Farmer Charged, Fined $2.8 Million, for Plowing His Own Property in the ‘Land of the Free’
TheFreeThoughtProject.com
May 28, 2017
Modesto, CA — (RT) The US Army Corps of Engineers and state authorities are seeking almost $3 million in fines from a California farmer because residue from plowing polluted creeks on his property, under environmental rules the Trump administration wants to abolish.
Federal authorities are charging John Duarte of Modesto for not obtaining permits to discharge dredged or fill material into seasonal wetlands that are considered waters of the United States, the Redding Record Searchlight reported this week.
“The case is the first time that we’re aware of that says you need to get a [US Army Corps of Engineers] permit to plow to grow crops,” said Anthony Francois, a lawyer for the Pacific Legal Foundation, a libertarian nonprofit working on Duarte’s behalf. “We’re not going to produce much food under those kinds of regulations.”
Duarte, whose nursery business in Modesto bills itself as the “largest permanent crops nursery in the United States,” bought 450 acres of land in Tehama County in 2012. He hired consultants to map out areas that drained into Coyote and Oat creeks, which were subject to federal regulations, the Record Searchlight reported. He plowed around those and planted a wheat crop.
In February 2013, however, the Army Corps and California’s Central Valley Regional Water Quality Control Board accused him of not obtaining a permit to deposit drainage into the waters. When Duarte sued the Army Corps and the state for not granting him a hearing, they counter-sued him for violating the Clean Water Act. In June last year, US District Judge Kimberly J. Mueller sided with the government.
Duarte literally became a poster case for repealing the rules, when Senator Joni Ernst (R-Iowa) used a photograph of his furrows as a backdrop during the confirmation hearings for Scott Pruitt, President Donald Trump’s nominee to head the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA).
A week after Pruitt was confirmed, Trump signed an executive order directing the EPA to start repealing the Waters of the United States (WOTUS) rule.
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