Factory Farms
Hog Farming/Hog Waste Rabbit Hole
to read:
- very detailed paper on CAFO economics and if they make sense at all, from srap
- peep the sources on this paper
to read: Food and water watch vs pork council
Just because a hog farm doesn't have an NDPES, doesn't mean they also lack a state permit right?
"70% of cafos lack federal permit."
Two parts, one hook, and one intricate world of waste discharge policy.
What is the story here?
What are the national effluent limits? What are California's effluent limits?
Effluent limitations serve as the primary mechanism in NPDES permits for controlling discharges of pollutants to receiving waters. When developing effluent limitations for an NPDES permit, a permit writer must consider limits based on both the technology available to control the pollutants (i.e., technology-based effluent limits) and limits that are protective of the water quality standards of the receiving water (i.e., water quality-based effluent limits).
Example on p. 9 - 10 of this case:
- Corn Nitrogen Rate Calculator
Clean Water Act prevents discharge into "navigable waters". Recent controversy about this around wetlands.
Last updated in nov 2008 as a result of the Waterkeeper lawsuit in 2005 about the 2003 guidelines.
- here are the guidelines
- "Duty to Apply" covered in III.A
Waste regulated under NPDES (National Pollutant Discharge Elimination System) permits
The world of fecal lagoon management policy is quite intricate, quite nuanced. But the core idea is this:
- it is actually legal to dump waste directly into waterways.
- discharge permits are generally the responsibility of state environmental agencies.
- some smaller factory farms dump animal waste directly into waterways. this is legal, but you need a permit. the problem is, you have to self-report to the epa if you're dumping waste into water. and many farms don't report. there are state regulatory boards that can come after them, but if the board is full of big ag friends, as is the case of idaho and iowa, they won't. but even if a board wanted to enforce the epa's clean water act regulations, they have to put in a lot of investigative work in order to figure out who's breaking the law.
- so dumping waste directly into waterways isn't even enforced well.
- it would be (thankfully) too sus for bigger factory farms to dump millions of gallons of waste into a lake, and that's why they use these fecal lagoons. BUT!
how does the ndpes permitting system work for CAFOs? does it allow direct discharge into waterways under certain conditions? whta are the limits and restrictions around this?
https://missouriindependent.com/2022/11/21/large-cafos-are-known-polluters-heres-why-epa-permits-only-cover-one-third/
Lax permit enforcement
“There’s just been a ‘catch me if you can’ system, where if a CAFO says, ‘I don’t discharge,’ they basically don’t have to seek a permit unless the state regulating agency says they do and sets a higher standard than EPA,” said Tarah Heinzen, legal director at Food and Water Watch, a nonprofit environmental group seeking changes to the EPA’s regulation of CAFOs.
No duty to apply for permits! Enforcement differs state per state.
The CAFO industry organizations argued that EPA exceeded its statutory authority by requiring all CAFOs to either apply for NPDES permits or demonstrate that they have no potential to discharge. The court agreed with the CAFO industry petitioners on this issue and therefore vacated the ‘‘duty to apply’’ provision of the 2003 CAFO rule.
In some states with hundreds of large CAFOs, including Indiana, Idaho and Arkansas, zero facilities have a federal permit.
The percentage of CAFOs with an NPDES permit varies widely from state to state.
Oregon’s state law, for example, allows the state environmental agency to require any enclosed animal operation to apply for an NPDES permit, regardless of the number of animals present. As a result, there are more NPDES permits issued in Oregon than there are CAFOs.
The EPA rarely issues permits at the federal level, instead authorizing state environmental agencies to implement the NPDES program.
In 2003, the EPA implemented a “duty to apply,” meaning that all large CAFO operators had to apply for an NPDES permit. But a federal court struck down that rule two years later, preventing the EPA from enforcing universal permitting in the future.
BUT ALL CAFOS ARE OBVIOUSLY DISCHARGING!
The court found that the duty to apply, based on the potential to discharge, was invalid because the CWA subjects only actual discharges to permitting requirements rather than potential discharges. The court acknowledged EPA’s policy considerations for seeking to impose a duty to apply based on the potential to discharge but found that the Agency lacked statutory authority to do so. 399 F.3d at 505.
**
Why did the court strike down duty to apply?
Especially in Iowa
Iowa has more CAFOs than any other state — nearly 4,000 — but only 4% have NPDES permits.
The EPA standard is “both the floor and the ceiling” in Iowa, Heinzen said.
Iowa law bars the state department in charge of issuing the permits — the Iowa Department of Natural Resources — from issuing permits outside of the bare minimum required by the EPA.
“In Iowa, ag is king — corporate ag in particular, ” said Lisa Whelan, deputy director of Iowa Citizens for Community Improvement. “There’s a lot of political donations…the industry has a lot of power and it’s reflected in our laws.”
The Iowa DNR also was failing to respond to violations of the Clean Water Act in a timely manner, the EPA said.
One reason for the low rate of NPDES permitting across the country is that CAFOs often don’t directly discharge waste into waterways. Instead, pollution more often occurs when rain causes manure lagoons to spill over into waterways, or washes manure off of crop fields where it had been used as fertilizer.
Link to california: https://archive.is/owajG#selection-583.0-598.0
California’s Low Carbon Fuel Standard Act is “designed to decrease the carbon intensity of California’s transportation fuel pool and provide an increasing range of low-carbon and renewable alternatives, which reduce petroleum dependency and achieve air quality benefits.”
One way the act increases renewable alternatives is by subsidizing biogas production from cow, pig, and chicken farms. The methane from animal manure is easily converted into biogas, and factory farms have tons and tons of it.
By incentivizing methane collection, California is actually paying industrial nightmare farms for their enormous waste lagoons. Our tax dollars are going to this hog farm in North Carolina that sprays millions of gallons of fecal matter on their neighbors (source). We subsidize North Carolina fecal lagoons because the methane eventually gets to us through a series of biogas pipelines.
https://www.ecowatch.com/factory-farm-waste-2638905933.html#:~:text=Generally%2C CAFOs dispose of animal,from large-scale factory farms.
"In fact, agriculture is the leading cause of pollution in the nation’s rivers and lakes, according to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), much of it emanating from large-scale factory farms."
Good analysis: https://dho.stanford.edu/wp-content/uploads/digesters.pdf
- most producers are dairy farms
- state provides grants to build anaerobic digesters (1.6M)
- On one estimate, methane credit sales make up approximately 40% of the revenue generated from each dairy cow on a farm with a digester
Are toxic pits good? If we seal the toxic pit, we generate biogas and stop all methane emissions, which seems good. But definitely the animal farming aspect is not good.
what's worth more, milk or poop: https://agdatanews.substack.com/p/whats-worth-more-a-cows-milk-or-its?r=i2qe&triedRedirect=true
The unlined millions of gallons of hog waste reminds me of the The Produced Water Problem
Issue (cows and pigs) effects California in Pixely (near LA) (see Prism)
- nitrate from digester runoff is odorless and tasteless. need to test for it in wells. but most rely on private domestic wells and they're responsible for their own testing. plus low income communities.
- But the problem is that residents such as those in Pixley and Planada, California, farming communities, who rely on domestic wells rather than municipal water systems, are responsible for their own testing. Rivers said that currently, there are no regulations for how often testing is performed, and operators of private domestic wells are not required to report testing results to the state.
- The women described difficulty breathing and severe lung illnesses among their neighbors. According to the state, it’s among California’s most polluted communities: Levels of dangerous pollutants such as ammonia, hydrogen sulfide and volatile organic compounds are very high.
- When another resident, Josefa González, asked doctors why people here seem to get so sick, with medical problems ranging from allergies and asthma to heart conditions, she said the doctors told her the only solution was to move.
“California is really influential, but we would say probably in a bad way, because it’s fueling more consolidation,” said Ben Lilliston, the director of rural strategies and climate change at the Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy. Digesters “don’t deal with the water pollution issues,” he added.
"Each of the 136 barns at Somerset can hold 1,100 large hogs, according to regulatory filings. The cheap pork such huge operations can produce, government data shows, has decimated the once-thriving network of smaller, more sustainable family farms that do not create vast lagoons of waste. Smaller farmers spread manure on fields, where it does not generate the high volume of methane that is produced by a lagoon, according to the Environmental Protection Agency."
Methane / biogas pipeline
Biogas = methane + CO2
Raw biogas is produced when manure decomposes in the absence of oxygen (so shit in a vacuum)
This is then filtered to create Renewable Natural Gas
Manure (hog or cow or chicken) ->
Carbon Credits
- farmers incentivized to capture methane from livestock and inject it into methane fuel pipelines (?)
- how do these pipelines work?
- To receive carbon credits under California’s “Low Carbon Fuel Standard” program, companies convert methane from animal waste into natural gas and pipe it into California’s fuel supply.
- The fuel just needs to come into california:
It also eliminated a requirement that the fuel needed to be physically delivered into California, allowing firms to drop it into pipelines tangentially connected to the state.The increased subsidies and looser rules proved to be attractive to out-of-state factory farms.
- incentivizing factory farms to create huge disgusting lagoons of pig waste
But in 2021, a worker’s failure to shut off a valve at the Somerset operation led to 300,000 gallons of treated swine sewage flowing into streams miles away.
- small is beautiful
Digesters: machines that turn manure into methane
Kinlaw Farms Lawsuit
The operation at Kinlaw Farms annually maintained nearly 15,000 of Appellant’s hogs. These hogs generated approximately 153,000 pounds of feces and urine daily.
A Boeing 737 weighs 90,000 pounds. fully loaded semi truck is 80k lbs.
10 pounds of waste per day fort these large meat hogs! I checked this!
slats in the flooring, where the waste was then stored in three open-air pits within view of Appellees’ homes. These pits or “lagoons” contained millions of gallons of hog waste.
Kinlaw Farms used what is known as the lagoon-and-sprayfield method for hog waste disposal. Kinlaw Farms periodically drained waste from the lagoons and spread it across open “sprayfields” on the Kinlaw Farms property. Approximately eight million gallons of hog feces were sprayed in the air annually at Kinlaw Farms.
Appellant instructed its growers to refrain from applying the hog waste to sprayfields “out of respect for [their] neighbors” if the contractor was aware that neighbors planned to have guests over for weddings or cookouts. Despite this policy, spraying of hog waste in summer months occurred at Kinlaw Farms as regularly as three to five days a week for an average of six hours per day
At Appellant’s direction, hog carcasses pending pickup were stored in “dead boxes,” dumpsters placed in open fields on the Kinlaw Farms property. Hog carcasses would pile up and rot in these dumpsters in open fields until collection of the carcasses was scheduled. These dead boxes attracted dozens of buzzards and flies that would accumulate around the dead boxes and frequent Appellees’ neighboring properties
This is not sacred.
We should be treating our food with a sense of sacredness. This is the kind of insane farce that happens when we do not!
Reacting to mounting community pressure, in 1997, North Carolina banned new lagoon-and-sprayfield hog operations.
But Kinlaw was grandfatehred in.
In 2006, the scientific expert designated by the AG Agreement identified alternative abatement technologies but, applying the AG Agreement’s criteria, the designee did not deem those technologies economically feasible at that time for existing hog farms.
Environmental engineer to test for fecal matter on the homes of the neighbors and conclude: "yes, there is in fact shit on their homes"