Monona County supervisors today will discuss a manure-related project in a rural area of the western Iowa county.
County officials say they weren’t notified of the development, which includes a storage area for a solid byproduct of hog manure. Scott Koepsell lives next door. “Somebody who doesn’t, you know, live there and own the land, why do they get to turn this into an industrial dump and profit from it, whereas the people living there end up smelling it and having to deal with worrying about their groundwater and what else comes along with this without any notification?”
According to Koepsell, six acres of soybeans were plowed under to make room the project. “I just want people to be aware that this can happen in their backyard as well,” Koepsell said, “and I don’t think it’s acceptable.”
Koepsell said he moved out of Omaha to a home a few miles from Castana because of the beauty of the Loess Hills, but he said that beauty is now threatened by industrial waste. “If you were to go out there today — aside from this site — you’d see this beautiful cemetery that has been around for generations. You would see rolling hills, forest, and then a lot of green crops as far as you can see. So it’s it’s a really important site for, I think, farmers in the area, but also there’s a lot of wildlife that call it home as well.”
Monona County Supervisors will begin their weekly meeting this morning at 8:30 and are expected to open a letter from the company managing the site and review an Iowa DNR report outlining complaints about the project.
