Wellington rancher, Bellissimo's son fighting in court over tons of horse manure next door

WELLINGTON — An equestrian rancher and one of the village’s most influential families have been fighting in court for more than a year over millions of pounds of horse poop.

Maria Aurora Rangel de Alba in April 2023 sued Matthew Bellissimo and his father, Mark, over truckloads of horse manure that the son's business, Agricultural Blending Co., has been moving in and out of a facility neighboring her ranch.

De Alba’s lawsuit accuses the Bellissimos of failing to stop “toxic” clouds of manure dust and smells from blowing onto her ranch, decimating her business’ bottom line. Her lawsuit also argues that Matthew Bellissimo is lying to state regulators by characterizing his operation as blending horse manure to make fertilizer instead of one that just stores it.

De Alba wants the facility shut down. She is not demanding money from the Bellissimos.

Toxic manure clouds blow onto property, rancher contends

Matthew Bellissimo contends he has spent hundreds of thousands of dollars trying to solve a problem that has long plagued the area. What should be done with the hundreds of thousands of tons of manure produced each year by the 2,000 or so horse farms in and around Wellington — enough to cover 50 football fields 3 feet deep.

Instead of the manure piling up across the community, Matthew Bellissimo and his attorneys argue, it’s delivered to his 2.2-acre tented grounds on the northeast corner of Ousley Farms Road and 50th Street South, where it’s blended to make valuable fertilizer, in accordance with state code.

“I think the manure presents a public hazard,” said Rangel de Alba’s attorney, Ed Patricoff. “Powdered manure blows into the wind, and it’s a few hundred feet from the canal” between her ranch and Matthew Bellissimo’s manure facility.

“No doubt manure particulate is falling into the canal and blowing to my client’s property,” he said.

Manure odor is 'just part of life,' Bellissimo lawyer says

Matthew Bellissimo's attorney, Daniel Rosenbaum, says De Alba’s real concern has nothing to do with the smell. “I think it’s about the view,” he said.

“This has to do with the lack of having the view she had before,” he said.

De Alba bought the property on the neighboring land in 2017. The manure facility started running in 2020.

“Could you smell something? Yes, it depends on the way the wind blows,” Rosenbaum said. In Wellington, he said, “that’s just part of life.”

The horse manure odors De Alba complains about come from her own manure storage, Rosenbaum claimed. But De Alba keeps manure stored in closed facilities. A Palm Beach Post reporter could smell manure during a recent visit to her ranch while facing Bellissismo’s manure facility, standing on the balcony of De Alba’s ranch when a breeze picked up.

The smell and dust from the 60 to 70 trucks a day carrying the horse waste caused De Alba’s rental income from her stables to drop to $5,000 in 2023 from $32,000 in 2021, her property manager Arturo Lagunes Galindo said in an April 26 court hearing. One prospective tenant told her that their horses’ owner would not want to come see them “with manure flying over the barn,” De Alba said.

A lifelong equestrian, De Alba set up 19 stables, a horse walker and a covered riding arena when she bought the land. Once the manure facility started operating, she said in the court hearing, “from breathing the strong smells, I started getting headaches, a lot of bad taste in the mouth as well, runny nose, itching (in the throat), and that would be sort of the immediate symptoms that I experienced when I was in the barn.”

More on the Bellissimos: Luxury housing plan won't get new look in Wellington, despite equestrians' plea

The covered arena where she would ride her horses to train them started “trapping” the dust and odor, De Alba said, making it tough to breathe while she rode. De Alba’s physician, Dr. Claudia Porrata, testified during a May 2 court hearing that her patient told her during a September 2022 appointment that she had postnasal drip and irritation in her eyes and nose, along with headaches and a cough.

On order from Circuit Judge Carolyn Bell, De Alba’s attorneys filed a complaint in April with the Florida Department of Environmental Protection alleging that the department wrongly granted the facility a permit to blend manure into fertilizer for farming when no such activity occurs there.

State inspectors find no wrongdoing. Attorney disputes that

A DEP inspector said after a May 23 inspection that they did not observe any objectionable odor leaving the property, or any manure running into the waterway. Matthew Bellissimo gave the inspector a tour of the facility. The inspection report includes a photo of stacks of dozens of bags of soil that Matthew Bellissimo said is blended with the manure.

"May was right in the middle of the hearing process," Patricoff said. "Of course, they're going to be on their best behavior."

Matthew Bellissimo's operation fails to comply with state code when inspectors aren't scrutinizing it, Patricoff contends. "The government inspectors are just not doing their jobs," he said.

The DEP did not respond to a request for comment.

Two previous DEP inspections in 2023 found that “fugitive odors” were indeed blowing onto neighboring properties. But after the installation of odor-control systems such as citrus misters and sprinklers, inspectors concluded in October that although they could smell a “slight odor,” it was not “objectionable” and therefore not against state code.

Manure facility cost $500,000. Matthew Bellissimo 'can't remember' if it's profitable

Those improvements and others cost “half a million dollars,” Matthew Bellissimo said during a May 7 court hearing. “I put so much money in response to this complaint so that I could not just talk the talk but walk the walk.”

Matthew Bellissimo’s father thought the manure facility was a stupid idea, the son said in a hearing. “Who makes money from horse s***?” he said. His company had $4.3 million in revenue in 2023, he said later.

“I had economic motivations, but I also have a fanatical passion about my community, Wellington, and if you live in Wellington, if you're in the equestrian domain, and you're close to it the way that I've been close to it, you understand that manure is sort of like an albatross … hovering over that sort of industry,” Matthew Bellissimo said. “The common theme was no one knew how to solve this issue.”

His facility took in a peak of 3,000 tons of manure each week during Wellington’s equestrian season in spring 2023, he said. This year, it was about 2,500.

Although Matthew Bellissimo could remember figures off the top of his head on manure tonnage and money spent on his facility, he claimed not to know how much profit his company had made.

“You don’t have any idea?” Patricoff asked Matthew Bellissimo during the May 21 hearing. “No,” he replied.

“Could it be zero?”

“I can’t remember.”

“You don’t remember if you made a profit?”

“No,” the recent Columbia University business school graduate said.

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Chris Persaud is The Palm Beach Post's data reporter. You can reach him at cpersaud@pbpost.com.

This article originally appeared on Palm Beach Post: Wellington rancher, Bellissimo's son fight over tons of horse manure