America’s factory farms generate nearly a trillion pounds of manure every year, and way too much of it ends up in rivers, lakes and estuaries. Animal waste is a major reason half of America’s water bodies are too dirty for fishing or swimming. It’s the most persistent driver of destructive algal blooms in beloved waterways such as Lake Erie and the Chesapeake Bay, which both just fell far short of their 2025 water quality targets.
It’s a dirty, smelly, sickening mess, and the cause is quite simple. Unlike factories, most factory farms aren’t legally responsible for their pollution. Unlike human poop, animal poop isn’t legally required to be treated before it is released into the environment. America’s concentrated animal feeding operations, the industrial livestock farms known as C.A.F.O.s, produce twice as much waste as America’s toilets, but nobody is tracking where or how it gets flushed.
The deeper cause of this legal absurdity is the nearly unlimited political power of farmers generally, and industrial animal farmers specifically, to get whatever they want out of state capitals and from Washington. That includes lavish grants, subsidized loans and other government handouts, but it also includes a free pass from serious environmental enforcement.
So C.A.F.O.s keep getting bigger, even though they are wildly unpopular. Polls from the A.S.P.C.A. suggest that 89 percent of Americans are concerned about factory farms and 74 percent want to ban new ones. The critics now include right-wing natural-food advocates as well as left-wing environmentalists and animal rights activists; the podcaster Joe Rogan has said factory farming should be illegal.
I actually don’t believe that. Like it or not, 99 percent of U.S. meat now comes from factory farms. Banning them would send production to much less efficient operations that would require much more land, deforestation and carbon emissions to produce our steaks, bacon and chicken breasts. The world needs to grow a lot more food, and factory farms, like other factories, are skilled at mass production.
Still, other factories have to clean up their messes! The solution to pollution from big C.A.F.O.s is not to ban them or even to restrict their size. It’s to regulate them like any other industrial polluter.
Environmentalists sometimes make it sound as though factory farms simply pour manure into rivers, and while that happens occasionally — Iowa and North Carolina hog farms have had ugly spills — the problem is usually more complex. Much of C.A.F.O. manure is initially stored in piles, pits or lagoons, and then sprayed onto cropland as fertilizer. The problem is that much of it then drains into waterways or aquifers that store drinking water, with no accounting or accountability.
A variety of loopholes contribute to this, but the most relevant is the agricultural storm-water exemption in the federal Clean Water Act, which shields farmers from liability for any nutrient pollution washing off their fields. The exemption makes some sense for ordinary farm fields, since they can’t discharge pollutants through easy-to-monitor pipes like factories do. But most factory farms have gotten a pass, too.
In theory, factory farms are still supposed to get discharge permits from the Environmental Protection Agency, but today, fewer than a third of the 20,000-plus large C.A.F.O.s have them, and the Republican-controlled House of Representatives recently passed a “PERMIT Act” that would further weaken those rules. Really, though, the permits barely matter, because once C.A.F.O.s transfer their manure to a farmer or any other legal entity, that entity can hide behind the agricultural storm-water exemption if it dumps the manure on farm fields, a shell game euphemistically known as “manifesting.” In some states, manure can even be manifested to an entity controlled by the C.A.F.O. itself.
States enforce the Clean Water Act, and some are more vigilant than others about preventing farmers from applying their manure in ways that tend to wash it into waterways. But a lot still ends up in there. Iowa adopted a so-called Nutrient Reduction Strategy in 2013 that relied on voluntary agricultural measures; today, more than half of the rivers and lakes the state has tested are unfishable or unswimmable, and one report estimated that at the current pace it could take 22,000 years to reach its water quality goals.
Iowa now has more than seven pigs for every human resident, and there’s no obvious way its factory farms that make meat for giant conglomerates like Hormel and McDonald’s should dispose of more than 50 million tons of manure a year. But it’s striking that as a society, we’ve implicitly decided it happens however they want it to. A feedlot cow can unload 100 pounds of manure a day, and unlike fracking water, nuclear waste and municipal sewage, nobody’s really responsible for making sure it doesn’t contaminate nature. A single CAFO can produce more waste than a major city, but unlike cities, CAFOs don’t have to invest in wastewater treatment plants.
Maybe this isn’t surprising. Factory farms are also significantly exempt from federal air-pollution reporting rules, and several states have what are known as ag-gag laws to prevent whistle-blowers from filming or reporting what happens inside C.A.F.O.s. All kinds of farms can receive exemptions from wetland protection regulations, chemical reporting requirements and collective bargaining laws; even the rule limiting how many hours truckers can drive excludes agricultural deliveries. Big Ag is America’s most influential lobby, especially the Barnyard, as its livestock lobbies are collectively known.
But unsurprising situations can still be unacceptable, and even some policymakers who routinely tout their support for hard-working farmers with “heartland values”— as if other businessmen were lazy and amoral — have trouble justifying this anything-goes approach to excrement. In November, after a state legislative report revealed that over three quarters of South Dakota’s river miles were significantly polluted, the state senator Chris Karr, a Republican, suggested that it might be time to rethink voluntary pollution control: “That’s pretty scary for folks, especially in the community that starts with the letter ‘A’ and ends with ‘G,’” he said, “but we’re going to have to look at some restrictions as well, and regulate.”
The next day, Gov. Larry Rhoden, a rancher and a Republican, made it clear that Mr. Karr’s suggestion was dead on arrival: “Rest assured, he’s going to be set straight on a few of his issues in a very kind, civil way.”
Clearly, the community that starts with A and ends with G will make it tough to change the status quo. Change will be even tougher now that record beef prices are a hot-button issue, since stricter pollution enforcement could make them even higher. But there is evidence that when C.A.F.O.s adopt relatively inexpensive manure management strategies, like separating solids from liquids at dairies or spraying the right amounts on crops at the right times of year, they can reduce greenhouse gas emissions, as well as nitrogen and phosphorus pollution from animal waste.
Anyway, Big Ag can’t be sure factory farms will remain politically untouchable as more Americans get angry about their abuse of animals and overuse of antibiotics, as well as their pollution. Robert F. Kennedy Jr., President Trump’s health secretary, has called for farming to return to its pastoral roots, and his Make America Healthy Again movement is vociferously opposed to all forms of industrial agriculture. The solution is not to eliminate the farms that supply our meat. It’s to treat them like any other factories.
Michael Grunwald, a contributing Opinion writer, is the author of “We Are Eating the Earth: The Race to Fix Our Food System and Save Our Climate.”
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