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EPA study of CAFO emissions grinds on with no end in sight U.S. EPA's nine-year effort to document air pollution at livestock operations is likely still many years from completion and unlikely to be as useful as industry and environmental groups had hoped.
Still incomplete is what EPA promised to do under a 2005 deal cut with livestock producers to identify air emissions for different types of concentrated animal feeding operations, or CAFOs. The agency has said little about when the work will be done or when it will start three related regulatory tasks, according to sources outside EPA who track the issue closely.
The long wait for results is excruciating and frustrating for stakeholders.
"We just want them to come up with something," said Michael Formica, environmental counsel at the National Pork Producers Council.
CAFOs for dairy cattle, swine, poultry and other food animals hold thousands of large animals or hundreds of thousands of smaller animals.
Most of the regulatory focus has been on CAFOs' water pollution. But the CAFOs' barns, feedlots and manure storage areas also foul the air with ammonia, hydrogen sulfide, particulate matter, volatile organic compounds and other contaminants.
Animal waste accounts for about half of total natural and man-made ammonia in the United States, according to a 2003 National Research Council report. Those emissions are associated with health effects that range from throat irritation to major cardiovascular diseases and increased rates of morbidity. Many are also precursors to other air quality problems, such as smog and acid rain.
Environmentalists have long called on EPA to put in place Clean Air Act requirements subjecting CAFOs to the same air standards that apply to coal-fired power plants and other big industrial emitters.
"Without question they are a stationary source, they emit a lot of pollutants, and they should be getting permits," said Brent Newell, general counsel at the Center on Race, Poverty & the Environment, a California nonprofit that has battled the livestock industry over pollution in court in California.
But livestock producers say agricultural operations are more complicated than smokestack industries and more difficult to regulate. And even those pressing for strict CAFO regulation acknowledge that measuring exactly how much pollution is being caused by an individual operation and how that is affecting neighboring communities is a difficult task.
"One piece of why it's so difficult to regulate them is that they don't fit neatly into the boxes of the statutes that apply to other industrial sectors, like the Clean Air Act or the Clean Water Act," Earthjustice attorney Eve Gartner said. "There's not a smokestack you can measure, they're not a pipe where you can see what kind of water is being discharged."
EPA has historically approached the regulation of CAFO air emissions through right-to-know laws that require the public reporting of potentially harmful air emissions but that don't punish facilities for exceeding limits.
To help make it easier for livestock industries to comply with those laws, EPA announced an unprecedented agreement in 2005 with pork, dairy and egg producers in which the agency agreed not to sue CAFO operators for violating air pollution laws in exchange for the CAFOs funding a two-year air emissions study.
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