at our March 29th Board of Directors meeting, PDMP leadership adopted the response as our own. The Board of Directors of PDMP believes this is a critical issue for dairy producers throughout the state and will be submitting this response to DEP. You can find my letter on behalf of the PDMP Board of Directors attached to this message.
In addition to hearing from our organization, it is important that DEP also receives comments from as many individual dairy producers as possible. We have been told repeatedly that DEP will be influenced most by the comments of individual dairy producers. We have prepared a sample letter that you may use with the technical response, in a similar fashion to the letter I sent on behalf of the Board of Directors. We suggest you personalize the cover letter to best fit your situation or feelings, but we encourage you to attach the technical response created by the workgroup so that we continue to reinforce it in a unified voice. We also recommend that you copy your local representatives in the House and Senate so they are aware of your position on the issue.
The deadline for responses is APRIL 9, 2007. Responses can be mailed or emailed to:
Robert T. Gibson
Department of Environmental Protection
Bureau of Watershed Management
Rachel Carson State Office Building, 10th Floor
Harrisburg, PA 17105
Email responses to: rogibson@state.pa.us
PDMP Board members and staff have been working hard on your behalf on this issue that is so important to our industry. We hope that you will take a few minutes to let your voice be heard. Please let us know if you need additional information to help you to communicate the response to DEP.
Sincerely,
Logan Bower
PDMP President
Attachments:
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