OH CRAP - SLUDGE REPORT

Can Maine lead the way to a future without forever chemicals?

- Bridget Huber

DOSTIE FARM, an organic dairy in Fairfield, Maine, was thriving until one day in October 2020 when owner Egide Dostie Jr. got a call from Stonyfield, his exclusive buyer. Something was off with the farm's milk: Tests had found that it contained three times the state's allowable level of perfluorooctanesulfonic acid, one of the class of "forever chemicals" known as PFAS.

"We called bullshit," Dostie remembers. PFAS contamination had recently been found at two other Maine dairy farms. But those farms had used sewage sludge to fertilize their pastures-something Dostie had never done.

But, as Dostie later learned, his farm's previous owners, like many of their peers back in the 1980s and '90s, had spread the fields with sludge provided by a state program that promoted it as a safe, environmentally friendly fertilizer and delivered it to farmers for free. At the time, few people realized that chemicals in the sludge would eventually taint water, soils, milk, vegetables, and even farmers' bodies.