This week the Environmental Protection Agency rejected a petition from a coalition led by Food & Water Watch that asked the agency to strengthen regulations regarding water pollution from factory farms.
“For more than 50 years, EPA has knowingly shirked its crystal clear obligation to regulate factory farms under the Clean Water Act,” Food & Water Watch’s Legal Director Tarah Heinzen said in a statement after the EPA’s decision on Tuesday.
Food & Water Watch says factory farms are like “sewerless cities, generating unsustainable amounts of waste that all too often contaminates drinking water with cancer-causing nitrates, floods homes with waste during storms and natural disasters, and renders water recreation unsafe.
“All told, factory farm pollution threatens or impairs over 14,000 miles of rivers and streams and more than 90,000 acres of lakes and ponds nationwide, yet fewer than one third of the country’s largest 21,000+ largest factory farms have National Pollutant Discharge Elimination System (NPDES) permits.”
Iowa is one of the leading states for factory farming, with confined animal feeding operations (CAFOs) proliferating across the state since those facilities were first created in the 1990s. Those industrial-style operations are also why Iowa raises more hogs and chickens than another state, and are major contributors to the state’s poor water quality. There’s very little regulation or oversight of CAFOs at the state-level in Iowa, and the legislature has stripped local governments of any authority over the industrial ag operations.
Four Iowa community groups — Dallas County Farmers and Neighbors, Iowa Citizens for Community Improvement, Jefferson County Farmers and Neighbors and the Poweshiek Community Action to Restore Environmental Stewardship — as well as the Des Moines Water Works, were among the 32 signatories that joined Food & Water Watch in the petition.
It took the EPA six years to respond to the petition.
“It’s hard to know why EPA sat on our petition for so long,” Heinzen told Utah Public Radio shortly before EPA announced its decision. “What we do know from Freedom of Information Act requests is that EPA was actually poised to deny the petition at the end of the Trump administration, and then the Biden administration rapidly reversed course.”
According to the EPA, more time is needed to study the problem of pollution from factory farms before any action is taken.
“A comprehensive evaluation is essential before determining whether any regulatory revisions are necessary or appropriate,” the agency said in its statement on Tuesday.
EPA said it plans to establish an advisory panel with representatives from agricultural business groups, environmentalists and academic researchers to assist in its evaluation.
In a letter to Food & Water Watch and the other groups calling for action, EPA Assistant Administrator Radhika Fox said, “We want to hear from all voices and benefit from the findings of the most current research, and EPA is confident that these efforts will result in real progress and durable solutions to protecting the nation’s waters.”
The last time the EPA made any revision to any of its regulations involving farming was in 2008.
“The lack of urgency displayed in EPA’s decision doubles down on the agency’s failure to protect our water, and those who rely on it — but the fight to safeguard clean water is far from over,” Heinzen said. “We are considering all of our options moving forward.”
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