Officials at Walkersville’s Teabow Farms showed a group of journalists and dairy experts around on Wednesday, but left a manure holding pond and storage tanks off the tour.
A pipe leading from a holding pond to a storage tank at the farm burst twice in late January, sending up to 576,000 gallons of cow manure into Glade Creek. Fear of contamination of Walkersville’s water supply caused boil water advisories and bottled-water giveaways to area residents for weeks.
James J. ‘‘Jimmy” Stup, president of Teabow Farms, in January called the break an accident and blamed it on the failure of an automated system. Stup has apologized for the spill that forced Walkersville to rely on Frederick city water from late January until late March.
Frederick County has billed the Town of Walkersville $287,000 for its response; Walkersville officials have budgeted $60,000 for legal fees for fiscal 2009 to try to recoup the money from Teabow Farms or its insurer.
The subject was taboo on Wednesday.
‘‘That’s still ongoing. Nothing’s been resolved,” James M. Stup, founder of Teabow Farms and Jimmy’s father, said Wednesday. He added that attorneys have advised the family not to discuss the matter.
He also said that the spill temporarily cast the farm’s future in doubt: ‘‘It was serious.”
Teabow Farms got its start on Glade Road in 1965 with 80 cows. The farm began an aggressive expansion in 2000 that brought together Stanley W. Fultz, Maryland Cooperative Extension director for Frederick County, and a team that includes veterinarian Matt Iager of Hagerstown and Dick Matthews, a dairy nutrition consultant for Cargill, and about 20 employees.
The farm produces three tankers full of milk every two days from almost 1,000 cows. Maryland has a $153 million industry encompassing 250,000 acres, according to literature from the Mid-Atlantic Dairy Association, and the average dairy herd is 77 cows.
The Philadelphia-based association organized Wednesday’s tour.
The farm has a homemade training video for new employees. About 1,000 cows are born there each year. Cows that no longer produce milk are sold to the beef market.
Larry Jarvis, Teabow Farms’ herdsman and son-in-law to James M. Stup, led the tour. Jarvis demonstrated the farm’s ultrasound machine, ‘‘milking parlor” and main dairy barn, where hundreds of cows ate a mixture of fiber foods and grains and chewed their cud.
‘‘We take a lot of pride in our cow comfort. This is all we do. We go for herd health first,” he said, pointing out the rubber mats and sand beds that cows in the open-air barn were using. ‘‘You’re going to see how content these cows really are.”
Dozens of fans kept air moving through the long barn, which came to a depression in the middle. When cows vacated a section of the pen for milking, Jarvis opened a valve and sent a cascade of recycled water through the pen to flush manure away.
