USDA’s Natural Resources Conservation Service (NRCS) has awarded the National Milk Producers Federation (NMPF) matching funds of $25,000 to inform and educate producers about revised regulations for oil storage and pending regulations for milk storage containers.
The funding will be used to help dairy producers understand the Environmental Protection Agency’s Spill Prevention, Control, and Countermeasure (SPCC) regulation, including development of a self-certification template. NMPF is planning to conduct a series of webinars later this year to train dairy producers in the use of the self-certification template. Additionally, NRCS will work with NMPF to evaluate how NRCS can most effectively provide technical assistance to dairy producers to comply with the SPCC regulations.
“Dairy farmers are excellent stewards of our natural resources,” said Jamie Jonker, NMPF Vice President Scientific and Regulatory Affairs. “The USDA grant and NRCS technical assistance will provide dairy producers with valuable tools to successfully implement SPCC plans on their farms and continue that stewardship.”
The goal of the SPCC program is to prevent oil spills into waters of the United States and adjoining shorelines. A key element of the program calls for farmers and other facilities to have an oil spill prevention plan, called an SPCC plan. The SPCC plans are required for farms which have an aggregate storage capacity of oil products of 1320 gallons, or more, for every storage container larger than 55 gallons. A farm with less than 10,000 gallons of total storage capacity and no single storage greater than 5,000 gallons can self-certify its SPCC plan. Farms that do not meet this exemption must have a plan certified by a professional engineer. In a letter to NMPF dated June 9th, the EPA committed to finalizing the SPCC exemption for bulk milk storage “as expeditiously as possible…to have that process completed by early 2011.” In addition, EPA will be extending the compliance deadline for the revised regulation.