Farm failed to report manure spill in Taylor County that killed fish in a nearby creek

State environmental regulators say they didn’t learn of a recent manure spill in Taylor County until several days after it occurred.

The Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources said the Sept. 2 spill at County Line Dairy, LLC was caused by an open valve on a pipe connecting the manure collection tank in the barn to a manure storage pit. The farm is in Withee, on the border of Taylor and Clark counties.

Manure spilled from the farm’s barn and pasture into a ditch that flowed into Trappers Creek, killing fish along a 5-mile stretch of the waterway.

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The DNR first learned of the spill on Sept. 5 when Taylor County’s land conservation staff detected the spill through routine water monitoring, said Liz Usborne, the DNR’s regional nonpoint source coordinator and acting agricultural runoff section manager.

“They detected dissolved oxygen levels in Trappers Creek to be indicative of a spill, and they called it into our spills hotline,” Usborne said.

Usborne said the amount of manure released and the number of fish killed is unknown at this time. Trappers Creek flows into the Black River, and a conservation warden identified dead fish along the creek until the two waterways converge.

A man identifying himself as the farm’s owner said he declined to comment when reached by phone Tuesday.

According to the DNR, the farm was cleaning out manure from its freestall barn where dairy cows are kept when the spill occurred. The farm pumped manure from the barn’s collection tank into a nearby manure storage pit. When the pump was disconnected, a valve remained open, allowing manure to flow backward into the barn’s collection tank.

Two black and white cows stand near a muddy ditch with water running through it on a grassy field bordered by trees. — Manure flowed backward from a storage pit into the barn’s manure collection tank at County Line Dairy on Sept. 2, 2025. The DNR says manure overflowed from the barn through the farm’s cow pasture into a ditch before entering Trappers Creek. *Photo courtesy of the Wisconsin DNR*

“The manure they were working to pump into secondary storage, so they were able to recover some. But when they couldn’t keep up with it, it overflowed, flooded the barn, left the barn, flowed through the production site, through cow pasture into a road ditch and then flowed through the road ditch before entering the creek,” Usborne said.

The manure transfer started around 11:30 a.m. Sept. 2, and the spill lasted until 8:30 p.m. that day — roughly 9 hours after work began. Usborne said the DNR is still determining whether the spill occurred due to an equipment malfunction or operator error, calling it an accidental release.

The farm is a medium-sized dairy with 988 animal units. That is just shy of the 1,000-animal unit threshold to be considered a concentrated animal feeding operation, which is equivalent to 700 milking cows.

The farm is required to immediately report the release under the state’s spill law, which carries a penalty up to $5,000 per day for each violation.

The DNR encourages anyone to report spills immediately to its 24-hour emergency hotline at 1-800-943-0003.