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factory farms
Measure J in California's Sonoma County Paves the Way for Environmental Health
Examining the hidden impacts of factory farming and how a ballot measure in the heart of wine country could put us on a path to a more sustainable and healthier future.
Jul 13, 2024
In a June article in Politico, the author of “Animal rights comes to ‘America’s Provence’ and farmers are worried” dives into the ongoing debate over Measure J on Sonoma County’s November ballot, which seeks to bar the operation and maintenance of concentrated (or confined) animal feeding operations. The piece overlooks the significant damages that CAFOs have historically inflicted upon surrounding communities and animals.
The piece cites CAFO operators’ commitment to sustainable practices and “compliance monitoring,” such as recycling manure by applying it to agricultural land as a natural fertilizer. Such land applications, however, frequently lead to groundwater contamination through runoff. Sonoma County has the most wells per capita of any California county, with around 23,000 properties relying on groundwater from a private well for their water supply. Sonoma County residents deserve access to clean water, uncontaminated by manure.
These facilities also impact air quality and human health. A 2019 University of Wisconsin-Madison study corroborated previous findings stating that the closer children lived to a CAFO, the more likely they were to develop asthma. According to the California Air Resources Board, one in six children living in California’s Central Valley suffer from asthma.
Measure J offers a path to a more sustainable future for Sonoma County. Voting for Measure J this November would allow the county to lead by example—pushing for environmental and public health protections and making a collective effort to protect our environment and public health.
Asthmatic symptoms caused by hazardous contaminants are not the only consequence of CAFO air pollution. CAFOs emit egregious amounts of greenhouse gases that heavily contribute to climate change. Methane and nitrous oxide emissions are 23 and 300 times more potent than carbon dioxide as greenhouse gases, respectively. Animal agriculture is the leading source of U.S. methane emissions, while agricultural soil management is responsible for 75% of U.S. nitrous oxide emissions, primarily because of the use of manure from animal agribusiness.
CAFOs are also associated with the increased spread of diseases—including avian flu—among animals and humans. In the original article, farmer Mike Weber admitted that he had to kill all 550,000 chickens in December due to an outbreak. Several states have recently suffered from avian flu outbreaks, 48 with affected poultry and 12 with affected cattle. The extremely high-density environment of a CAFO facilitates a quicker transfer of the virus, exacerbated by wastewater that is often improperly treated and discharged. These cruel conditions are a perfect storm for a public health disaster, while also causing high levels of stress, discomfort, and illness among the animals housed there.
Although the piece argues that Measure J would impede family farm livelihood, it is actually the opposite. As a matter of fact, small family farmers are often the strongest adversaries of large, industrial-scale CAFOs. For example, family farmers in Iowa are calling for reduced federal subsidies for large CAFOs in favor of increased funding for conservation programs targeted at smaller farms. These are not activists wanting to “eradicate animal farming entirely.” The opposition to CAFOs is a community-led effort to ensure all Californians get a cleaner and healthier food system and environment.
Measure J seeks to prohibit the establishment, operation, expansion, or maintenance of CAFOs in the unincorporated areas of Sonoma County. This prohibition aims to protect the environment, safeguard public health, and address environmental justice concerns. It even provides existing CAFOs with a phase-out period of three years to modify or cease operations.
The measure does not simply cast CAFO owners aside. It includes provisions to ensure that farm workers receive the assistance and training they may need to transition to government-sanctioned agricultural operations. The measure does not require these animal feeding operations to close outright but rather gives them a three-year period to modify their operations so that they no longer qualify as CAFOs. That time period presents the perfect opportunity for owners to lean into sustainable agricultural practices, for which Sonoma County has long been known. Sustainable approaches, such as implementing pasture-based feeding and taking a circular, whole-systems farming approach, are increasingly feasible, economically viable, and almost always more humane.
Measure J offers a path to a more sustainable future for Sonoma County. Voting for Measure J this November would allow the county to lead by example—pushing for environmental and public health protections and making a collective effort to protect our environment and public health. It's time to prioritize human and environmental health over industrial farming practices that harm our communities, animals, and planet.
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GOP Farm Bill Blueprint 'Puts Big Ag's Profits Over Everyone Else'
"America's farmers and consumers need forward-looking policies that build a sustainable, resilient, and fair food system," said one campaigner.
May 01, 2024
As Democratic and Republican leaders on Wednesday unveiled competing visions for the next Farm Bill, green groups sounded the alarm about the GOP proposal that "slashes nutrition programs and climate-focused conservation funding in order to boost commodity crop production."
U.S. House Committee on Agriculture Chair Glenn "GT" Thompson (R-Pa.) put out a "title-by-title overview" of priorities and announced plans for a legislative markup on May 23 while Senate Agriculture, Nutrition, and Forestry Committee Chair Debbie Stabenow (D-Mich.) released the Rural Prosperity and Food Security Act, which includes over 100 bipartisan bills.
"The contrast between the House and Senate farm bill proposals could not be clearer," asserted Environmental Working Group senior vice president for government affairs Scott Faber. "The Senate framework would ensure that farmers are rewarded when they take steps to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, and the House framework would not."
"At a time when farmer demand for climate-smart funding is growing, Congress should ensure that support for farmers offering to reduce nitrous oxide emissions from fertilizer, and methane emissions from animals and their waste, is the Department of Agriculture's top priority," Faber said. "Unless farmers are provided the tools to reduce nitrous oxide and methane emissions from agriculture, farming will soon be the nation's largest source of greenhouse gas emissions."
Friends of the Earth senior program manager Chloe Waterman declared that "House Republicans have proposed a dead-on-arrival Farm Bill framework that puts Big Ag's profits over everyone else: communities, family farmers, consumers, states and local rule, farmed animals, and the planet."
"Senate Democrats are off to a much better start than the House, but they have also fallen short by failing to shift subsidies and other support away from factory farming and pesticide-intensive commodities toward diversified, regenerative, and climate-friendly farming systems," she added. "We are particularly concerned that millions of dollars intended for climate mitigation will continue to be funneled to factory farms, including to support greenwashed factory farm gas."
Both Waterman's organization and Food and Water Watch spotlighted the Ending Agricultural Trade Suppression (EATS) Act, which aims to prevent state and local policies designed to protect animal welfare, farm workers, and food safety—like California's Proposition 12, which the U.S. Supreme Court upheld last year. The Republican bill is opposed by more than 200 members of Congress and over 150 advocacy groups.
"Despicable ploys to undermine critical consumer and animal welfare protections must be dead on arrival," Food & Water Watch senior food policy analyst Rebecca Wolf said in a Wednesday statement blasting the House GOP's priorities.
"America's farmers and consumers need forward-looking policies that build a sustainable, resilient, and fair food system," she stressed. "Instead, House leadership seems poised to take us backwards, trading state-level gains for a few more bucks in the pockets of corporate donors. Congress must move beyond partisan bickering, and get to work on a Farm Bill that cuts handouts to Big Ag and factory farms."
As green groups slammed the GOP's agricultural proposals for the Farm Bill, the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities (CBPP) called out the Republican scheme to attack food stamps.
Stabenow's bill "would protect and strengthen the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), our nation's most important and effective anti-hunger program," noted Ty Jones Cox, CBPP's vice president for food assistance.
Meanwhile, Thompson's plan "would put a healthy diet out of reach in the future for millions of families with low incomes by cutting future benefits for all SNAP participants and eroding the adequacy of SNAP benefits over time," she warned.
As Jones Cox detailed:
Thompson's proposal would prevent SNAP benefits from keeping pace with the cost of a healthy, realistic diet over time, which the Congressional Budget Office estimates would result in a roughly $30 billion cut to SNAP over the next decade. The proposal would do this by freezing the cost of the U.S. Department of Agriculture's Thrifty Food Plan (the basis for SNAP benefit levels) outside of inflation adjustments, even if nutrition guidelines or other factors change the cost of an adequate diet. The Thompson proposal's modest benefit improvements do not outweigh the harm to the tens of millions of SNAP participants—including children, older adults, and people with disabilities—who would receive less food assistance in the future because of this policy.
"Stabenow's proposal rejects the false premise that improvements in SNAP must come at the expense of food assistance for low-income families who count on SNAP to put food on the table," she concluded. "The Senate framework, which rejects harmful benefit cuts, should be the basis for farm bill negotiations moving forward."
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Manure Digesters: Another False Solution That Makes Climate Injustice Worse
There are better responses to the climate crisis that also treat rural people and our land, air, and water with respect.
Apr 21, 2024
There has been much media hype about manure digesters and how they will “solve” climate change by capturing and burning methane from confined animal feeding operations or CAFOs—aka factory farms. Billions in taxpayer handouts and other incentives through pollution offset trading markets are encouraging factory farms to expand and profit from their waste stream. Some economists now speculate that factory farms are earning more from making methane than milk!
A recent Friends of the Earth and Socially Responsible Agriculture Project report
goes even further, suggesting that if the U.S. really wanted to reduce it’s agricultural contribution towards greenhouse gases, it would make more sense for regulators to phase out or split up CAFOs and shift taxpayer support towards smaller grass-based livestock operations instead.
Sadly, the misguided notion of manure digesters as a “solution” to the climate crisis is nothing new. Back in 2009 at the United Nations Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen, I almost fell off my chair when then-U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) Secretary Tom Vilsack announced that manure digesters on factory farms were going to be a key part of former President Barack Obama’s climate change agenda. He later admitted that less than 10% of dairy farms (ie CAFOs) would be large enough to qualify for these USDA digester grants—another example of how federal policies support industrial agribusiness to the detriment of smaller farmers.
Intentional factory farm production and subsequent “climate smart” combustion of methane is not only oxymoronic, but will undermine the future prospect of life here on Earth.
This manure digester building binge has ramped up even more under President Joe Biden—with Vilsack once again back at the helm of the USDA. The latest Instititue for Agriculture and Trade Policy report critiquing the Environmental Quality Incentive Program (EQIP) reveals just how much of this popular USDA effort has been hijacked by a small elite number of CAFOs, to the detriment of the majority of farmers who have their EQIP applications declined. Encouraging livestock grazing is NOT front and center among “climate smart” practices promoted under EQIP and the Natural Resources Conservation Service—that star role is held by waste lagoons and manure digesters.
A typical CAFO digester for 2000 dairy cows costs over $2 million, with EQIP covering up to $400,000. But there are many other funds available, such as through the Rural Energy for America Program (REAP), which bankrolled $78 million for digesters in the last decade. The recent Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) added another $250 million to EQIP, along with another $2 billion for REAP, including a brand new 30% tax credit for all new digesters built.
The current trough of taxpayer funding for the manure methane industrial complex is long and deep, but there is even more potential revenue to be milked. In Wisconsin alone there are now 15 manure digesters getting money for their methane offsetting of 1.3 million carbon credits available through the California Cap and Trade System. How does this work? Build a methane digester in Wisconsin, claim that by burning off this really bad methane it is equal to reducing the impact of so many tons of carbon dioxide emitted in California, and then get a bonus check for that hard offset work! The value of one carbon credit on the California market as of April 2023 was $28.66.
The problem with this taxpayer mandated and subsidized “cap and trade” system is that it does not necessarily reduce overall greenhouse gas emissions—it just moves pollution around (and the atmosphere doesn’t care about your zipcode). Worse yet, if your offset claims prove to be bogus and corrupt, the climate crisis ends up much worse. This was exactly the case when Midwest activists alerted California officials that some of the Wisconsin CAFOs claiming methane offset credits were really engaged in wire fraud, since their digesters were either broken or not effectively functioning to capture methane as claimed. More details can be found in the SRAP expose of this 21st century Ponzi style scheme. Along with many allies, Family Farm Defenders has been diligently opposing such corporatized pollution trading mechanisms through the Alliance Against Farm Bill Offsets, whether they involve offsets for carbon sequestration pipelines, manure digesters, or “no-till” GMO monocultures.
My gut reaction 15 years ago to Vilsack’s manure digester panacea to global climate change remains true today—why pay to fix a problem that doesn’t even need to exist? Countless studies have shown that the most cost effective, eco-friendly, and often quite profitable form of animal husbandry—including dairying—is managed rotational grazing. If animals are just allowed to enjoy pasture outside (as they prefer and are meant to do by mother nature) and then also allowed to deposit their manure in a healthy perennial ecosystem, one does not end up with a methane crisis. It is only when one decides to confine thousands of animals in a warehouse, offer them nothing but TMR to consume (with dubious components like feather meal and ethanol leftovers), liquefy millions of gallons of their manure, and then store it in massive anaerobic lagoons, that one creates a pollutant 80+ times worse than carbon dioxide.
Sure, one can always capture and burn the methane that doesn’t leak from a CAFO digester to make electricity or run a vehicle (which means more greenhouse gas pollution), but you still have the leftover sludge (aka digestate) to deal with. This is loaded with nitrates, phosphorous, and—depending upon what other waste gets dumped into the digester—PFAS, pharmaceuticals, agrochemicals, heavy metals—which will then seep into the ground and became part of runoff, contributing to tainted wells, beach closures, toxic fish, the list goes on and on. Besides methane, there are other toxic CAFO gases—such as hydrogen sulfide, ammonia, and nitrous oxide—that cause chronic headaches for neighboring residents and hurt anyone else downwind.
And let’s not forget the ever present danger of methane explosions and lagoon ruptures. When a massive lagoon leaked on a hog factory farm in Wayne County, North Carolina, in May 2022, spilling into the nearby Nahunta Swamp, it was revealed that hundreds of rotting pigs, along with deli meat and discarded hotdogs, were part of the digester feedstock to make the methane being sold to Duke Energy. Closer to home, just ask anyone who lives near Waunakee, Wisconsin, what it was like to have a poorly designed and managed digester both explode and also leak 400,000+ gallons of fresh manure into Lake Mendota about a decade ago. This single disaster set back Yahara Watershed cleanup efforts for years. It would have been so much cheaper, simpler, and less disastrous for Wisconsin state and Dane County taxpayers to have promoted composting instead (which some better CAFOs actually do, without lagoons).
In November 2022 Kari Lydersen wrote a disturbing investigation, chronicling the many risks to farm workers from factory farms and their manure digesters. She tells one story of Bob Baenziger, Jr., retired Army veteran and former offshore oil rig diver, who died in 2021 as a hired contractor trying to fix a broken cable in an Iowa manure digester. Drowning in such a squalid pool is something straight out of Dante’s Inferno. The same year Samuel Antonio Padilla Castro, a Honduran immigrant, was working a 12-hour shift at the Fair Oaks Farm in Indiana when his clothing was caught in manure handling equipment, strangling him to death. His death left behind a widow, three children, and a token $10,500 Occupational Safety and Health Administration fine. Austin Frerick’s profile of the McCloskey family, which owns Fair Oaks Farm, in his new book, Barons, reveals more of the underbelly of this “Dairy Disneyland,” including their role as digester cheerleaders. Another Fair Oaks tourist and digester advocate he mentions is Tom Vilsack.
Our current “get big or get out” farm policy does not have much time or interest in agroecological approaches for healthier food that also ensure food sovereignty. Instead, corporate agribusiness is allowed to manipulate commodity markets—driving out what little competition exists from smaller farmers and local processors. The political allies of the food giants then ensure that taxpayers help underwrite the largest industrialized operations left standing, since they are the easiest to vertically integrate into the dominant oligopoly structure. Is it any surprise to see agribusiness lobbyists and their academic apologists now touting manure digesters as “climate smart” just in time for Earth Day and pushing for pollution trading offset schemes within the 2024 Farm Bill?
Thankfully, there are better responses to the climate crisis that also treat rural people and our land, air, and water with respect. Existing federal initiatives such as the Conservation Reserve Program could be expanded to better direct payments to farmers who are already doing so much responsible land and climate stewardship—without carbon offset peddlers skimming 25% off the top. The EQIP and REAP programs need to be overhauled to severely limit or even eliminate CAFO lagoon and digester grants and earmark more towards smaller grass-based diversified operations instead. This is the gist behind the EQIP Reform Act, introduced by Sen. Cory Booker (D-N.J.) and Rep. Mike Lee (R-Utah) last year as part of the Farm Bill debate.
More generally, factory farms must be treated as a pollution point source, subject to all the monitoring, regulation, and liability required for any other industrial operation. Why should CAFOs evade the common sense oversight that other businesses respect? Defending local control also remains critical. Last year grassroots activists in St. Croix County were able to push back and shut down a massive digester proposal near New Richmond, Wisconsin, being aggressively promoted by Nature Energy, a Shell Oil subsidiary. Thousands of folks recently responded to a statewide action alert successfully demanding that Wisconsin Gov. Tony Evers veto CAFO industry-crafted preemption legislation that would have hamstrung the right to pass ordinances that would restrict their manure digesters and other rural mal-development projects. Democratic direct action can get the goods!
NASA space probes have revealed that there is a massive ocean of liquid methane on Titan, one of the moons circling Saturn. There is also not any life that we know of on Titan… Intentional factory farm production and subsequent “climate smart” combustion of methane is not only oxymoronic, but will undermine the future prospect of life here on Earth. Farmers can feed the world and the cool the planet—without the false promise of manure digesters.
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