Valley Waterways Polluted By Livestock Industry
The Problem
Virginia’s Shenandoah Valley, while famous for its cultural heritage and natural beauty, also hosts a thriving livestock and poultry industry. The runoff from all this livestock and poultry manure ends up in Shenandoah waters, adding to pollution that threatens to disrupt fishing, swimming, rafting, and other recreational uses that valley residents and visitors have long enjoyed. Most of the manure from the 159 million chickens, 16 million turkeys and 528,000 cows raised annually in the valley’s Shenandoah, Augusta, Page, and Rockingham counties is spread on surrounding farmland as fertilizer, but contains far more phosphorus than crops need for growth. The excess manure leaks pollutants into groundwater and is often washed by rain into surrounding streams.
Analysis
In 2022, 81 percent of water quality monitoring sites (29 of 48) in Virginia’s scenic Shenandoah Valley had levels of fecal bacteria that were so high that EPA would consider them unsafe for swimming. Previous annual averages were similarly high: 60 percent in 2021, 72 percent in 2020, 74 percent in 2019 and 81 percent again in 2018.
In the first half of 2023, the conditions improved. Only 41 percent of sites (or 21 of 51) examined through mid July had unhealthy levels of fecal bacteria, perhaps because of reduced rainfall so far this year causing less polluted runoff into streams and rivers.
Data collected by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration the Virginia Department of Environmental Quality suggest that bacteria levels in the Shenandoah’s waterways tend to be higher in years with more precipitation, as more rain washes more sediment, manure, chemical fertilizer, and other pollutants off the land.
Despite the historically high levels of bacteria in the Shenandoah’s waterways, Virginia posts no signs warning rafters, kayakers, or swimmers about health threats from bacteria in these fresh waterways—as it does regularly with swimming advisories on ocean beaches and in saltwater areas. The Commonwealth eliminated the state’s swimming advisory standard for freshwater recreation areas in October 2019. For this reason, EIP uses EPA’s recommended federal guidelines, instead of state standards.
In April 2019, EIP and the Shenandoah Riverkeeper released a study of aerial photographs of the livestock industry in the Shenandoah Valley that showed that 81 percent of farms in the state’s two largest farming counties—Augusta and Rockingham—failed to fence their cattle out of streams. An examination of 1,676 Google Earth images of livestock farms with rivers or streams found that only 19 percent of them (321 out of 835) had fenced their cattle out the waterways. The rest had not fenced their cattle out of all waterways on their properties, allowing the animals to deposit fecal bacteria, as well as nitrogen and phosphorus pollution, into them.
Bacteria Levels and Swimming Safety in Shenandoah Waterways
*Numbers for 2023 reflect data available as of August 14th, 2023.
Sampling locations often change from year to year. The threshold value used in this chart is EPA’s “beach action value” for swimming, which recommends states warn the public when bacteria levels exceed 235 counts of E. coli bacteria/100 ml water. Annual rainfall data from NOAA for Harrisonburg, Va.
Shenandoah Bacteria Map
The interactive map below shows where the Virginia Department of Environmental Quality’s water monitoring found E. coli concentrations higher than the Environmental Protection Agency’s Beach Action Value of 235 counts per 100 mL of water in 2023 as of August 14, 2023. EPA recommends warning swimmers about potential health risks when E. coli concentrations exceed this threshold. (Click the “layers” button to view sampling results from previous years). The map also shows where in 2020 VDEQ listed waterways as impaired due to high bacteria levels and identifies those that still need clean-up plans (TMDLs) to reduce bacteria levels.
Recommendations
EIP has recommended that Virginia take several steps to reduce agricultural pollution in the Shenandoah, including:
- establishing a better system for collecting and disposing of surplus livestock manure;
- requiring fertilizer management plans for all farms that spread manure;
- increasing inspections and enforcement;
- requiring all farmers to fence their cattle out of public waterways;
- and requiring state notifications about when water is unsafe for swimming.
Related EIP Reports and Press Releases
Virginia Monitoring Data Show Shenandoah Valley Waters Remain Bacteria Hotspot (August 30, 2018)
