EPA drops plan to seek information from livestock farms

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has dropped a proposed rule that would have required livestock farms defined as "concentrated animal feeding operations" to report certain information about their operations, including their location, size and manure management practices.

The agency said it will instead work with federal, state and local governments and other existing sources to collect the needed information, which will be used to regulate concentrated animal feeding operations, or CAFOs, under the Clean Water Act.

Livestock farmers and agricultural groups opposed the proposed rule, released last fall, saying it was too burdensome and that much of the information EPA seeks is already available through existing programs at the state and local levels.

They also expressed biosecurity and privacy concerns about an EPA proposal to store the information and make it available online to the public.

Ria de Grassi, director of livestock and animal health for the California Farm Bureau Federation, said the organization is "relieved" the EPA has decided to withdraw its proposal.

"The duplicative reporting requirements on farmers would have been stifling," she said. "We stated in our comments to EPA that improving, protecting and maintaining water quality can be achieved by relying on existing information now publicly and easily available.

"That information should not be compiled into some kind of publicly available central registry, however, that could abet activist crimes against farms," de Grassi added. "We still encourage EPA to use partnerships to target its outreach and compliance assistance efforts."

EPA agreed to propose the CAFO reporting rule as part of a settlement agreement with environmental groups, which said the agency doesn't have enough information to meet its water quality protection responsibilities under the Clean Water Act.

The proposed rule applied to livestock farms that house a certain number of animals or may discharge wastewater into waters of the United States. Under the rule, those farms would have been required to report information such as the street address or latitude and longitude of their production area, acres available for land application of manure, type and number of animals, and other details about nutrient management practices.

California livestock farms such as dairies already provide this information to a number of regulatory agencies, such as regional water quality control boards, air quality districts, county land use offices and the California Department of Food and Agriculture, all of which collect the information for permitting purposes.

"To require farmers to report to yet another agency is a redundant activity that takes away time the farmer could better spend ensuring the skilled management of the farm overall," de Grassi said.

In addition to relying on publicly available information about confined animal feeding operations, EPA said it has established a collaborative effort with the Association of Clean Water Administrators, an independent, nonprofit corporation of state and interstate water program managers, to assist the agency in obtaining pertinent information about CAFOs on a state-by-state basis.

EPA said after seeking the information from existing sources, it will then re-evaluate whether a rule is still needed and determine if it is necessary to fill in information gaps by doing site visits or requesting individual information from CAFOs. The withdrawal of the EPA proposal does not change which operations need permits under National Pollutant Discharge Elimination System regulations.

(Ching Lee is an assistant editor of Ag Alert. She may be contacted at clee@cfbf.com.)