Lawsuit Halts Mosaic's Move South
The inevitable move of phosphate mining south of Polk County has been put on hold at least temporarily.
The Mosaic Co., the lone phosphate company based in Polk, had planned to extend its South Fort Meade mine last summer. The mining plan approved by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers called for extending the mine onto more than 10,000 acres in northern Hardee County.
Judge Henry Lee Adams Jr. of the U.S. District Court in Jacksonville halted the mine extension in June in response to a lawsuit filed by the Sierra Club Inc.; People for Protecting Peace River Inc. of Wauchula; and ManaSota-88 in Nokomis.
The lawsuit claims the mine would destroy wetlands and pollute the Peace River watershed, including the Charlotte Harbor estuary, and that the Army Corps failed to conduct an environmental impact study on the mine extension as required under federal law. Adams halted the extension and ordered the Army Corps to study less environmentally damaging mining alternatives.
The move was necessary because phosphate reserves in the Polk section of South Fort Meade are nearly exhausted. Phosphate officials estimate all Polk reserves will be exhausted by 2020.
Mosaic in August laid off 140 of the 260 mine workers at South Fort Meade. They were recalled in November, when Adams approved an agreement between Mosaic and the environmental groups that allowed the company to extend the mine onto some 200 acres of the Hardee tract, enough to keep operating until about March.
Mosaic has appealed Adams’ ruling to the U.S. 11th Circuit Court of Appeals in Atlanta, which agreed to expedite its deliberation.
Polk was once the home to dozens of phosphate companies, making it the center of U.S. phosphate fertilizer production. The last two companies, IMC Global Inc. and Cargill Crop Nutrition, merged to form Mosaic in October 2004.
Plymouth, Minn.-based Mosaic employs more than 2,100 workers at its Polk facilities, making it one of the county’s largest public employers. In addition to South Fort Meade, it operates two other phosphate rock mines in Southwest Polk, named Four Corners, and Hookers Prairie, and two fertilizer plants in Bartow and New Wales south of Mulberry.
The latter is the one of the world’s largest fertilizer manufacturing plants.
In January, Cargill Inc., an agricultural conglomerate and one of the world’s largest private companies, announced it would sell off its 64 percent share of stock in Mosaic, a public company traded on the New York Stock Exchange. The tax-free transaction, worth more than $24 billion, is designed to keep Cargill a private company.
