Congressmen Move To Protect Big Ag from Water Protection Law
Photo from usdagov on Flickr.
Residents of rural communities near large-scale farms may soon find it harder to protect their drinking water from pollution from agriculture, thanks to a bill introduced recently by Representative Dan Newhouse, a Republican from Washington’s 4th district.
Newhouse’s bill, H.R. 848 introduced in February with 43 co-sponsors, aims to amend the Resource Conservation and Recovery Act (RCRA), a piece of environmental legislation that in recent years has provided citizens with a vital tool to fight groundwater pollution by industrial farms.
Newhouse introduced the bill two years after a U.S. District Court judge ruled in favor of the Center for Food Safety and the Community Association for the Restoration of the Environment (CARE) in a lawsuit against five dairies in Yakima, Washington, in Newhouse’s home district.
That ruling expanded RCRA to cover groundwater nitrate pollution from manure, which previously had not been covered by the law due to special exemptions for agricultural. High nitrate levels in drinking water have been linked to lower blood oxygen in infants and to thyroid cancer. The two environmental groups successfully argued that the dairies’ treatment of manure violated RCRA’s solid waste management provisions.
This use of RCRA was a crucial win for rural communities, because other federal legislation like the Clean Water Act doesn’t cover groundwater pollution. Jessica Culpepper, an attorney with Public Justice who worked on the Yakima case, says that using RCRA to cover agricultural waste is aligned with its intended purpose. “[Lawmakers] wanted it to be a stopgap” to protect water sources like private wells, she says, which aren’t covered by other federal regulations.
Newhouse’s bill would remove animal waste from the pollutants covered under federal solid waste management regulations. Critics of the legislation, like Robert Martin, program director at the Johns Hopkins Center for a Livable Future, worry that H.R. 848 would “totally undo [the] progress” that the Yakima lawsuit made in protecting rural residents from the polluting effects of factory farming. Culpepper calls the bill “terrifying.”
According to Martin, the 43 supporters of H.R. 848 together received $5.2 million in donations from agriculture groups in 2015 and 2016, about 10% of which comes from the dairy industry. Rep. Newhouse alone has received over $400,000 in agricultural donations since 2002. The campaign contributions from his 2014 Congressional race include many Big Ag players, such as Syngenta, the National Cattlemen’s Beef Association, General Mills, ConAgra, Darigold, Monsanto, among others.
The Yakima lawsuit was the first time RCRA was used as a basis for a citizen lawsuit against livestock producers. The judge held that excessive use of manure to fertilize crops amounts to a form of solid waste dumping. There are more than 260,000 dairy cattle living on over 400 dairies in Washington State, and they produce about 26 million pounds of manure each day.
Helen Reddout, the president of CARE, says that as a result of the lawsuit, the local dairies in Yakima have been forced to pay for reverse osmosis of the local drinking water and to line their manure lagoons to prevent seepage into groundwater. But she says H.R. 848, if passed, will “take one of our tools away” from communities fighting future pollution from industrial farms.
Culpepper says that without RCRA, communities will have few, if any, legal options to push bad agricultural actors to reform their practices. There do remain state-level protections for farm neighbors, who can seek monetary compensation if a home’s value declines because a large-scale farm moves in next door. But such lawsuits don’t force the farms to reform their practices.
The move on Capitol Hill comes after a series of Big Ag-supported bills at the state level to shield agricultural producers from lawsuits. One such “right to farm” bill, for instance, HB 467 in North Carolina, which has passed both the House and Senate, would prevent plaintiffs in suits against farms from receiving monetary compensation for health effects and lost income. Similar right to farm legislation has been proposed in Minnesota, Nebraska, Indiana, and Oklahoma, and has passed in Missouri and North Dakota.
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