A Mississippi town's annual battle against a lagoon of souring milk

People in Kosciusko, Miss., describe the smell differently. It’s “gassy” and “milky,” to some like rotten eggs and to others like ammonia or the acrid burn of an old-fashioned perm.

“It just smells like clabbered milk and burnt cat hair,” resident Brad Stanley said.

What Stanley and his neighbors agree on is that the stench, whatever it is, is so strong that it subsumes their small city in central Mississippi for weeks on end every year. They say it emanates from a lagoon just beyond the city limits, where a production plant for the Prairie Farms dairy company dumps wastewater, including, on at least one occasion, gallons of spoiled milk.

Residents told The Washington Post that the ensuing odor has been foul enough to sour visitors and drive Kosciusko’s community of about 7,000 people indoors. It has led the city to commit millions of dollars to treating the lagoon and attracted scrutiny from the Mississippi Department of Environmental Quality, which cited Prairie Farms for its waste discharge several times in 2022 and 2023, according to state records and a recent report by Mississippi Today.

But the smell persists, returning every February and March in a seasonal haunting. Some in Kosciusko see an intractable dilemma: Prairie Farms is one of Kosciusko’s largest employers.

“I understand why people are complaining,” said Tim Kyle, Kosciusko’s mayor. “I don’t like it either. But, you know, on the other side of this, I don’t want to lose this business.”

“Prairie Farms desires to be a good neighbor in Kosciusko,” Prairie Farms spokesperson Darin Copeland said in a statement. “… We are working with city and state officials to find a solution as quickly as possible.”

Residents can’t pinpoint exactly when the smell of spoiled milk began to sour the streets of Kosciusko. Most agree that it was not present when they grew up in the city, decades ago. The consensus is that in recent years, it has become impossible to ignore.

“The scent is so overwhelming,” said Emily Bennett, who lives near the lagoon on the east side of Kosciusko. "It will wake you up in the middle of the night, you will think your house is on fire.”

The lagoon sits just beyond Kosciusko’s southeastern limits, near Prairie Farms’ production plant and a stretch of the Natchez Trace Parkway, a federally maintained scenic drive. Several residential streets, a high school and a Walmart are also nearby.

“When you’re picking out your produce or your meat, it’s the thick taste of clabbered milk in your sinuses,” Stanley said.

Joy Reynolds, who runs a ranch near the lagoon, said the stench overpowers that of her horses’ manure. Amber Thrasher, a former restaurant owner in Kosciusko, said she’s taken injections for migraines, which develop when the smell emerges. The smell also discouraged customers from eating at her restaurants, she said.

“A lot of people ended up just doing to-go orders … because they don’t want to get out of the car to smell it,” Thrasher said.

Lagoons are often used by small and rural communities to treat wastewater, according to the Environmental Protection Agency. (Kosciusko has more than one.) And it’s not unusual for wastewater lagoons to become particularly pungent as seasons change, when fluctuating temperatures stir the water, exposing submerged waste and odorous gases. But state and federal records indicate that Prairie Farms, which Kyle said contributes the majority of the waste pooling in the lagoon, repeatedly violated standards for the quality of wastewater it discharged.

Prairie Farms' wastewater consistently violated state quality standards when inspected between November 2022 and March 2023 and again from July to November 2023, according to Mississippi Department of Environmental Quality records obtained by The Post. At its peak in February 2023, the biochemical oxygen demand of the plant’s wastewater - a measure of the amount of oxygen consumed by bacteria in the water as they break down waste - exceeded daily permitted limits by over 1,500 percent, according to records.

Prairie Farms, which is based in Illinois, was notified of its violations twice in 2023 and was told in January that it was in significant noncompliance, according to records.

Mississippi Department of Environmental Quality spokesperson Jan Schaefer confirmed that the department was taking action against Prairie Farms, but she declined to comment further. Copeland, the Prairie Farms spokesperson, declined to comment on a pending case with the department.

Kyle, the mayor, criticized the dairy company in 2022 after a broken valve on a Prairie Farms tanker truck spilled gallons of milk into the lagoon, fueling a particularly foul spate of odors, according to the Star-Herald, a Kosciusko newspaper.

“That took 90 days to break down,” Kyle said.

Kosciusko has sunk millions into addressing the smell. Kyle said Prairie Farms purchases about 4.2 million gallons of water each month from the city to use in the plant. But Kosciusko spends around $212,000 a year to treat the lagoon with aerators and chemicals. Kyle said the city plans to spend $3.2 million from the American Rescue Plan and state funding to dredge the lagoon and raise its levees this summer.

Kyle said that the city is in communication with state officials and Prairie Farms, and that it’s up to the Mississippi Department of Environmental Quality to enforce the plant’s compliance with state wastewater standards.

Kosciusko residents are split on how much they want to press the issue. In a community with no strangers, Bennett said, there is little appetite for conflict. Many of Prairie Farms’ critics have friends who work at the plant.

“I think the last thing anyone wants to do is have them leave town,” Bennett said. “But at the same time, should we be compromising our health and our right to breathe fresh air?”

As Kosciusko stews, some are weighing their options. Thrasher spends her weekends in Texas, where she has family, and is considering moving west to start a restaurant in Dallas, she said. Others, like Reynolds, can’t stomach leaving home.

“Most of the people grew up here and just stayed here,” Reynolds said. “… I want better for the town.”