EPA to Study Water Pollution Tied to Livestock Farms

by Marc Heller, E & E News

The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has said it will study water pollution generated by large livestock farms, a potential first step toward tighter regulations on how industrial agriculture manages animal waste.

Officials announced the study as part of a biennial review of water pollution regulations required by the Clean Water Act. The review, called “Effluent Guidelines Program Plan 15,” touches on wastewater discharges across many industries, and the study of big livestock farms comes in response to a lawsuit filed by the organization Food & Water Watch.

In a report finalized January 20, the environmental agency said any proposal to revise the regulations — which could take several years — requires the type of updated information the study would provide. That could include changes in the livestock industry since the last major update in 2008, as well as advances in technology and farm practices to reduce manure runoff, EPA said.

“Understanding the nature and frequency of discharges is critical to understanding the extent to which potential revision of the effluent limitations guidelines (ELG) could yield significant pollutant reductions,” EPA said.

Livestock agriculture groups point to improvements in the design of manure management systems — which include outdoor lagoons, tanks and equipment to inject liquefied manure into fields to reduce direct runoff into streams. Concentrated animal feeding operations (CAFOs) big enough to fall under EPA regulation — generally with hundreds or even thousands of animals — are also required to have pollution permits and nutrient management plans.

The National Cattlemen’s Beef Association was supportive of the effluent limitations guidelines study in a statement from its chief counsel, Mary-Thomas Hart.

“Collecting further information will enable EPA to make an informed and reasoned decision on whether to revise the CAFO ELGs,” Hart said. “We appreciate that EPA is not choosing to unnecessarily rush its regulatory process.”

And while technology such as the use of membranes to filter manure is unfolding, that method isn’t widely used in the poultry industry, for instance, the U.S. Poultry and Egg Association and other groups told EPA in response to a preliminary report on the effluent guidelines in 2021, in which the groups asked for an extended comment period.

Should updates come along, the groups said, EPA will need a more accurate accounting of the facilities that are covered, since some of the categories referenced in that report could include “restaurants, specialty sausage manufacturing and delicatessen and sandwich shops.”

In that preliminary report, EPA also cited regional shifts in where big livestock farms are located, as well as the general trend toward fewer but larger farms.

A study is also likely to run into the complications of the “Waters of the U.S.” regulations that attempt to define waterways subject to the Clean Water Act. The agency said its first step is to assess the extent to which CAFOs discharge into such waters.

Beyond that, the agency said, “EPA’s data about discharges of pollutants from CAFOs is sparse; indeed, its preliminary analysis was only able to analyze monitoring data from sixteen reporting CAFOs. EPA intends to gather information about discharges from the production area to appropriately characterize whether manure, litter, and process wastewater flows off land application areas.”

A Food & Water Watch lawyer, Emily Miller, said regulators should consider additional limits, such as nationally restricting spreading manure on frozen fields — a practice already restricted in some states — as well as basing nutrient management plans on preventing pollution, rather than maximizing crop yields through manure spreading.

In addition, she said, manure lagoons are often designed to handle outdated standards for floods, such as withstanding 24-hour rain events that occur every 25 years according to the National Weather Service. Some of those standards are based on weather records from the early 1960s, Miller said.

“They are ancient by today’s standards,” Miller said.

While the study’s emphasis is on water pollution, EPA said it would also examine the financial condition of the agriculture industry “to the extent possible.” The Clean Water Act requires that updates to effluent guidelines be economically achievable as well as technologically available, the agency said. ▫

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