Oregon's farm regulators are not required to impose water-quality rules aimed specifically at dairy manure pollution in Tillamook Bay, the state Court of Appeals has ruled, Capital Press reports. The decision is a setback for the Hayes Oyster Co., which has fought the Oregon Department of Agriculture (ODA) in court for nearly a decade.

The oyster company says weak regulation lets manure from dairy farms seep into waterways, and that food-safety closures have sharply cut harvests from about 600 acres of its oyster beds in the bay. Since 2001 the total maximum daily load of fecal coliform bacteria from farms and pastures in the Tillamook watershed has been set at zero.

ODA implements that requirement through an agricultural water-quality management plan covering the wider North Coast Basin. Hayes Oyster asked the agency for a plan with stricter limits written for the Tillamook Bay watershed alone; ODA refused, and the company sued.

The case was dismissed in Tillamook County Circuit Court, revived by the Court of Appeals in 2024 and dismissed again. This time the appellate court agreed that ODA has discretion to draw the plan's boundaries broadly, finding nothing in state law or regulation that requires a narrower area.

Thomas Benke, the company's attorney, said it is considering an appeal to the Oregon Supreme Court. "In Tillamook, any right a CAFO might have to discharge manure to the waters of the state stops at the shellfish-growing waters of Tillamook Bay," he said. The story was written by Mateusz Perkowski.

Photo: Aaron Zahrowski / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 3.0)

Source: Capital Press