The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency building.

Environmental and community groups are suing the Environmental Protection Agency over what they contend is the agency’s failure to regulate effluent discharges from confined animal feeding operations under the Clean Water Act.

Food & Water Watch, Center for Biological Diversity, Center for Food Safety and 10 other groups are asking the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals to reject EPA’s denial of a 2017 petition asking it to initiate rulemaking to reform its CAFO regulations.

The petition’s recommendations have the potential to expand and strengthen water pollution permits for CAFOs, according to the groups.

The petition requested revisions to EPA’s discharge permitting requirements, effluent limitations and standards for the CAFO industry.

EPA denied the petition in August but is launching an evaluation of the National Pollutant Discharge Elimination System (NPDES) regulatory requirements for CAFOs and forming a subcommittee to evaluate ways to reduce pollutants generated from CAFOs.

Response

“EPA’s deliberate head-in-sand approach to factory farm regulation has facilitated a national clean water crisis, decades in the making, Tarah Heinzen, Food & Water Watch legal director, said in a press release.

“When given the opportunity to finally right its wrongs, EPA elected instead to double down on special treatment for factory farms,” she said.

Denying the petition is an “appalling abdication of the administration’s clean water and environmental justice objectives,” said Hannah Connor, environmental health deputy director at the Center for Biological Diversity.

“For over a decade, the EPA has doggedly looked the other way as factory farms across the U.S. balloon in size and regional concentration, destroying watersheds and accelerating the decline of endangered species,” she said in the press release.

Reform

The petition requested EPA:

• Revise its CAFO regulations to ensure all discharging CAFOs obtain a permit.

• Establish an evidentiary presumption that CAFOs with certain characteristics actually discharge.

• Establish a presumption that CAFOs with certain production area characteristics actually discharge.

• Establish a presumption that CAFOs that apply manure to land as fertilizer actually discharge.

• Revise its interpretation of the agricultural stormwater exemption to clarify it does not include any CAFO-related discharges.

• Ensure permitting agencies co-permit integrators and other operators with producers.

• Revise the CAFO definition to broaden the definition of “production area” to eliminate or shrink the “Medium CAFO” category and revise the criteria for designating certain AFOs and CAFOs.

• Strengthen NPDES permits for CAFOs to adequately protect water quality.

• Require water monitoring in CAFO permits.

• Strengthen annual reporting requirements.

• Revise the Effluent Limitations and Guidelines.

A copy of the complaint, which includes EPA’s letter to petitioners can be found here.

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