EPA Lets CAFOs Police Themselves

Concentrated Animal Feeding Operation (CAFO) is the agricultural business’ attempt at a euphemism for mass-produce-and-slaughter-facility, or, factory farm.

As you may know, when you cram hundreds or thousands of animals into a factory where they don’t have room to roam–or even turn around for some animals–and where they never see the light of day and the air they breathe is full of the gases they emit, not only will you get putrid, diseased meat as your end product (to say nothing of the karma attached), but you get tons of manure that has to go somewhere.

Guess where?

Into the surrounding air and water. In fact, factory farms produce 500 million tons of poop  each year. To put it in perspective, that’s three times more waste than the people in this country produce. The water nearby factory farms releases ammonia, hydrogen sulfide, and methane, and the water contains whatever the poop contains, such as pathogens, pesticides, antibiotics, and hormones, and that’s according to the EPA! As a direct result, people get sick and the natural environment suffers. In fact, the rivers and groundwater of dozens of states is already contaminated. (If you’ve got the stomach for the stats, see the NRDC or the Sierra Club.)

The EPAs solution is to propose a rule requiring permits for the discharge of pollutants. The only problem is that the factory farms themselves get to decide what constitutes a polluting discharge.

Therefore, they could decide that the contaminants they produce and unleash onto the Earth and everyone on it, aren’t really contaminants at all, thus they’d never need a permit.

It was always clear that the profits of factory farms are more important than the humane treatment of animals. But now it’s clear that profits also trump the air we breathe and the water we drink.