ALLEGAN COUNTY, MI -- The Vande Bunte Eggs farm has racked up more than 200 state permit violations in the past three years.

Despite the high number of violations, no enforcement action has been taken against the farm, technically classified as a concentrated animal feeding operation (CAFO) that houses about 1.6 million chickens under the Konos Inc. corporate name at its Martin headquarters in Allegan County.

The farm has also benefitted from more than $1 million in federal subsidies.

That doesn't sit well with environmental groups who analyzed 272 large CAFOs in Michigan and concluded that accumulating pollution discharge violations haven't made a dent in the flow of federal dollars that subsidize crop insurance, livestock production and water conservation at state mega-farms.

"We think people should be able to run their business, but not pollute the commons and make other people pay to clean up their waste," said Hudson resident Pam Taylor of the Environmentally Concerned Citizens of South Central Michigan, who authored the report.

Taylor combined information from Freedom of Information Act requests, annual reports for individual farms and records accessible through an online portal on the Michigan Department of Environmental Quality website to create maps (see below) showing each large CAFO in Michigan, how many animals it houses, how much it has received in subsidies and how many permit violations it has.

The report focused only on industrial-scale farms that met the Environmental Protection Agency definition of a large CAFO, with DEQ permits to discharge wastewater to on-site lagoons that is usually applied to fields as fertilizer.

"This is the first time all of this information has been collated into one location," said Gail Philbin, director of the Michigan Sierra Club chapter, which released Taylor's report, titled "A Watershed Moment."

In total, the report concluded that Michigan factory farms received more than $103 million in combined federal subsidies between 1995 and 2014, and accumulated 644 state environmental permit violations as of the end of 2016.

Those farms produced 3.3 billion gallons of untreated wastewater, manure, production area waste, leachate and runoff from about 20 million animals -- mostly chickens, although dairy cows produce most of the waste.

In order to qualify for the U.S. Department of Agriculture's Environmental Quality Incentives Program (EQIP), a cost-share, or subsidy, through the Natural Resources Conservation Service, farms are supposed to demonstrate compliance with federal, state, tribal, or local environmental regulations.

The report comes on the heels of a major court defeat for industrial farming. In April, a federal appeals court struck down EPA rules that exempted CAFOs from reporting emissions of hazardous gases like ammonia or hydrogen sulfide, which are commonly released from manure lagoons.

The Sierra Club and its project partners contend that untreated waste, when applied as liquid fertilizer, gets into waterways that drain to the Great Lakes where it's causing issues in the waters of Saginaw Bay, Lake St. Clair, Lake Macatawa, and western Lake Erie in particular, which are dealing with nutrient-fueled algae blooms that, in some cases, have impaired drinking water supplies.

The Michigan Farm Bureau called Taylor's report "fear-mongering" in a bid to "demonize" farms by nitpicking every interaction with the DEQ.

In Michigan and across the country, farm bureaus have aggressively fought CAFO pollution regulations and environmental community claims that the large farms are harmful to the environment and cruel to livestock.

In 2011, the Michigan Court of Appeals sided with the state after the Michigan Farm Bureau challenged whether the DEQ could require CAFOs to obtain pollution discharge permits before an actual incident occurred.

Since 2003, Michigan has required CAFOs have a National Pollutant Discharge Elimination System (NPDES) permit to regulate how much manure and other pollution are allowed to enter state waters.

"This project rehashes a years-long argument by several organizations whose aim is to shut down family farms around Michigan based solely on their size," said Laura Campbell, a program director at the Michigan Farm Bureau.

"Permitted farms are not factories, they're not soulless corporate despoilers."

The report is "nothing more than fear-mongering, ignoring the real efforts farmers, regulators, and partners are making to improve livestock environmental stewardship, and pandering to what they seem to hope is public ignorance about farming in order to target a scary-sounding name," Campbell wrote in an email.

In Allegan County, began racking up permit violations in 2015, when the business expanded into "cage-free" and organic egg production to meet growing market demand for eggs laid by hens not crammed into cages. The cage-free push started in California and has spread to other states. Michigan has required that all laying hens be cage-free by 2020.

Paul Vande Bunte, Konos CEO, said he wasn't aware of the high number of permit violations when contacted by MLive, but said Konos is working with a consulting firm to aerate the water it uses to wash its eggs down in order to reduce the total amount of effluent, or wastewater, going into its lagoons.

"Organics are dirtier," he said. "You have to clean them up."

According to records on the DEQ's MiWaters online portal, Konos is having trouble controlling its nitrogen discharge and keeps violating the maximum amount of wastewater allowed under its groundwater discharge permit, which the company has asked the DEQ to increase.

Konos has installed monitoring wells around the farm, a move required when there's either the possibility groundwater may become contaminated, or it already has been.

Ryan Blazic in the DEQ Kalamazoo district office said Konos hasn't been punished for the violations because the agency is expecting to grant the permit revision request, which is presently under review by staff in Lansing.

"They are technically permit violations, but they have been reviewed and determined to be permittable when we can get the permit out," he said.

To Taylor, that approach is emblematic of a regulatory structure and state legislature she considers too deferential to big agribusiness operations which bear little resemblance the idealized image of Old MacDonald walking a green pasture in front of a red barn and setting sun.

The DEQ should enforce existing pollution limits, not raise allowable levels, she said. Egg wash water is still CAFO waste as defined by DEQ pollution rules. It contains nutrients, manure, bacteria, hen afterbirth and other biological waste. It goes into lagoons to be sprayed as fertilizer or irrigation.

"It's certainly not something you would drink," she said. "It's got the same pollutants in it that manure does, basically. It's more diluted, but it's still there."

She acknowledged that some farmers are employing conservation measures like field buffer strips to control sedimentation and erosion, but considers that inadequate to remove dissolved nutrients fueling the algae growth.

Surface barriers don't help runoff from tile-drained farms, she argued.

To keep dissolved nutrients from entering the lakes, large factory farms meeting the EPA definition of a CAFO should have to install a municipal-sized wastewater treatment system on site, she argued.

Michigan needs to follow Ohio's lead and ban application of liquid manure on frozen ground, she said. The state enacted stricter agriculture rules following the brief Toledo drinking water in 2014, when harmful Lake Erie algae bloom toxins entered the city's drinking water intake.

"The Michigan Farm Bureau has been slow to acknowledge the fact that we really don't have anything yet that works for dissolved phosphorous and tiled field drainage of liquid manure, and they've been even slower to push for new practices," Taylor said.

"We're continuing to subsidize things that don't work."