EPA Abandons 20-Year Push to Monitor Factory Farm Air Pollution

The Environmental Protection Agency is done trying to figure out how to measure the smog rolling off factory farms. Late last week the agency announced it's ending a two-decade-plus push to develop monitoring methods for livestock operations, effectively shutting down its halting attempts to police those facilities under the Clean Air Act.

The timing raised eyebrows: the announcement landed just days before the midterm elections, and the EPA framed it as a long-awaited break for farmers — a constituency that has historically lined up behind Trump and the Republican Party.

The problem the agency is walking away from is anything but small. When tens of thousands of animals are crammed into a single operation, waste becomes airborne — blown out of ventilation fans or rising off enormous lagoons of liquid effluent. Those facilities pump out fine particulate matter, ammonia, nitrogen oxides, sulfur dioxide and volatile organic compounds, according to Ars Technica.

That cocktail is dangerous. Research has shown emissions from these operations are a major driver of air pollution, linked to nearly 12,700 deaths in the United States every year. For more than 20 years, the EPA worked on and off to find a way to actually measure what's coming out of the barns and lagoons — an effort that is now over.

What happens next is the open question. With the monitoring work scrapped, the Clean Air Act regulations that might have followed it are off the table for now, leaving nearby communities with the same air and no new federal tool to measure it.