Some 10 percent of greenhouse gases generated in America come from agriculture; about 65 percent of that 10 percent, primarily in the form of methane and nitrous oxide, come from large animal farms.
Yet in the last days of the Bush administration, the Environmental Protection Agency proposed further lightening the already skimpy regulation of those emissions—for example, by not requiring large animal farms to report excessive emissions of air pollutants like ammonia and hydrogen sulfide (though it did end the exemption of livestock operations from the Clean Water Act). In fact, it hardly even kept track of the number and location of animal agribiz operations, though some of them put out more animal waste than the city of Philadelphia.
But what with a new White House that isn't the friend to agribiz that earlier occupants were (Obama's proposed budget would take away subsidies for farms bringing in more than half a million dollars a year), it's a new day at the EPA, which is cracking down on the huge meat-raising operations that have been polluting not only air but water, notably the Chesapeake Bay.
As First Lady Michelle Obama and her crew of schoolchildren were digging dirt for an organic vegetable garden on the White House lawn, the EPA was beginning to enforce an old but neglected rule requiring big chicken farms to get manure disposal permits. The enforcement begins in Maryland, where grunge from so-called CAFOs (Confined Animal Feeding Operations) has done its part to make a sewer of the Chesapeake.
EPA will also be terminating agreements it's had with large dairy and beef farms in certain states to halt regulation of their waste. And at last, people and waterways that have been suffering for years from the notorious pollution at the Smithfield hog farming operations may get some relief; in North Carolina's Neuse River, more than 4 million fish died in five days from pollution from a Smithfield pork farm.
