This month, Big Ag lobbyists, including Iowa’s Farm Bureau and Pork Producers Association, sided with the Environmental Protection Agency in Food & Water Watch’s landmark lawsuit to clean up water pollution from factory farms nationwide. In supporting the agency ostensibly responsible for protecting the environment, they join some of the country’s largest lobbying groups, including the National Pork Producers Council, American Farm Bureau Federation, US Poultry & Egg Association and the United Egg Producers, who have consistently worked to undermine wetland protection and hold back climate action.
Abdicating government responsibility can make for strange bedfellows. The Farm Bureau once called for the abolition of the EPA. Now he’s singing a different tune. But where polluting companies see a job well done, we see a job not done at all.
No industry has been more successful than Big Ag in skirting environmental regulations. And nowhere is that better demonstrated than in Iowa. The fact that Big Ag is siding with the EPA in this case speaks volumes about the failure of our environmental regulators.
Agriculture is both the largest contributor to pollution of America’s waterways and the least regulated. Today, fewer than a third of the nation’s more than 21,000 largest industrial farms, known as concentrated animal feeding operations or CAFOs, have Clean Water Act pollution permits. In Iowa, more than 4,000 CAFOs operate without any water pollution permits. The result is a rogue industry that pollutes with impunity.
At any given time, there are 1.7 billion animals living in strict confinement on industrial farms in the US – an increase of 47% in just two decades. Iowa is home to more of these industrial farms – and their waste – than any other state. Iowa’s industrial livestock farms operate like sewer-less cities with densely packed livestock, producing 109 billion pounds of pathogen-, nitrate-, and pharmaceutical-laden waste annually that are linked to everything from cancer and birth defects to mass fish kills and aquatic dead zones, each years – 25 times as much. as the sewage produced by the entire human population of the state.
This animal waste contaminates drinking water with dangerous E. coli and nitrates, chokes waterways, kills aquatic life and makes water recreation unsafe. E. coli is the leading cause of Iowa’s poor waterways, which comprise more than half of all assessed lakes, reservoirs, and river and stream segments. Meanwhile, scientists are increasingly linking nitrates to Iowa’s worsening cancer rankings, which rank second in the nation.
We demand better. We at Food & Water Watch sued the EPA last summer for decades of failure to regulate factory farm water pollution. Joining us are twelve co-sponsors, dozens of academics, family farmers, and some of the most prominent environmental justice organizations, including the NAACP and the Southern Environmental Law Center.
Our case seeks to force federal regulators to protect our waters and our health by finally bringing the largest, most polluting CAFOs under the umbrella of the Clean Water Act – just as the law requires. To do this, EPA must ensure that all polluting CAFOs are licensed, and strengthen permits so that they are actually effective in protecting clean water.
Hundreds of millions of corporate lobbying dollars have led to a consistent failure to regulate agricultural water pollution, punishing farmers who raise animals sustainably and rewarding those who pollute their profits. And time and time again, as frontline communities, farmers and advocates seek improvements to the squalid status quo, corporate front groups hinder progress.
This time it must be different. Our lawsuit calls on the legal system to step up where regulators have failed, and ultimately force the EPA to get back to work for the public and the environment, not industry lobbyists. Decades of inaction, coupled with intense pressure from Big Ag, make it clear that EPA will not act on its own.
Wenonah Hauter is the founder and executive director of the national environmental organization Food & Water Watch, and the author of “Foodopoly: The Battle Over the Future of Food and Farming in America.”
This article originally appeared in the Des Moines Register: Livestock farming pollutes with impunity; We filed a lawsuit to change that.
