BIRNEY — Driving along a gravel road that parallels the Tongue River, Art Hayes gestures to land once belonging to Brown Cattle Company, the ranch his great-grandfather founded when this area appeared on maps as “Montana Territory.” Hayes describes how his grandfather, “one of the last open -range cowboys,” would start trailing cattle into the Big Horn mountains in May and hope to return to Birney by Thanksgiving.  The Tongue River, cottonwood-lined and flush with snowmelt on this mid-May day, has supplied five generations of Hayes’ family with stockwater for cattle and irrigation water for forage. Hayes and his children use the same water rights his grandfather secured nearly 140 years ago to irrigate the hay critical to Brown Cattle Company, which once boasted a herd of 15,000-20,000 head — too many, he says, to count. Hayes, 82, is also known as “Bunny,” a reference to his Easter birthday. He’s a man accustomed to thinking across expansive time scales. Pointing to a piece of fossilized tree in the roadcut above the river, he describes how this arid, sparsely populated corner of southeastern Montana was once an ancient inland sea. Remnants of that earlier period still exist underground in the coal seams and methane fields that have driven decades of energy development in the Powder River Basin, and in the region’s briny groundwater.   Art “Bunny” Hayes, owner of Brown Cattle Company in Birney and president of the Tongue River Water Users, poses for a portrait in southeastern Montana. Hayes works on water management and agricultural issues affecting ranchers along the Tongue River. Credit: Jessica Plance / MTFP In 1972, when Decker first proposed mining for coal a stone’s throw from the Tongue River Reservoir, Hayes was concerned that mining would bring mercury, a toxic heavy metal, to the 12-mile-long manmade lake. Later reports highlighted a different water-quality issue, which has since come to pass: Mining has brought sodium-infused groundwater to the surface. Hayes contends that the most critical resource ranchers like him have — clean and plentiful water — is deteriorating due to coal mining and methane drilling. “They issued a bunch of discharge permits for the coal companies [and] fed the farmers a bunch of bull,” Hayes says of Montana’s environmental regulators. “We’re paying the price, and we’ve got to pay it a long time.” Art Hayes holds a rusted steel gate guide near the Tongue River Reservoir in southeastern Montana. Hayes and other water users have raised concerns about material durability of dam infrastructure exposed to high salinity conditions. Credit: Jessica Plance / MTFP The groundwater that came up with the coal Decker shipped to power plants in the Midwest has high electrical conductivity — a measure of dissolved solids used to approximate the water’s saltiness. The water is corrosive to the metal innards of the Tongue River dam and hell on the hay crops local producers grow to feed their cattle. In places, what used to be productive soil has turned into a mucky goo — or firm, pale salt flats. Hayes and others suspect that decades of mining for coal and drilling for coalbed methane, or CBM, are linked to the near-disappearance of three species of fish from the Tongue River Reservoir, the largest state-managed water project in Montana.  “It’s all naturally saline, but with these discharges, everything with CBM, it’s just enough where it’s going to damage the crops and soils,” Hayes says. “My family came here in 1884. Had the first water rights in the river. And we’re wondering whether the next generation is going to be able to be here, or if it’s just going to be salt flats.” Decker’s mines haven’t been operational since 2020 and CBM came to an unceremonious end nearly 20 years ago. But pollution issues continue to vex downstream farmers and ranchers who convened in Miles City Feb. 26 to discuss the state of the Tongue River watershed. The meeting drew so many irrigators, elected officials and government staffers that organizers had to move it into a larger room and make last-minute calls for more sandwiches. Hayes came to the meeting armed with photos of a CBM pipe running into the Tongue River, Decker Mine wastewater streaming into the reservoir at up to 30 gallons per minute, and rust-riddled components inside the relatively new dam. As the longtime president of the Tongue River Water Users Association, he gently but firmly urged those assembled to pursue solutions. “We have to do something to correct the mistakes that have been made in the past,” he said. Like others present at that meeting, Hayes has been painfully aware of the recent water-quantity difficulties compounding the basin’s longstanding water-quality issues. Record-breaking temperatures and scant snowfall conspired to bring half the typical winter snowpack to the Tongue River Basin, which draws water from the 12,000-foot Big Horn Mountains that straddle the Montana-Wyoming border. Without plenty of clean, high-mountain snow to dilute the salty water that continues to accumulate in the reservoir, Tongue River water users like Hayes worry about their crops — and, by extension, their livelihoods. “It’s just going to be a tough, tough year,” Hayes said. The small town of Birney, along the Tongue River. Credit: Jessica Plance / MTFP Hayes remembers when the coal boom reached Birney, an agricultural community that boasted two stores until about 20 years ago, when suppliers stopped including Birney in their rounds. Now the town hosts little more than a post office and a school.  “Coal companies just went nuts,” Hayes recalls of the early ‘70s. “You put a price on your ranch and they bought … everything: land, mineral [rights], water.” Views differed on how to deal with the coal prospectors. Some landowners sold their ranches, others kept them, and some were all but physically forced off their land by the aggressive and sometimes deceitful tactics of the coal companies. Rifts opened and widened. One of Hayes’ cousins landed on the other side of the coal debate. When they were younger, they spent all their time together, Hayes recalls, but the two have hardly spoken in the last 30 years.  “Coal tore this community apart,” he says, shaking his head. “It’s just been a nightmare with all of this energy development down here.” The economic bonanza that accompanied coal mining repeated itself in the late ‘90s and early 2000s, when a couple of resourceful oil workers found a way to pull methane, or natural gas, from the coal aquifers that permeate the Powder River Basin. Water is an unwanted byproduct of CBM extraction. Hayes says “fly-by-night” companies created so many holding ponds to capture the unwanted “product water” coming up with the methane that the area no longer resembled a region that receives 12 inches of precipitation in a typical year. “There were thousands of these dam pits,” he recalls. “Flying over it, it looked like going over Minnesota, the Land of 10,000 Lakes.” He adds that most of the holding ponds leaked, bedeviling irrigators as far south as Miles City, nearly 200 river miles away, by inundating their water supply with sodium. Elected officials in Montana and Wyoming went all-in for CBM.  Art “Bunny” Hayes stands inside a historic barn on his ranch near Birney. Hayes owns Brown Cattle Company and serves as president of the Tongue River Water Users. Credit: Jessica Plance / MTFP “Our legislators just couldn’t stand not to have that money,” Hayes says. “Everyone got what they wanted except the irrigators. We wanted safe water. And we just didn’t get it.” Former Gov. Judy Martz, a Republican who famously said she didn’t mind being a “lapdog” for industry, was so eager to fan the flames of the CBM boom that in the early 2000s, she reportedly drank a glass of discharge water to ease locals’ water-quality fears.  Not everyone was convinced. While sodium-rich water can have a laxative effect on people, it’s more destructive to plants. Hayes Goosey, a forage and agronomy professor with Montana State University-Extension, recently explained to Montana Free Press that water high in sodium mimics drought by interfering with a plant’s ability to take up water. Plants subjected to high-sodium water don’t grow as big and are more susceptible to disease. Oftentimes the sodium-related handicap opens a path for weeds to take over.  The Tongue River flows through southeastern Montana, providing water for agriculture, wildlife habitat and recreation before joining the Yellowstone River near Miles City, Mont. Credit: Jessica Plance / MTFP According to Hayes, during the CBM boom, environmental regulators (mostly in Wyoming, but also in Montana) issued permits like they were “handing out candy at a parade.” Within a decade, companies including Red Stone Resources and Fidelity Exploration and Production had punched tens of thousands of wells into the Powder River Basin, the most coal-rich region of the United States. Well pads, power lines, gas lines, compressor stations and waterlines (for the “product water”) proliferated, giving the rural region an industry makeover. Then hydrologic fracturing, or “fracking,” arrived, revolutionizing fossil-fuel extraction and tilting the economic scales against CBM. The frenzied era of extraction came to a sputtering end around 2008.  In a late May interview with MTFP, employees with DEQ reported that there aren’t any active coalbed methane wells in Montana. The agency also said Decker has stayed in compliance with environmental regulations, including aspects of its wastewater discharge permit focused on salt content.  Representatives with Decker did not respond to MTFP’s emails and phone calls, but DEQ employees noted that Decker, which entered into a reorganization bankruptcy in 2020, is well into the reclamation phase for one of its mines. The agency has released some of the bond Decker gave the agency in order to begin mining. To date, Decker has moved 20.5 million cubic yards of dirt, or roughly 20.5 million pickup trucks worth, to start restoring the topography to its pre-mining condition. But to water users like Vince Muggli, a Miles City resident who runs a livestock feed business, restoring water quality should take priority over recontouring the land. “DEQ’s happy that they’re in this reclamation stage; I couldn’t give a shit,” he said. “I would like to see my farm go on to the next generation, [but] the salt flats are getting bigger.” Vince Muggli poses for a portrait on his farm near Miles City. Credit: Jessica Plance / MTFP Perhaps no other water user in the region has spent more money to mitigate the effects of the high-sodium Tongue River water than Muggli, who sports a green John Deere tattoo on his bicep and a T-shirt emblazoned with “Farmers feed America.” Sitting in an air-conditioned trailer just outside the massive grain silos he fills with alfalfa, corn and millet, Muggli lists the measures he’s taken to protect his generational business from the Tongue’s water-quality issues. In the past decade, he’s spent $90,000 on sodium-resistant alfalfa seed for one of his fields. He’s amended his soil with a variety of additives, including humic acid and gypsum, to counteract the salt. He’s ground up trees to make compost, not because he’s a hardcore environmentalist but because he doesn’t want traditional fertilizers to add any more salt to the soil. Most significantly, he bought a Yellowstone water right for $3 million to get out from under the “terrible” Tongue River water. It’s more junior than the Tongue and Yellowstone Irrigation District water right he had been using, so his future access to water is a bit of a gamble. But the whole enterprise feels like a gamble at times. Some of Muggli’s best fields once produced 10 tons of alfalfa per acre. Now, despite all the investments he’s made, he nets around half that. Muggli argues that this wouldn’t be tolerated in western Montana, with its postcard-perfect mountain vistas and pretty cutthroat trout. It feels as if his home in the wide-open prairie, a place where cows outnumber people by a 7-1 margin, has become a “dumping ground for big industry.”  “When you’re in eastern Montana, you’re expendable.” Vince Muggli’s irriation system on his fields in Miles City. Credit: Jessica Plance / MTFP Like other agricultural producers, Hayes and Muggli keep a close eye on the Tongue River Reservoir fishery, which has a legacy of producing record-setting fish. Decent water quality is critical to both healthy aquatic ecosystems and thriving farms and ranches. “We look at the fish kind of like a canary in the coal mine,” Hayes says. “When fish are disappearing, something’s going on in our water. That’s what’s happening down here.” The Tongue Reservoir used to be Montana’s crappie-fishing destination. On Memorial Day weekend, up to 10,000 anglers would descend on the lake to fill buckets full of the popular species of sunfish prized for its mild, sweet flavor. “It didn’t matter if you were a beginning angler or you fished all of your life,” says Mike Backes, “you could literally catch fish after fish after fish.” Backes, a fisheries biologist with Montana Fish, Wildlife and Parks, describes the crappie fishery as a “shadow of itself” compared to when he joined FWP 34 years ago. Anglers are lucky if they catch one or two in the whole summer, he says. Backes is quick to note that there isn’t a “smoking gun” linking coal and CBM development to the decline of crappie. There have been many changes in the area, including renovations to the dam in 2000 that raised the lake level by about 4.5 feet, flooding much of the vegetation that once grew along its shoreline. He does, however, note that a “tremendous” volume of high-conductivity groundwater is flushing into the reservoir from coal mines and coalbed methane wastewater holding ponds. It’s especially concentrated at the bottom of the reservoir, he’s found. When that heavier, saltier water warms in the late summer, it holds less dissolved oxygen. Backes hypothesizes that a lack of oxygen at the bottom of the pool could be driving a decline in macroinvertebrates — the bugs fish feed on — and keeping eggs and juvenile fish from maturing into adults.  Backes wonders aloud if state agencies would have issued the coal and CBM companies more stringent permits if they knew then what they know now. “I bet it would be an issue that would be talked about,” he says. The Tongue River Reservoir stretches across southeastern Montana with the Decker coal mine visible in the background. Credit: Jessica Plance / MTFP Hayes has a more pointed take. He says the Tongue was the “crappie capital of Montana” until CBM development “turned that lake into a septic tank.”  “Everyone feels [DEQ is] trying to cover their butt because they made a mistake,” he says. He adds that a 10% decline in crop yield might be acceptable to DEQ but it’s not fine with him. He’s also frustrated that the help a DEQ employee promised after Hayes showed him water streaming through the coal mine spoils last fall hasn’t materialized.  Hayes isn’t just complaining about the issue, though. He’s been working to find solutions. For the past two years, Hayes and Backes have been going out on the reservoir every month to take measurements and collect water-quality samples. They hope the data will give them a better understanding of the precise causes of the crappie collapse and point stakeholders to a viable fix. A handful of potential solutions circulated at that late-February meeting in Miles City. A “bubbler,”a type of air pump, could pull some of the dense, high-sodium water off the reservoir bottom so it doesn’t become so concentrated. The dam manager could then try to flush the worst of the water downstream in the late fall or winter after agricultural producers have stowed their pivots and shut off their ditches. The water coming off the Decker spoils could be treated or put to other industrial uses farther from surface waters — dust abatement for the nearby Spring Creek coal mine, for example.Experts say that without intervention, the future could be bleak. For a while. Vince Muggli holds a chunk of salt-affected soil on his farm near Miles City. Elevated salinity can reduce crop productivity and degrade soil health across agricultural lands in the Tongue River Valley. Credit: Jessica Plance / MTFP Elizabeth Meredith, a Billings-based hydrogeologist with the Montana Bureau of Mines and Geology, told MTFP that coal-mine reclamation can spike salinity levels by flushing newly available salt from the mine spoils into rivers and lakes. Researchers eager to understand how long it takes for a reclaimed coal mine to return to pre-mining salinity levels studied the Big Sky Mine, a relatively small operation outside Colstrip that closed in the 1980s. Meredith, who has written more than a dozen papers on coal and CBM development, said the Big Sky Mine can serve as a somewhat helpful guide. Apart from a few remaining “hot spots,” as she calls them, it’s taken three decades for water supplies to return to their pre-mining salinity levels.  “But that was a fairly small watershed that was disturbed,” she says. Clint McRae, a cattle rancher from Colstrip, is adamant that the energy industry’s profits shouldn’t land on the backs of farmers and ranchers. His family has been haggling with environmental regulators over water-quality protections since before the Colstrip Generating Station, Montana’s largest power plant, fired up more than 40 years ago. Over a lunch of hamburgers and potato chips at his home in Rosebud County, McRae, 64, recounts the assurances the plant’s developers and environmental regulators made to ranchers like him. Those promises have been broken numerous times in numerous ways, as evidenced by the plant’s leaking coal-ash ponds and efforts to diminish locals’ input through perfunctory reviews and dismissive responses to their concerns. McRae underscores how, from “Alzada to Eureka,” ranches with longevity possess a critical resource that shouldn’t be taken for granted. “If you go to any old ranch in Montana that’s still established, the one thing they have in common is water, both quantity and quality,” he says. “The most valuable resource that we have in ag is water.” McRae adds that the resources coal companies work with are finite. But the people who have stewarded the land for generations will still be there — hopefully with their water supplies intact — even after the coal hand has played out. “Industry is looking at the end of the year,” McRae says. “We’re looking one to two generations down the line.” The Tongue River flows through southeastern Montana, providing water for agriculture, wildlife habitat and recreation before joining the Yellowstone River near Miles City. Credit: Jessica Plance / MTFP Like McRae and Muggli, Hayes is in the fight for the long haul. He’s hopeful the Tongue River water his ranch relies on will hold up; hopeful Montana agencies will start taking the long view toward protecting the state’s water resources; hopeful this winter’s miserable snowpack won’t wreak too much havoc on the already-uncertain proposition of making a living from agriculture. Hayes’ home in Birney is peppered with artifacts of that conviction. His computer is stuffed with images of the Tongue River and depictions of the fossil fuel industry’s impact on it. The U.S. Geological Survey river-monitoring website is bookmarked so he can readily access Tongue River statistics. On the desk next to his computer lies a document titled “Estimates of post-mining water quality for the Upper Tongue River, Montana and Wyoming.” The report, which was issued by the Montana Bureau of Mines and Geology in 1982, appears to be an original copy.  A plaque from Northern Plains Resource Council, the nonprofit formed in 1972 to help farmers and ranchers push back on eastern Montana coal development, is nailed to the wall above the report. The plaque recognizes Hayes and his now-deceased wife, Marilynn, with the Bob Tully Spirit Award, given to those who have “demonstrated outstanding leadership abilities, creativity in the face of adversity and unwavering courage.” Asked what has kept him invested in this issue for more than half his life, Hayes says he feels an obligation to ensure that other members of the Tongue River Water Users Association have decent water. There’s an undercurrent of fair dealing that motivates him as well.“I’m not totally against all of this development, but I don’t want people left with the residue when they leave,” he said. “I love this place, and I don’t want it destroyed.” The post In southeast Montana, a history of coal mining haunts farmers and ranchers appeared first on Montana Free Press. ...read more read less