As a result of a series of recent developments, industrial farms that raise thousands of animals in concentrated animal feeding operations (CAFOs) are facing new regulations aimed at preventing water pollution. And the American public will soon have additional information about just how much pollution the facilities create each year.
Last week, advocacy groups logged victories in two significant court cases. In one, a judge decided that CAFOs that were previously exempt from environmental impact assessments will now be required to complete them in order to access government loans. In another, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) agreed to respond by August to a petition it had ignored for more than five years. In the petition, advocacy groups detail loopholes in CAFO permitting and outline a plan for the agency to more closely regulate the facilities under the Clean Water Act.
“This issue has gone unaddressed for so long by the agency that it really forces us and our allies to put more and more pressure on EPA to get something done,” said Emily Miller, a staff attorney for Food & Water Watch, one of the organizations involved in the lawsuits. “It has been years—decades, really—since they’ve taken a hard look at this industry and its pollution.”
As animal agriculture has consolidated and shifted toward larger CAFOs over the last several decades, the industry has evaded many of the environmental regulations to which other industries are held. Last year, researchers at the Environmental Integrity Project found that over 50 years, the Clean Water Act successfully tackled pollution from many industries—except agriculture. They pointed to runoff from CAFOs and crop fields as the largest reason that half of the country’s waterways are impaired. Another 2019 analysis found that no permits or other data existed for half of the CAFOs the EPA estimated were operating.
Last week’s developments come on the heels of a court case from earlier this year that could specifically address that data gap. In response to advocacy groups’ accusations that the agency has been violating its annual Clean Water Act obligations to monitor CAFO pollution, the EPA announced it will complete a detailed study of the industry and its water pollution impacts, with data to be published this summer.
“If EPA does this study correctly and really takes a comprehensive look at the industry’s waste streams,” Miller said, she hopes is that “it will lead to the unavoidable conclusion that the regulations these industries are subject to now don’t work and need to be stronger.”
There is precedent for that pathway. In 2021, EPA studied pollution from slaughterhouses and determined that meat and poultry plants discharge the most phosphorous and the second highest levels of nitrogen—nutrients that cause dead zones in waterways—compared to other industries. The agency followed that up by announcing that it will propose updates to water-pollution rules for slaughterhouses by the end of this year.
Of course, agriculture groups and meatpackers are bound to push back, and the outcome of all of this movement is far from certain.
In fact, last week, President Biden also vetoed a Congressional attempt to weaken a rule that defines which waterways in the country are subject to regulations to prevent pollution. And while that decision supports the overall shift toward more stringent protections for waterways, the rule’s long history demonstrates just how complicated and winding the fight over water pollution from agriculture can be.