A Case for regulating all CAFOs

Just over a year ago, opposite the editorial pages of the New York Times, Blake Hurst, a former hog farmer and current president of the Missouri Farm Bureau, bemoaned the plight of livestock farmers.  Mr. Hurst wrote of a market that signals farmers to produce more for lower prices while diverting inputs to ethanol production and imposing burdensome regulations.  Others, he said, disparage the industry over animal welfare and pollution, calling for the abandonment of practices that best provide cheap and plentiful meat and dairy.

Referencing a Chipotle advertisement, he wrote, “Commercial farmers will have to decide whether we can withstand public opprobrium while continuing to efficiently produce the world’s most essential good, or join the entertainment industry, selling expensive pork chops with heaping sides of nostalgia.”

While I share some of Mr. Hurst’s distaste for the small-farm fetishism often used by the sustainable agriculture community, his rather ad hominem caricature and dismissal of those who would seek alternatives to the predominant livestock production system largely misses the point – that there is a real need for both improved regulation and alternative production practices (the NYTs fielded numerous responses to Mr. Hurst's op-ed linked here). 

Hurst is guilty of perpetuating an unnecessary duality, where animal agriculture is either large and industrialized or small and pasture-based.  This argument, myopic in scope, is an appeal to ignorance and a distraction from the immediate need to improve regulation of an industry that feeds the vast majority of Americans while simultaneously poisoning their water. 

Industrialized livestock production is the driving force of American agriculture.  It is the cornerstone of our agricultural policy, a key consumer of more than 150 million acres of corn and soybeans.  And, yes, consumers reap the benefits of the remarkable economies of scale that play out on these Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations or CAFOs. 

The EPA regulates CAFOs that discharge or purpose to discharge pollutants requiring operators to have permits to do so.  For a sense of both farm size and market share consider that 58% of all swine production in 2011 occurred on a mere 135 industrialized farms, each home to more than 50,000 hogs.  A full 81% of all hog production took place on 1,340 farms with over 5,000 head each. 

The amount of livestock waste produced on such farms is equally impressive.  A large operation is capable of producing more than 1.5 million tons of manure a year.  In total, the EPA estimates that CAFOs annually produce 3 times more waste than humans with the amount of excrement produced on the largest operations surpassing that of many U.S. cities.  The geographic concentration of large operations – hogs in northern Iowa and southern Minnesota for example – compounds the issue, imposing a disproportionate burden on those living within these production regions and their watersheds.  As a result, 43% of the population has had their drinking water quality compromised by CAFOs. 

The current standard of regulation is inadequate in part because it fails to require that all CAFOs with the potential to discharge apply for permits.  The EPA previously sought to require universal registration unless a farm could demonstrate “no potential to discharge.”  This proposed rule would have provided basic information about all CAFOs, their locations, the waste they produce, and how they manage it.  However, the Waterkeeper Alliance v. EPA decision in 2005, found that the EPA lacked authority to mandate permits.  Rather, a CAFO must be found to have discharged pollutants before being required to obtain a permit.

Yet all CAFOs are presumably polluters - a point that is absolutely critical to the EPA’s ability to effectively regulate point source pollution.  Without mandatory permits, a CAFO must be caught in the act of polluting before they are brought under the auspices of the EPA.  The practicality of this strategy for mitigating pollution is mindboggling, especially in the absence of a comprehensive inventory of all CAFOs. 

Upward of 90% of raw waste produced by CAFOs is applied to cropland.  However, there is insufficient land on which to apply it safely.  This necessitates the use of structures to store manure, wastewater, and contaminated runoff and opens the door to catastrophic failures and overflows, especially in cases of extreme precipitation.  As a result, there are more large-scale discharges and significant increases in nutrient and pathogen runoff.

A concern over excessive runoff has led many to call for improved ecosystem monitoring in proximity to large CAFOs.  Again, without a comprehensive inventory and requirement that CAFOs obtain discharge permits, any monitoring will be severely gap-laden.  To achieve maximum efficacy, the EPA must have all CAFOs under their purview. 

What Waterkeeper made clear is that this likely cannot be accomplished through the rule making process alone.  Legislation increasing the scope of the EPA’s regulatory power is needed.  Requiring all CAFOs to have discharge permits and to be held accountable seems as much a matter of conscience as it is an ecological necessity. 

Please feel free to contact me for additional information or direction to resources.  Below is the Chipotle video Mr. Hurst referenced in his op-ed. I will go on the record as a fan of the video and its sentiments: