What happened: In the wake of industry pressure, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) withdrew a rule that would have required concentrated animal feeding operations (CAFOs) to provide needed data on how its activities contribute to water pollution. The EPA withdrew this rule despite the agency’s own analysis stating that there are major gaps in the data collection that prevent the EPA from obtaining an accurate picture of how CAFOs are contributing to water pollution.
Why it matters: The EPA failed to follow its own analysis showing that more data collection was needed to assess water pollution from CAFOs. Under the Clean Water Act, the EPA is required by law to regulate sources of water pollution, which includes the need to obtain an accurate set of data from industries like CAFOs and other sources of pollution.
The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) ignored its own analysis identifying major gaps in water pollution data from concentrated animal feeding operations (CAFOs) and withdrew a rule that would have required CAFOs to provide the agency with this data. In October 2011, the EPA had proposed a rule, known as the 308 rule, that would have required basic data collection about CAFOs under Section 308 of the Clean Water Act. According to documents obtained through a Freedom of Information Act request, the meat industry and livestock organizations were outraged by the EPA’s rule and claimed that the collection of these data amounted to a violation of privacy. Due to this pressure, the EPA withdrew the 308 rule in July 2012 and claimed that the data could be obtained through existing sources.
According to the rule’s contents, the EPA carried out an analysis and found that the amount of available data from CAFOs to be insufficient, stating that “unlike many other point source industries, EPA does not have facility-specific information for all CAFOs in the United States.” The 308 rule would have required that CAFOs to submit basic information to the EPA, including the owner name and contact information, the location as defined by latitude and longitude or street address, the National Pollutant Discharge Elimination System permit coverage, the maximum number and type of each animal in confinement, and the acres of land available for land application of manure.
A 2008 report from the US Government Accountability Office (GAO) also identified a lack of data from CAFOs as an impediment for the EPA to regulate air and water pollution from CAFOs. Specifically, the “GAO found that EPA does not have comprehensive, accurate information on the number of permitted CAFOs nationwide. As a result, EPA does not have the information it needs to effectively regulate these CAFOs.” The report also stated that “EPA has not yet assessed the extent to which these [air and water] pollutants may be impairing human health and the environment because it lacks key data on the amount of pollutants that are being emitted from animal feeding operations.” The GAO recommended that the EPA “develop a national inventory of permitted CAFOs and incorporate appropriate internal controls to ensure the quality of the data.”
CAFOs are industrial-sized livestock operations where animals live in high densities in indoor stalls until they are transported to processing plants for slaughter. These conditions lead to high concentrations of waste that can contaminate ground and surface waterways with excessive nutrients, microbial pathogens, pharmaceutical drugs, heavy metals, hormones, and other harmful substances. CAFOs can pollute waterways at virtually any point in their operations, such as when production, spills, or transport of animal waste leads to surface runoff of contaminates; when stormwater mixes with waste and flows into drains; or when pipes or hoses that carry animal waste burst or break.
The increased growth and clustering of CAFOs has led to major environmental, health, and wellness concerns in nearby communities, which are often communities of color or low-income communities. Communities near CAFOs experience increased amounts of air pollution, greenhouse gases, degraded water quality, infectious diseases, odors, insect vectors, and decreased property values. Pollution from CAFOs can leach into groundwater and therefore are a serious threat to drinking water supplies, leading to increases in birth defects, miscarriages, and blue-baby syndrome. When waste from CAFOs contaminates surface water, it can lead to major harm in aquatic environments such as oxygen depletion in the water, algae blooms, decreased fertility in fish, and increased concentrations of fecal bacteria and pathogens.
Without comprehensive data, the EPA cannot identify water pollution from CAFO sources, and therefore cannot take science-based actions that would reduce the harm from this potent source of water pollution. By bowing to industry pressure, the EPA under the Obama administration failed to follow its analysis showing the need to collect more data from CAFOs, and therefore endangered the health and safely of thousands of communities near CAFOs across the country.