Cleveland Plain Dealer
Animal agriculture is booming across the Midwest these days, but not on the family farms that resonate in the American psyche. Instead, it is happening at concentrated animal feeding operations (CAFOs), which confine thousands of animals and produce far more waste than the land can handle. They are poorly regulated and poorly understood by both the public and policymakers. Problems involving excess manure runoff into our waterways are rampant throughout the Midwest.
Manure is laden with nutrients like nitrogen and phosphorus. When excessively applied to nearby crop land as fertilizer, nitrogen can seep into groundwater and taint wells with nitrate, which is linked to cancer and birth defects. Excess phosphorus runs off of crop fields into waterways, where it fuels algae growth if conditions are right for it. Algae blooms coat rivers and lakes in toxic green scum, threatening drinking water, impairing recreation, and damaging local economies. Algae also deplete oxygen, choking out aquatic life, and causing dead zones. In 2014, Lake Erie was overwhelmed with such algae, causing Toledo to shut down its water supply for three days.
To shine a light on the hidden world of large-scale agricultural pollution, ELPC has partnered with different groups to gather real-time data on the dramatic growth of CAFOs in the Midwest. In one project, we developed a method of monitoring industrial livestock production using publicly available satellite imagery. Researchers measured the visible infrastructure and used industry guidelines to estimate animal counts, manure volume, and nutrient output over time. The results reveal rapid, massive growth in animal feeding operations in the Maumee River Valley, and downstream communities have already seen the impact of their resultant nutrient pollution over the past few decades. The data from this study represented at the time the most complete accounting of confined livestock within the Maumee River basin.
ELPC is working with others to track CAFOs engaging in winter manure spreading on frozen fields in Wisconsin, and fighting in the courts to reduce pollution in Lake Erie. We fought a legal battle all the way to the Michigan Supreme Court against industrial farming interests seeking to loosen state regulations over agricultural runoff from their operations. And ELPC is collaborating with other groups in Iowa to try to limit the number of CAFOs expanding in a well-documented flood plain where the potential for tremendous manure pollution is a disaster waiting to happen.
The southernmost Great Lake is also the shallowest, making it most vulnerable to pollution. Over the past decade, Lake Erie has become inundated with annual algal blooms, fueled primarily by nutrient pollution flowing into the lake’s western basin from CAFOs located in the Maumee River Watershed. In the summer of 2017, ELPC sued the U.S. EPA for failing to enforce the Clean Water Act and protect Lake Erie communities. A federal judge agreed, and the Ohio EPA declared western Lake Erie officially “impaired” in 2018. In February 2019, ELPC filed a new related lawsuit against the Trump Administration EPA, challenging its approval of an Ohio EPA decision in June 2018 to make western Lake Erie a “low” priority for setting a pollution budget.
More lawsuits followed. In 2019, ELPC sued U.S. EPA to compel Ohio EPA to fulfill its obligation under the Clean Water Act to craft a pollution “diet” that sets limits on the amount of nutrients that can be dumped into the waterways that feed into impaired Lake Erie. ELPC prevailed in that lawsuit but found the pollution diet, or Total Maximum Daily Load (TMDL), Ohio EPA developed was inadequate to solve the ongoing toxic algae problem. In 2024, ELPC returned to federal court once again. We’ll continue our fight until a stronger, more meaningful cleanup plan is in place.
Permits are the key mechanism for controlling CAFO pollution, but they tend to be far too weak and cover too few operations. ELPC is working around the Midwest and at a national level to push for stricter CAFO permits and more effective CAFO regulation.
Midwesterners know that clean water is a basic human need, and polls show widespread support for water regulation. Unfortunately, the EPA and some state regulatory agencies in the Midwest are abdicating their responsibility, by eroding bedrock environmental regulations, cutting resources, and declining enforcement. ELPC is fighting in the courts to protect sensible regulations under the Clean Water Act, while serving as a watchdog for the Midwest to hold EPA and polluters accountable.
ELPC is using a range of tools and tactics, including new technology, to educate policymakers about CAFO pollution. We released a comprehensive report documenting the CAFO pollution problem in Michigan and recommending a host of reforms to address it. ELPC also partnered with Environmental Working Group to use satellite images to identify livestock confinement facilities that are just below CAFO permitting thresholds (700 dairy cows/2,500 hogs) in the Western Lake Erie watershed. Our analysis showed an explosion in the number of these “one under” facilities, which operate without any regulatory oversight. ELPC also retained renowned pollster Ann Selzer to conduct polls testing messages for