Hello. My name is Samantha, and I’m here because, like all of us, I love my home and I love my family. I live on 120-acre farm with my dad, Ty, and my two children, Donavan, who’s 15, and Vanessa who’s 11. I’ve spent pretty much all of my life on this farm as my mom, she just came in, she can confirm, I literally was born and was on that farm straight from the hospital.

Now, my dad and I farm around 800 acres of cash crops and we manage a small beef herd. I’m proud that I’m raising my two children on the same farm. I’m proud of how hard my dad and I have worked to run a successful farm, and I’m proud to be just down the road from my grandma Gail and my grandpa Tim’s farm. My grandpa Tim just turned 90, by the way, in March, and he is still farming!

This home is a part of my family. This way of life is a part of who we are. But some things have changed since my dad was growing up here, since I was growing up here, in ways I have never, would have never expected.

When after my divorce, I moved back home to the farm with my two small children. We started to get sick and I couldn’t figure out why. Mostly upset stomachs and just general ickiness. But that turned into occasional vomiting, which turned into more frequent vomiting for me and my daughter. We saw doctors and we couldn’t get answers. I did a ton of research on diet, I always pushed drinking lots of water, and I even got rid of all of our plastic eatery. Still no answers.

After about five years, someone mentioned nitrate poisoning from well water, and I looked it up, and all of our symptoms matched up. I got my well tested and it was at 12.9 parts per million for nitrates, with ten being the cutoff for safe to drink.

I never would have imagined that the water that came from our own kitchen tap would hurt me and hurt my children. We immediately went to bottled water until we could get a reverse osmosis system up and running. Our tummy aches and vomiting went away almost instantly.

As soon as we got better, I find out that this may have been the result of living next to two factory farms with about 3500 to 4000 dairy cattle total between the two of them. They store millions of gallons of liquid manure in lagoons. It’s a huge threat to the groundwater and the wells all of us depend on here in Pierce County. And what was worse is I found out these farms are still getting bigger.

I knew I had to do something, so I got a group of people together from my community and then sought outside help because I really had no clue how any of this worked.

When I first started talking to people at the county, I couldn’t get anyone to take me seriously. It felt like I didn’t actually have the right to safe water for me and my kids. It felt like I didn’t have any say in what happened right on my road. I didn’t know what to do next, but I knew I had to do something.

And that’s when my GROWW journey began. Meeting Bill, starting to collaborate with him and Danny, and learning about organizing with GROWW quickly changed everything. Me, Nancy, Doug, my grandma Gail, and the whole People Protecting Pierce team felt like we could chart a path forward in our fight to protect our homes. So even though this experience has been painful and has made me so angry, in some ways it has been a gift.

Before we started, I had felt alone. I felt like Pierce County was telling me I didn’t have any rights and that nobody cared about what was happening to me. Now I feel even more deeply rooted in this community as I’ve seen us come together. I feel closer than ever to my neighbors. Organizing with Danny, Bill and the team, I learned so much about Wisconsin siting laws, ordinances, permits and all kinds of things that I knew nothing about. I didn’t know that there was a CAFO specialist with the DNR, and I didn’t know what questions to ask. I’ve also learned how to make my elected officials the same ones who made me think I was crazy, listen to me.

We’re so much stronger together. With kicking off with this team, we have collected more than 1300 signatures to support a moratorium on CAFO expansions in Pierce County, helped spur the creation of the Groundwater Advisory Committee to look into our groundwater issues and recommend solutions, and supported the passage of a most complete waste storage ordinance in the state to protect families and homes like mine from manure runoff. 

Together with GROWW, We’re fighting for the protection we deserve in Pierce County, but just aren’t getting. We’re not there yet. CAFOs are still growing in Pierce County, but now I have a real hope that we can win.

I want to live a life of dignity because I have earned it. We have earned it. And I’m proud to be fighting with all of you for it.

Thank you.