BRIGHTON, MI — Jason Grostic is feeding cattle that he can’t sell. He’s growing grain that nobody will buy. In his words, the farm is “slowly but surely going bankrupt.”
Life was turned upside down for Grostic and his family in January when the state of Michigan issued an advisory for beef from his organic farm after testing found elevated levels of toxic ‘forever chemicals’ known as PFAS in the meat they sell.
Now, Grostic is suing the company that released the pollutants, which made their way to his Livingston County farm through tainted municipal wastewater sludge spread as fertilizer.
On Aug. 12, Grostic filed a lawsuit against Tribar Manufacturing, an automotive supplier which came under significant fire this month for putting hexavalent chromium into the same wastewater system as its PFAS releases that, starting years ago, resulted in contamination of the Grostic farm, the Huron River and the city of Ann Arbor drinking water.
The lawsuit, assigned to Livingston County Judge Suzanne Geddis, seeks punitive damages which Grostic’s lawyers describe as “tens of millions.” That’s what they say it would cost to remediate the farm’s soil and groundwater.
“That’s what it’s going to cost to put them back in a place they were before Tribar’s contamination,” said Kyle Konwinski, an attorney at the Varnum law firm. “The farm is useless. It’s been in the family for over 100 years and now they quite literally cannot do anything on this land.”
In addition to damages, the suit asks Geddis to force Tribar to remediate the farm and prevent the company from further damaging natural resources and the environment. Tribar has created a public nuisance in addition to being negligent and violating state law, the filing claims.
According to the filing, Grostic’s reputation was “destroyed overnight” when the state issued a January 28 consumption advisory following tests on steaks and roasts which between .98 and 2.48 parts-per-billion (ppb) for the individual compound PFOS in the meat.
The testing came through a crackdown on PFAS in industrial wastewater, which the state began actively scrutinizing in 2018 through a program focused on municipal sewage plants like the one in the city of Wixom that receives Tribar’s discharge.
Because PFAS chemicals are so robust, they pass through sewage plant filters into waterways like the Huron River, which was slapped with a “Do Not Eat” advisory for fish thanks to Tribar’s discharge. They also pollute the wastewater biosolids, which have long been applied to some farms to stimulate plant growth rather than being shipped to a landfill.
Tribar used PFOS as a fume suppressant to protect workers around its chromium plating baths at Plant No. 4 in Wixom. In 2015, facing a federal deadline to stop using PFOS, Tribar switch to a different type of PFAS chemical. However, enough residual PFOS remained in the company’s discharge that, three years later, Wixom’s wastewater discharge was hitting more than 5,500 parts per trillion (ppt) at its Norton Creek outfall.
Facing state scrutiny and public outcry, Tribar installed filtration to capture PFOS from its discharge. Today, the company suppresses vapors in its plating baths using compounds like 6:2 FTS; a substitute chemical that is, nonetheless, in the PFAS fluorochemical family.
The company, previously named Adept Plastic Finishing, is owned by HCI Equity Partners of Washington, DC. It makes decorative trim parts for automobile manufacturers like Ford, General Motors, Toyota and others.
At Grostic’s farm, PFOS from the sludge polluted the soil and groundwater and entered the cattle feed, which was grown on site rather than purchased. The farm received the largest and most frequent applications of contaminated biosolids from Wixom, say state regulators.
Those factors helped the animal herd concentrate the chemicals in a unique way at Grostic’s farm, according to agencies like Michigan Departments of Environment, Great Lakes and Energy (EGLE), Health and Human Services (DHHS) and Agriculture and Rural Development (MDARD), which have characterized the situation as a one-off.
Grostic isn’t buying it. He’s convinced other farms in Michigan which have spread municipal or industrial sludge as fertilizer have problems which are yet to be discovered.
“I don’t think anybody should believe that,” he said. “I mean, I know four other farmers that took Wixom sludge same time I was taking it, but they’re not investigated.”
For the past seven months, Grostic has watched financial ruin overtake the farm where he lives with his wife Teresa, daughter Kinsey and son Emerson. Within a week of the state’s advisory, the bank was calling to talk about the value of his collateral, he said. His mortgage is now in default. Grostic is selling equipment and tapping into savings to pay the bills.
He still has about 160 cows to feed. The state is buying his feed, but the number of mouths is increasing because the cows are birthing calves. The grain won’t sell. No one will take it.
“If I had to guess, there’s probably $40,000 to $50,000 worth of grain sitting in my grain vents. On top of that, you don’t get to raise any crops this year for income,” Grostic said.
“So…. yeah — slowly but surely going bankrupt,” he said. “Even if I go bankrupt, I’ve still got to take care of the cows.”
The situation has taken a mental toll. Grostic started seeing a therapist and said customers have called him a “murderer,” accusing him of poisoning them with contaminated beef.
He’s not getting any outreach from environmental groups or advocates in the PFAS arena, even though there’s growing nationwide concern over PFAS entering food systems and other examples of farms being impacted by the chemicals.
Grostic is angry with the state’s handling of the matter — but he’s angrier at Tribar. He wants the company to remediate the soil and compensate him for his financial losses.
“I want our ground cleaned up. I want my life back together and (to be) paid for all the suffering that I’ve gone through.”
“There’s PFOS in my soil and Tribar did that. That’s 100 percent on Tribar. I’m really pissed at that,” Grostic said. “Look at their last dump, that frickin’ chrome product. That’s a ‘do not touch’ product. They just keep getting away with it.”
Through a public relations firm, Tribar issued a statement in response to the lawsuit saying its use of PFAS was required by the government and that it “stopped its use of products containing PFAS in 2015, well before the compounds were regulated by the State of Michigan.”
The company also characterized the use of wastewater sludge as an issue between the city of Wixom and its customers. The city is not named as a party in the lawsuit.
“Tribar does not own or control the wastewater after discharge to the city’s wastewater treatment plant,” the company said in a statement to MLive. “We were not consulted about any land application of the city’s wastewater treatment sludge. We were not asked for, nor did we give approval for the city’s biosolids to be sold or provided to a third party, which we have been informed took place between 2010 and 2015. Any sale or use of that waste would be between the city and the requesting party.”
Grostic has a different explanation.
“Tribar sucks,” he said.
“My land is contaminated,” Grostic said. “I can’t do nothing with it. I can’t graze cattle on it. I can’t grow crops on it. I’m a farmer. What am I supposed to do?
Related stories:
Wixom PFAS discharge sets a sad milestone
Huron River PFAS crisis: One year later
Huron River spill protestors visit Tribar CEO’s home
Tribar chromium spill smaller than initially feared
Outraged rally crowd demands Tribar be ‘shut down’
Tribar waste alarms overridden 460 times before spill
Ann Arbor council OK’s legal action toward Tribar
PFAS a problem at farm where tannery spread sludge
No safe PFAS level? Toxicity drafts point that way
High PFAS found in rainbow smelt across Michigan
Biden EPA plans key PFAS regs by 2023
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