Loophole lets animal farms evade pollution rules

Karen Dillon The Kansas City Star
December 23, 2008

Livestock corporations in Missouri have found a way around state pollution rules - instead of building megafarms, they operate smaller farms that don't fall under the state's pollution regulations.

Missouri closely regulates about 450 indoor farms. But there are hundreds, possibly thousands, of farms with confined animals and waste lagoons that don't fall under state law, a state Department of Natural Resources official said.

The practice has created more than a stir in Barton County, south of Kansas City, where one corporation has contracted with at least a dozen farmers in the last couple of years.

Zach McGuire noticed several of the smaller factory farms cropping up near his home in Barton County, and he has joined a number of residents complaining about pollution and odors.

"In southwest Missouri they are going in like gangbusters to get in under the state's limits," said McGuire, a traditional farmer near Lamar. "It's like living in a porta-potty."

To find out how many indoor farms are in Barton County, McGuire and a friend began flying over the countryside to document them. So far, they say, they have found about 50.

Factory farms are controversial in Missouri because of the massive pollution they generate. Since the mid-1990s, the state has regulated the largest ones, known as Class 1 farms, which require permits and extensive waste-management plans. Class 1 farms are divided into subcategories by size.

The smaller ones, known as Class 2 farms, can have thousands of animals, too, but have few pollution regulations.

Cattle On Drugs

Commentary: A growing health threat, ignored

By John Carlin

For two years my colleagues at the Pew Commission on Industrial Farm Animal Production and I poured over volumes of data on what the Food and Drug Administration calls on its Web site "a growing threat," and what the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has termed "among its top concerns" – the phenomenon of antibiotic resistant bacteria.

What we found in our research was that overuse of antibiotics, especially in the production of food animals, is one of the primary culprits. We released our findings in April of this year with the recommendation that the FDA phase out the non-therapeutic use of antibiotics in farm animal production, meaning quite simply, preserve these drugs to treat sick animals, not healthy ones, and don't use them simply to stimulate weight gain.

Our report and recommendations were met with an enthusiastic reception by the public health and medical communities. In July, the FDA announced that it planned to ban the use – other than for strict, medically limited purposes – of cephalosporin drugs in food animals, effective December 1 of this year. Cephalosporin drugs are a powerful class of antibiotics used to fight infections in people, one of our newest and most effective lines of defense against harmful bacteria. But strangely, just five days before the ban was set to take effect, the FDA, with none of the fanfare that accompanied the original announcement, reversed itself.

What changed in less than five months? Certainly the problem hasn't gone away. It has only gotten worse. Newspapers are full of stories of Americans falling victim to serious infections that are resistant to traditional antibiotic treatments. Just one of them, methicillin resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA), kills more people in the United States each year than AIDS.

A decade ago, the Institute of Medicine estimated that antibiotic resistant bacteria generated an estimated $4 billion to $5 billion per year in extra costs to the U.S. health-care system, and costs have skyrocketed from there. Apparently, the drug companies and their allies in the animal agriculture industry were only too happy to lean on friends and quietly preserve a system that, for them, is incredibly profitable - never mind the growing threat to the health of the public.

As a former dairyman and Kansas governor, I was therefore disappointed to see my state's health department named as supporting reversal of the ban, lumping it with such special interests as the National Turkey Federation. On the other hand, groups supporting the ban included the American Medical Association, the American Academy of Pediatrics, the Infectious Disease Society of America and the American Public Health Association, among others.

It would be most interesting to know the basis for any organization's objection. Certainly the pressure on food animal producers is tremendous. A growing demand for meat and poultry led to a model of production that relies on what are commonly known as CAFO's – concentrated animal feed operations. Such industrial agriculture packs animals into such tight areas that often the conditions require a regimen of antibiotics to help avoid disease. Yet this practice, while once economically defensible, no longer is. The threat to public health from the antibiotic overuse alone is putting the human population at risk while adding billions to our health-care budget.

The rest of the world has leapt ahead of us on this issue. In Europe, antibiotics have long been eliminated from food production. South Korea followed suit this summer. Our refusal to turn away from this practice could cost us markets for our food products overseas and, by extension, precious jobs here at home.

The Pew Commission was composed of farmers, doctors, veterinarians, economists and other talented professionals who took on the challenge of finding a model that would allow U.S. farmers and ranchers the freedom to pursue their livelihoods in a way that does not adversely impact public health, the environment and the economies of their communities. We believe we found such a model, and it included phasing out the indiscriminate overuse of antibiotics.

Changing the way agriculture works in this country will likely prove challenging, and involve many difficult decisions. It's a tragedy that on this occasion the FDA took the easy – and more dangerous – way out.

ABOUT THE WRITER

John Carlin is a former governor of Kansas and was chairman of the Pew Commission on Industrial Farm Animal Production.

Green House Gases & Beef Production

The easiest and most cost effective way of reducing Global Warming Gases -- going vegetarian or at least reducing red meat and dairy consumption -- is seldom mentioned by environmental groups. If you must eat red meat -- hunt it.

But out in the West behind the Bovine Curtain, we never hear about this connection from so called environmental groups, much less all the other impacts associated with livestock production from killing of predators to trashing of riparian areas to water pollution. It is like it doesn't exist -- instead we have praise for the "working landscape" and "traditional uses."

Even Mr. Global Warming End of Nature Bill McKibben supports dairy farming in Vermont, apparently not willing to take on the unpopular notion of suggesting that we should all use less milk and meat, never mind all the other impacts from livestock production.

American Geophysical Union
2008 Fall Meeting

The GHG and Land Demand Consequences of the US Animal-Based Food Consumption
Martin, P A Dept. of Geophysics, 5734 S. Ellis Ave., Chicago, IL 60637, United States
Eshel, G Bard College, PO Box 5000, Annandale, NY 12504-5000, United States

Abstract:

While the environmental burdens exerted by food production are addressed by several recent publications, the contributions of animal-based food production, and in particular red meat---by far the most environmentally exacting of all large-scale animal-based foods---are less well quantified.

We present several simple calculations that quantify some environmental costs of animal - and cattle - based food production.

First, we show that American red meat is, on average, 350% more GHG (greenhouse gas) -intensive per edible calorie than the national food system's mean.

Second, we show that the per calorie land-use efficiencies of fruit and beans are 5 and 3 times that of animal-based foods. That is, an animal-based edible calorie requires the same amounts of land as 5 fruit calories or 3 bean calories.

We conclude with highlighting the importance of these results to policy makers by calculating the mass flux into the environment of fertilizer and herbicide that will be averted by reducing or eliminating animal-based foods from the mean US diet. This also enables us to make preliminary quantitative statements about expected changes to the size and probability of Gulf of Mexico anoxic events [the Dead Zone] of a certain O2 depletion levels that are likely to accompany specific dietary shifts.

Science Ignored: CAFO Regulation Stinks Like CAFOs

No one needed to do scientific studies to tell my mother that my long-ago FFA project’s 12 hogs didn’t smell like roses.

But the scientific studies have now been done that confirm what her nose — and stinky clothes — told her on that Illinois farm about 50 years ago.

The only difference is that the compounds causing the unpleasant smell have been identified, and some of those compounds, according to public health studies, cause human health problems, from flu-like symptoms to severe asthma attacks.

The sound-science research by institutions as diverse as Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, Iowa State University and the Minnesota Department of Health has documented that the preponderance of evidence is that emissions from concentrated animal feeding operations — CAFOs for short — can harm human health.

Likewise, there are all sorts of scientific studies documenting the ill effects of CAFOs on water quality — everything from heavy algae blooms to problems with bacteria, primarily E. coli. There are reams of health, economic and social-service studies that demonstrate the bad effects of crowding together farm animals by the thousands. The studies conclude that these big feeding operations are a liability, not a benefit.

The American Public Health Association, reviewing the many documents, called for a moratorium on permitting CAFOs.

Several recent reports — the most notable from the Pew Commission — also found CAFOs culpable on health matters.

By the way, there is absolutely no evidence that the meat, milk and eggs produced by these feeding operations have resulted in more food for the hungry mouths of peasants in Southeast Asia, Africa or South America. To the contrary, world hunger and deaths from malnutrition have increased.

Arguments about “the future of agriculture” ring hollow. CAFOs represent less than half of 1 percent of Missouri agriculture. They are passé — part of the industrial era that has devastated the American economy.

We now have more than 20 years of experience with these operations and what we now know is what was suspected initially: CAFOs pollute the air and water, and cause economic trouble and human health problems.

The science studies are in, and a reassessment is in order.

But those who advocate for these operations are not deterred by scientific studies or facts. Emotion and passion are poor substitutes for research reports, scientific studies, data and facts, but that’s what CAFO supporters are reduced to relying on.

Author Ken Midkiff is chairman of the Missouri Chapter of the Sierra Club. He lives in Columbia.

Meat Wagon: Bush Administration Midnight Riders

From http://www.gristmill.grist.org/ See the rest of the Meat Wagon Reports here, search for meat wagon.

Living near confined-animal feedlot operations (CAFOs) is no bowl of cherries. CAFO operators pack thousands of animals into tight spaces, concentrating their waste. The smells they release are intense and foul -- and probably dangerous.

According to one recent peer-reviewed study, by Wellesley researcher Stacy Sneeringer, living near CAFOs "significantly" raises infant-mortality rates.

But you don't need to live near a CAFO to feel their effects. According to the U.N., CAFOs generate tremendous amounts of greenhouse gas -- more even than cars. If this weren't Friday afternoon, I'd add a pungent sentence or two about CAFOs' dreadful effects on groundwater.
In this context, you want to see federal agencies cracking down on CAFOs, forcing them to take responsibility for the messes they generate.

But that's not how it works. Rather than forcing CAFOs to reduce their putrid emissions, the EPA just brazenly exempted them from even reporting emissions.

Cut another notch in Stephen Johnson's belt.

It turns out that when we cram thousands of animals together and force them to wallow in their waste, they become susceptible to all manner of sickness. Thus the temptation to douse them with antibiotics as a preventive measure. It also happens that antibiotics tend to make animals fatten faster -- another reason why CAFO operators use them liberally.

That such steady use of antibiotics is ruining their effectiveness and breeding resistance has become widely accepted. Researchers in Canada have found that supermarket pork is routinely infected with antibiotic-resistant staph.

Even the FDA got concerned. Back in July, the agency banned "extralabel use" of a family of antibiotics called Cephalosporin at factory farms -- meaning that it could no longer be applied for preventive purposes, but only to treat sick animals.

"This rule will help further protect consumers against antimicrobial-resistant strains of zoonotic foodborne bacterial pathogens," the agency declared. But then, on the day before Thanksgiving ... experienced FDA watchers will be able to predict what comes next.

On the day before Thanksgiving -- with millions of Americans preparing to cook up factory-farmed turkey -- the FDA unceremoniously issued this statement:

The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) is revoking the order prohibiting the extralabel use of cephalosporin antimicrobial drugs in food-producing animals.

Wha'?? What about that business about protecting consumers against antibiotic-resistant pathogens?

Turns out the agency had opened a comment period on the rule, and meat-industry flacks had bombarded it. Here's the FDA:

The agency received many substantive comments on the order of prohibition, and therefore, in order for FDA to fully consider the comments, the agency has decided to revoke the order. As a result, the order of prohibition will not take effect on November 30, 2008.

Nice one! Laura Rogers, project director for the Pew Campaign on Human Health and Industrial Farming, was, for one, not impressed by this logic. She recently issued the following statement:
"The misuse of antibiotics in animal agriculture helps fuel the increase in antibiotic-resistant infections -- a fact long acknowledged by the American Medical Association, U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and even the FDA. Yet in another set-back for public health, the FDA reversed itself on the off-label use of cephalosporin -- a family of antibiotics vitally important in human medicine -- allowing this unrestricted use in industrial farm animal production to continue.

"Earlier this year, the agency had announced plans to ban all off-label uses in agriculture of these critical human drugs. Regrettably, the FDA changed its course.

"These important drugs are the only effective therapies for serious gastrointestinal diseases in children and also the best treatment for antibiotic-resistant infections in cancer patients. Easing restrictions on the use of cephalosporin on factory farms jeopardizes the effectiveness of these drugs and needlessly imperils our public health.

"In addition, the overuse of human antibiotics in farm animals is driving up the cost of healthcare. For example, in 1998 the Institute of Medicine estimated that antibiotic-resistant bacteria generated an estimated $4 billion to $5 billion per year in extra costs to the U.S. healthcare system.

"The incoming Administration and the new head of the FDA need to examine the overuse of antibiotics on factory farms. They must take the advice of the doctors and other public health professionals who have raised the alarm about antibiotic misuse and put the health of people -- particularly susceptible groups like the elderly and children -- ahead of industry profits. Change cannot come soon enough."

As More Eat Meat, a Bid to Cut Emissions

The United Nations expects beef and pork consumption to double between 2000 and 2050.

by ELISABETH ROSENTHAL
Published: December 4, 2008 STERKSEL, the Netherlands

The cows and pigs dotting these flat green plains in the southern Netherlands create a bucolic landscape. But looked at through the lens of greenhouse gas accounting, they are living smokestacks, spewing methane emissions into the air.

The farm at Sterksel makes electricity for itself and for sale, and sells carbon credits.

That is why a group of farmers-turned-environmentalists here at a smelly but impeccably clean research farm have a new take on making a silk purse from a sow's ear: They cook manure from their 3,000 pigs to capture the methane trapped within it, and then use the gas to make electricity for the local power grid.

Rising in the fields of the environmentally conscious Netherlands, the Sterksel project is a rare example of fledgling efforts to mitigate the heavy emissions from livestock. But much more needs to be done, scientists say, as more and more people are eating more meat around the world.

What to do about farm emissions is one of the main issues being discussed this week and next, as the environment ministers from 187 nations gather in Poznan, Poland, for talks on a new treaty to combat global warming. In releasing its latest figure on emissions last month, United Nations climate officials cited agriculture and transportation as the two sectors that remained most "problematic."

"It's an area that's been largely overlooked," said Dr. Rajendra Pachauri, head of the Nobel Prize-winning United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. He says people should eat less meat to control their carbon footprints. "We haven't come to grips with agricultural emissions."

The trillions of farm animals around the world generate 18 percent of the emissions that are raising global temperatures, according to United Nations estimates, more even than from cars, buses and airplanes.

But unlike other industries, like cement making and power, which are facing enormous political and regulatory pressure to get greener, large-scale farming is just beginning to come under scrutiny as policy makers, farmers and scientists cast about for solutions.

High-tech fixes include those like the project here, called "methane capture," as well as inventing feed that will make cows belch less methane, which traps heat with 25 times the efficiency of carbon dioxide. California is already working on a program to encourage systems in pig and dairy farms like the one in Sterksel.

Other proposals include everything from persuading consumers to eat less meat to slapping a "sin tax" on pork and beef. Next year, Sweden will start labeling food products so that shoppers can look at how much emission can be attributed to serving steak compared with, say, chicken or turkey.

"Of course for the environment it's better to eat beans than beef, but if you want to eat beef for New Year's, you'll know which beef is best to buy," said Claes Johansson, chief of sustainability at the Swedish agricultural group Lantmannen.

But such fledgling proposals are part of a daunting game of catch-up. In large developing countries like China, India and Brazil, consumption of red meat has risen 33 percent in the last decade. It is expected to double globally between 2000 and 2050. While the global economic downturn may slow the globe's appetite for meat momentarily, it is not likely to reverse a profound trend.

Of the more than 2,000 projects supported by the United Nations' "green" financing system intended to curb emissions, only 98 are in agriculture. There is no standardized green labeling system for meat, as there is for electric appliances and even fish.

Indeed, scientists are still trying to define the practical, low-carbon version of a slab of bacon or a hamburger. Every step of producing meat creates emissions.

Flatus and manure from animals contain not only methane, but also nitrous oxide, an even more potent warming agent. And meat requires energy for refrigeration as it moves from farm to market to home.

Producing meat in this ever-more crowded world requires creating new pastures and planting more land for imported feeds, particularly soy, instead of relying on local grazing. That has contributed to the clearing of rain forests, particularly in South America, robbing the world of crucial "carbon sinks," the vast tracts of trees and vegetation that absorb carbon dioxide.

"I'm not sure that the system we have for livestock can be sustainable," said Dr. Pachauri of the United Nations. A sober scientist, he suggests that "the most attractive" near-term solution is for everyone simply to "reduce meat consumption," a change he says would have more effect than switching to a hybrid car.

The Lancet medical journal and groups like the Food Ethics Council in Britain have supported his suggestion to eat less red meat to control global emissions, noting that Westerners eat more meat than is healthy anyway.

Producing a pound of beef creates 11 times as much greenhouse gas emission as a pound of chicken and 100 times more than a pound of carrots, according to Lantmannen, the Swedish group.

But any suggestion to eat less meat may run into resistance in a world with more carnivores and a booming global livestock industry. Meat producers have taken issue with the United Nations' estimate of livestock-related emissions, saying the figure is inflated because it includes the deforestation in the Amazon, a phenomenon that the Brazilian producers say might have occurred anyway.

United Nations scientists defend their accounting. With so much demand for meat, "you do slash rain forest," said Pierre Gerber, a senior official at the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization. Soy cultivation has doubled in Brazil during the past decade, and more than half is used for animal feed.

Laurence Wrixon, executive director of the International Meat Secretariat, said that his members were working with the Food and Agriculture Organization to reduce emissions but that the main problem was fast-rising consumption in developing countries. "So whether you like it or not, there's going to be rising demand for meat, and our job is to make it as sustainable as possible," he said.

Estimates of emissions from agriculture as a percentage of all emissions vary widely from country to country, but they are clearly over 50 percent in big agricultural and meat-producing countries like Brazil, Australia and New Zealand. In the United States, agriculture accounted for just 7.4 percent of greenhouse gas emissions in 2006, according to the Environmental Protection Agency.

The percentage was lower because the United States produces extraordinarily high levels of emissions in other areas, like transportation and landfills, compared with other nations. The figure also did not include fuel burning and land-use changes.

Wealthy, environmentally conscious countries with large livestock sectors — the Netherlands, Denmark, Germany and New Zealand — have started experimenting with solutions.

In Denmark, by law, farmers now inject manure under the soil instead of laying it on top of the fields, a process that enhances its fertilizing effect, reduces odors and also prevents emissions from escaping. By contrast, in many parts of the developing world, manure is left in open pools and lathered on fields.

Others suggest including agriculture emissions in carbon cap-and-trade systems, which currently focus on heavy industries like cement making and power generation. Farms that produce more than their pre-set limit of emissions would have to buy permits from greener colleagues to pollute.

New Zealand recently announced that it would include agriculture in its new emissions trading scheme by 2013. To that end, the government is spending tens of millions of dollars financing research and projects like breeding cows that produce less gas and inventing feed that will make cows belch less methane, said Philip Gurnsey of the Environment Ministry.

At the electricity-from-manure project here in Sterksel, the refuse from thousands of pigs is combined with local waste materials (outdated carrot juice and crumbs from a cookie factory), and pumped into warmed tanks called digesters. There, resident bacteria release the natural gas within, which is burned to generate heat and electricity. The farm uses 25 percent of the electricity, and the rest is sold to a local power provider. The leftover mineral slurry is an ideal fertilizer that reduces the use of chemical fertilizers, whose production releases a heavy dose of carbon dioxide.

For this farm the scheme has provided a substantial payback: By reducing its emissions, it has been able to sell carbon credits on European markets. It makes money by selling electricity. It gets free fertilizer.

And, in a small country where farmers are required to have manure trucked away, it saves $190,000 annually in disposal fees. John Horrevorts, experiment coordinator, whose family has long raised swine, said that dozens of such farms had been set up in the Netherlands, though cost still makes it impractical for small piggeries. Indeed, one question that troubles green farmers is whether consumers will pay more for their sustainable meat.

"In the U.K., supermarkets are sometimes asking about green, but there's no global system yet," said Bent Claudi Lassen, chairman of the Danish Bacon and Meat Council, which supports green production. "We're worried that other countries not producing in a green way, like Brazil, could undercut us on price."