Well, OK...
Posted on 12/16/2002 3:38:16 PM PST by Willie Green
For education and discussion only. Not for commercial use.
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - New U.S. pollution rules announced on Monday will do little to control "factory farm" manure runoff fouling the nation's waters, environmental groups said.
Farm groups say complying with the rules will cost livestock producers $1 billion a year, likely putting some out of business. The measures cover manure handling, require nutrient management plans and mandate more record-keeping.
About 15,500 cattle, hog and poultry feedlots will be required to obtain permits by 2006 under the Clean Water Act and write plans for safe disposal of manure, often used as a fertilizer. The farms must also file annual reports with the government.
"It will help reduce what has been a growing problem -- the fact that animal waste generated by concentrated animal feeding operations (CAFO) poses an increasing threat to the health of America's waters," EPA Administrator Christine Todd Whitman said in a statement.
The EPA's plan allows state governments to determine the types of permits to be issued to factory farms. The states will also have the flexibility to authorize alternative performance standards for large livestock farms, the EPA said.
Critics said the plan would do little to prevent spills and leaks from man-made lagoons commonly used to catch animal wastes at the mammoth CAFO operations. CAFOs have at least 1,000 head of feeder cattle, 2,500 hogs or 30,000 broilers.
The EPA was required to issue the regulations by a federal court order as part of a lawsuit filed by an environmental group a decade ago.
Under current rules that are 25 years old, only about 4,500 U.S. farms are covered by water pollution permits.
The EPA estimated that the amount of phosphorus released into the environment will be reduced by 56 million pounds, while nitrogen releases will be slashed by more than 100 million pounds.
'SWEET DEAL'
Green groups criticized the regulations as weak-kneed.
"It's a sweet deal for factory-farm polluters but it stinks for the rest of us," said Melanie Shepherdson of the Natural Resources Defense Council, which sued in 1989 for feedlot rules. She said livestock producers were being handed "a largely self-permitting system that insulates the industry" from public scrutiny or responsibility.
The farms' nutrient management plans do not have to be approved by state officials and the EPA did not set minimum standards for states to apply, she said.
Martha Noble of the Sustainable Agriculture Coalition said producers could keep the plan on the farm, making it hard to achieve public review.
Under the EPA rules, lagoons and manure handling systems must be engineered to withstand rainfall from the intensity of a storm that could be expected only once every 25 years.
"We're now in a situation where almost all these facilities are guaranteed to have big problems. We're not going to see an end to catastrophic spills under these federal regulations," Noble said.
Dan Whittle of Environmental Defense said EPA failed to encourage large operators to find a replacement for lagoons, which Whittle called rudimentary and outdated. "They (EPA) are taking baby steps toward new technologies."
FUEL SOURCE?
Some advocates for using renewable fuels regard manure as an untapped source of methane and other gases that could be used for heating or to generate electricity.
EPA nixed an idea supported by environmentalists -- requiring listing meatpackers as co-holders of pollution permits if they subcontracted animal feeding to a farmer. Without that, Whittle said, the so-called "integrators" take the profits and escape liability for livestock wastes.
During the past decade, factory farms have come to dominate U.S. production of beef, pork and poultry.
A National Academy of Sciences report issued last week called on the EPA to estimate air pollution and greenhouse gases from factory farms.
Eying the impending CAFO rule, Congress boosted funding for USDA land stewardship programs by 80 percent in May's six-year farm policy law. Funding for the Environmental Quality Incentives Program, covering up to 75 percent of the cost to control manure run-off, was set at $900 million a year. It had been $200 million a year.
All livestock operations are eligible for EQIP but a limit was set of $450,000 in assistance per farmer through 2007.
Bullshit.
You mean - crap ping...
Well, OK...
I was personally threatened with escalating, huge fines for non-compliance of the feedlot rules, based on paperwork from the early seventies. Papers of which I had no knowledge, and were apparently the product of the fevered imagination of a USDA agent eager to convince my father that the cure for losing money with a small herd was to get a much bigger herd !
The State presumed that there was ONE HUNDRED TIMES as many cattle on the property as in real life and began issuing threats WITHOUT first even being able to locate , much less count the animals. It took the agent assigned to "investigate" three DAYS to find the farm, something both the UPS and Post Office show little difficulty in doing !
The government attracts many more incompetents than any other field and then grants them power over us all.
That is why government MUST be kept restrained.
Until Babs, julia roberts, the Violence Policy Center, et al. are silenced...no, they do not.
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