An environmental lawyer representing a San Francisco-based nonprofit says it intends to sue Meadow Gold Dairies Hawaii and its president, Bahman Sadeghi, and Cloverleaf Dairy and its president, Edward Boteilho Jr., for alleged violations of the federal Clean Water Act.

The Aug. 9 letter from Seattle attorney Charles Tebbutt, representing the Center for Food Safety, gave Meadow Gold and Cloverleaf 60 days’ notice of their intention to sue in U.S. District Court in Honolulu.

The lawsuit alleges that every time Hawi receives a half-inch or more of rain, two manure ponds at Cloverleaf overflow, releasing pollutants into the ocean. Other allegations include improper disposal of dead dairy cattle at Cloverleaf in Hawaii and that Meadow Gold transports waste milk from its Hilo processing plant to Cloverleaf for disposal there instead of disposing of it through the county’s wastewater treatment plant.

“In the last two years alone, nine such discharges are likely to have occurred on July 30, 2022, March 2, 2023, March 3, 2023, April 4, 2023, May 26, 2023, May 31, 2023, November 30, 2023, December 1, 2023 (and) May 13, 2024, based on rainfall amounts exceeding 0.5 inches on those dates,” the letter said.

“This has been going on for a while, and it’s time to stop,” Tebbutt said Thursday. Tebbutt, who represented local nonprofits in litigation that resulted in a settlement that led to the closure of Big Island Dairy in Ookala in 2019, said his clients had received “a lot of information from locals about problems” at the Hawi dairy.

“We’ve done all the research; we’ve done everything we needed to do,” Tebbutt said of filing the lawsuit. “She’s ready when the notice period is up. The problem needs to be fixed. I don’t know if they will or can fix it in 60 days. I suppose it’s physically possible, but who knows? At this point, it’s up to them.

“They have all the specific information they need to fix the problem. They’ve known about this problem for years. And they’ve ignored it.”

Tebbutt said if Meadow Gold and Cloverleaf are found liable for marine pollution, “they will have to pay civil penalties.”

“The most important thing is that they stop polluting Hawaii, stop polluting the Big Island and the sacred sites there,” he said. “King Kamehameha was born right below that site, so they’re desecrating sacred sites and polluting the fisheries and the whales…”

Tebbutt described Cloverleaf, the last remaining beef dairy on the Big Island, as a concentrated animal feedlot operation, or CAFO. The U.S. Department of Agriculture defines a CAFO as “an intensive animal feedlot operation in which more than 1,000 animal units are confined for more than 45 days per year. One animal unit is equal to 1,000 pounds of ‘live weight’ of an animal.” According to the USDA, 1,000 animal units are equal to 700 dairy cows.

Sadeghi, who bought a majority stake in Cloverleaf from Boteilho, called the claims in the letter “completely false, so much misinformation.”

“They say we are a mega-dairy, a large-scale dairy,” Sadeghi said. “We are not a large-scale dairy, we are a pasture-based dairy and we milk less than 350 cows today. We have never milked 700 cows.”

“And we are not violating the Clean Water Act. We have never discharged anything into the ocean or other waters.”

When asked if Meadow Gold or Cloverleaf have been prosecuted by the EPA or the state Department of Health, Tebbutt replied, “I don’t know if they’ve been prosecuted for violations or discharges, but eight or nine years ago the Department of Health sent them a letter asking them to artificially line their lagoons – and they haven’t done that.”

“What’s worse is that Meadow Gold takes the milk waste and dumps it. It doesn’t come from Cloverleaf, it comes from the milk processing center in Hilo – and they truck it an hour and a half away and dump it so they can dispose of it for free instead of taking it to the wastewater treatment plant where it should go.”

Sadeghi said Meadow Gold takes “milk that doesn’t meet our quality standards – which doesn’t happen very often, a rare occasion” and “uses it as nutrient for our pastures.”

“In regenerative agriculture, lactic acid bacteria are added to the soil. So we use them as a nutrient,” he said. “We don’t consider them a pollutant, especially because they don’t leave our property or enter waterways.”

Sadeghi also said that the area where dead cattle are buried is sometimes disturbed by wild boars, “which crawl in there and wreak havoc,” but denied that body parts of dead cows end up in waterways.

“We’ve never had any complaints from our neighbors or state regulators,” he said. “We have a good relationship with our Hawi community. And we have this interest group on the mainland that is independent of Hawaii and has an anti-dairy agenda.”

“We will fight this vigorously and have done nothing that violates the Clean Water Act.”

The Tribune-Herald reached out to the state Department of Health but did not receive a response to its questions by the time this article appeared.

Email John Burnett at [email protected].