Equity In Every Drop: Series Two

Series two includes six episodes focused on the issues and advocacy priorities of our Pure Farms, Pure Waters campaign.

In this episode of Equity In Every Drop, host Thomas Hynes speaks with Kelly Hunter Foster, Senior Attorney at Waterkeeper Alliance and a member of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s Animal Agriculture and Water Quality subcommittee. Kelly offers an in-depth look at the regulatory challenges surrounding concentrated animal feeding operations (CAFOs), exposing industry loopholes and the inadequacies of current federal and state permits. She explains how underregulation and lack of enforcement enable widespread water pollution and pose serious public health risks, particularly for vulnerable communities living near these facilities.

Sandy Bihn, Lake Erie Waterkeeper from Toledo, Ohio, provides an on-the-ground perspective by sharing the devastating local impacts of CAFOs on Lake Erie. She details the rise of harmful algal blooms and the political and economic obstacles faced by affected communities.

Both guests emphasize the urgent need for stronger regulatory measures and call on large agribusinesses to take responsibility for their environmental impact. This episode sheds light on the human and ecological costs of industrial agriculture’s water pollution while underscoring the critical need for public awareness and action.

Stay tuned! New monthly episodes will be posted here and anywhere you get your podcasts. Click “Subscribe” in the episode widget above to access links to popular podcast apps.

Thank you for listening, sharing, and supporting our mission to ensure everyone’s right to clean water. Together, we demand equity in every drop.

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Waterkeeper S2, Ep3 – The Underregulated Underbelly of Factory Farms

Thomas Hynes: [00:00:00] Welcome back to Equity In Every Drop. We will be joined later in this episode by Sandy Bihn of Lake Erie Waterkeeper in Ohio. Our first guest today is Kelly Hunter Foster, senior attorney at Waterkeeper Alliance. Kelly is a nationally recognized environmental attorney with extensive expertise in a wide range of legal, regulatory policy, and technical issues.

Earlier this year, Kelly was asked to participate in EPA’s newly formed animal agriculture and water quality federal advisory committee subcommittee. Kelly, thank you so much for being here today. It’s good to see you. 

Kelly Hunter Foster: Happy to be here. 

Thomas Hynes: Great! So I have the pleasure of talking to you a lot about a variety of issues.

So this is a treat for our listeners. It’s something that I’ve been able to experience a number of times. Today we’re obviously talking about animal agriculture. We’re calling it factory farms for our listeners who may not know AFOs and CAFOs as well as we throw those terms around.

But I was hoping to start with that [so] you could explain the [00:01:00] regulatory landscape that governs AFOs, CAFOs, slaughterhouses, or “factory farms” for lack of a better term and the impacts that has on water pollution on local and national levels. 

Kelly Hunter Foster: That’s a big question. Well, let’s start with animal feeding operations or AFOs. And concentrated animal feeding operations or CAFOs. 

Thomas Hynes: Sounds good. 

Kelly Hunter Foster: There’s a mix of regulatory approach or, no regulatory approach when we’re talking about animal feeding operations. And animal feeding operations are typically quite large operations that confine animals in barns or other structures. And end up as a result of the way that they’re producing animals or raising animals and confining animals, they end up producing a huge amount of waste that they have to deal with.

 [00:02:00] And that regulatory system that we’re talking about today, I think is focused on the water regulatory aspects that apply to CAFOs and AFOs. 

So, under the Federal Clean Water Act, there’s a system for permitting facilities that are point sources, and CAFOs are defined as a point source. That means a source of pollution discharges that is readily identifiable. And so, the EPA has adopted regulations that govern the permitting of discharges from CAFOs. 

And so when EPA set about developing these regulations, they had to define what a CAFO is. And they did that by specifying different animal numbers that are confined at the operations to determine whether or not the facility is large enough [00:03:00] to come under the federal permitting regulations. The largest of the facilities are called large CAFOs and then there’s another subset down called medium CAFOs.

And then below that, [small] CAFOs. That seems fairly obvious. Rarely mom and pop, small would be, appear to be quite large as well. 

Thomas Hynes: Can I ask you, what are the ranges for what makes a large, like, how many animals we’re talking about, roughly?

Kelly Hunter Foster: The EPA regulations set different animal numbers for different types of CAFOs. So for example, to be a large CAFOs, a facility would have 700 or more mature dairy cows. By comparison you could have a facility with 2500 swine weighing 55 pounds or more or 10,000 swine weighing less than 55 pounds.

Then when you take a look at poultry, any [00:04:00] facility that has 125,000 or more chickens other than laying hens, which typically use a wet waste system, then you’re going to end up being a large CAFO. So below that, you get to the medium CAFO level. And for dairy, that would be 200 to 699 mature dairy cows. Swine, greater than 55 pounds would be 750 to 2,499. See, it’s very, very detailed. Then for poultry to be a medium CAFO, you would be 37,500 to 124,999. So that just gives you a sense there’s different numbers for different types of animals.

Thomas Hynes: And also just for me and maybe for some of our listeners, I mean, these are huge numbers.

And I think one of the things we’re trying to get across in this series and in a lot of the Pure Farms, Pure Waters work that we’re doing [00:05:00] here is they’re not mom and pop CAFOs, they’re not family farms. These are huge facilities doing massive numbers. Even the small operations sound staggeringly huge to me.

You had more to say on the regulatory landscape. 

Kelly Hunter Foster: Of course, so the key here is that those numbers that I recited there to you are one time capacity numbers.

So that doesn’t mean they have that many animals all year. Taking poultry, for example, they would have that number for a large CAFO, 125,000 or more five or six times a year. So it’s a massive number of animals. 

So in addition to needing to have those numbers in order to come under the federal regulations [00:06:00] you also need to have a discharge, a pollution discharge. And, so when we’re thinking about what would make a small CAFO, you would be under those numbers for a medium CAFO, and you would need to have a discharge, and you would need to be designated as a CAFO by the EPA or the state regulatory agency.

One of the real challenges that regulators have faced in dealing with CAFO pollution is that a large number of them claim they don’t discharge. Yet, the science tells us that they do in fact, discharge. Large numbers of them are discharging and creating nationwide water quality problems.

And so, part of the way that’s happening is the opposite of a CAFO or the animal feeding operation that isn’t meeting these federal requirements for being a CAFO. States usually have delegation from the EPA to implement the Clean Water Act permitting [00:07:00] program and then they have typically a corollary state law permit for animal feeding operations.

And a lot of these facilities are using that state law program for animal feeding operations as a shield against getting the federal CAFO permit. So they’re saying, we have this state law permit that prohibits us from discharging, thus we’re not discharging. 

But the standards in the state permits and the federal permits, generally speaking, are not controlling the pollution and preventing the discharges.

Thomas Hynes: So these huge facilities say they’re not discharging with those astronomical numbers that you just mentioned. I don’t really can’t get my head around that, but then it sounds like a lot of these facilities are they, is it fair to say that some of these state permits are more lenient than the Clean Water Act permits?

Kelly Hunter Foster: It’s hard to generalize. [00:08:00] It depends on the state. We can say that as a general matter, the permits state and federal are not adequate to control the pollution. So, when we take a look at, it’s hard to make a lot of statements about how effective the federal regulatory system would be because part of the problem is the facilities aren’t getting the permits, right? There’s about 70 percent of all of the large CAFOs in the United States are operating without Clean Water Act permits. 

Thomas Hynes: Really? 70 percent of the larger, of the large facilities? 

Kelly Hunter Foster: Yeah, and EPA doesn’t know how many medium facilities are operating without the permit. I would venture to say it’s most of them.

Thomas Hynes: I’m not laughing because that’s ridiculous. So this kind of answers my next question. I’ll ask it anyway, which was how effective are current regulations in mitigating water pollution from these facilities? It sounds like, I mean, well, I’ll let you answer.

I mean, I’m going to guess what you’re going to say, but how effective are these current regulations [00:09:00] then? 

Kelly Hunter Foster: We have what EPA has referred to as a national crisis with regard to nutrient pollution. Nutrient sounds good, but too much nutrients is a bad thing when it comes to water quality. And we know that we are getting significant contributions of uncontrolled nutrients from animal feeding operations and concentrated animal feeding operations all across the country. 

Nutrients are a really bad thing because they result in massive algal blooms that sometimes and increasingly produce toxins. They’re dangerous to people and wildlife and livestock. They can prevent water from being available to be used as a safe source of drinking water. Massive nutrient pollution causes fish kills and is devastating to commercial fisheries. It impacts recreation and the aesthetics of a water body. 

 

It is a massive [00:10:00] problem that we are not controlling through our existing regulatory systems. And agriculture has long been reported to be the leading source of nutrient pollution. But in addition to nutrients, there’s a whole lot of other types of pollutants that are in animal waste.

We, until a recent, recent to me, it took place a while ago, a change to our federal water quality standards. We also had pathogens impairing waterways all across the country. That pathogen pollution didn’t disappear. We just changed the criteria for judging how bad it is and made it seem less bad.

But we have massive problems with pathogen pollution. Obviously it’s untreated animal waste that is being handled by storage, typically in unlined lagoons, that leach into shallow groundwater or deep [00:11:00] groundwater. 

Thomas Hynes: Those are like the cesspools that sit in, I mean, we were talking in a previous episode about those and those are, those sit next to like the pig farms or the pig CAFOs a lot of times.

And there are these like, I mean, this is not a visual format, but there are like these huge purple ish, disgusting, unlined, totally exposed pools of animal waste, right? Just to hammer home that disgusting point. 

Kelly Hunter Foster: Yeah, they’re not all the same but, swine CAFOs, dairy CAFOs, egg laying CAFOs, they use pits, basically.

They can be lined with HDPE liners, and when they are, it’s better. And a lot of cases, like throughout North Carolina, they’re soil liners. Which are, is the same, in my opinion, as being unlined. All of them can leak, the ones that are unlined, particularly ones in the coastal plains that are sitting in shallow groundwater areas can [00:12:00] leak substantially. And, so that’s a major pathway for pollutants to make their way into people’s drinking water wells or into surface waters, that shallow groundwater migrates into surface waters.

It’s also, the waste is land applied, just applied without significant treatment to land. A lot of places where they’re doing land application they’re ditching the fields to move water off of the fields directly into nearby surface waters, or they’re installing what are called tile drains, which are these, shallow, tiny pipes that transport, groundwater underneath land application fields to surface waters, both of those ditches and tile drains channel the pollutants from these facilities directly into adjoining surface waterways.

Real quick, just to circle back. You can also have with animal waste, a huge loading of, in addition to nutrients like nitrogen and phosphorus and pathogens. You can [00:13:00] end up with heavy loads of organic matter, antibiotics. Antibiotics can contribute to antibiotic resistant pathogens, and you can end up with metals and pesticides and other types of pollutants like that.

Those last ones that I listed up there, are ones which are just not at all dealt with by any of the state or federal regulatory systems that I’m aware of, unless it’s indirectly. They don’t tend to be focused on the control of those other pollutants. The focus is typically on nutrients. How much nutrients they’re allowed to apply to land. And then these other pollutants are just sort of ignored.

Thomas Hynes: There’s a lot to unpack there. And a couple of things that jumped out at me. One I really appreciate when you were listing off the many negative impacts of algal blooms. It’s obvious the science and the biology, [00:14:00] there’s a lot of problems there, but you ended by talking about the economic impacts.

And I don’t think that’s discussed enough when we talk about it. Cause I think there’s this false choice. You can be good to the environment. It can be good for business. And this is a situation where we’re being very bad to the environment and it’s bad for business.

And I think that’s just sort of a paradigm or a lens that I like to remind people about all the time. And that’s just my own personal crusade. And then also with the nutrients I do appreciate it cause they do sound like a good thing. And when they over-apply to the land, I mean they know that this is too much for the soil to absorb or to use for agriculture, right?

Like I want to say they’re not paying for their own cleanup and doing it in their own water treatment or their waste treatment and doing it as this guise of like fertilizer. And then it just immediately runs right off the fields on the first rainstorm.

Kelly Hunter Foster: Yeah, it’s really complicated. Depends on, what I would say about it sort of depends on which industry we’re talking about. I would say the problem starts with the regulators. [00:15:00] The regulators and USDA and so EPA, the states, and USDA have set up a system where the permitting standards under state permitting systems and the federal permitting system allow for massive over application, particularly of phosphorus.

In some places. These facilities are being allowed to land apply just based on the nitrogen content of the waste. And when you do that, what you do is rapidly build up phosphorus, way more phosphorus than you need to grow any crop. And you do that year after year such that it becomes a continuing source of pollution that runs off both immediately in response to rainfall and over time, and it becomes a really intractable problem to deal with. 

I would say that the regulators have allowed that to [00:16:00] continue because of the way the industry is structured. But I want to circle back real quick because I missed something. In a lot of other places where they’re not just doing nitrogen based land application, they’ve adopted what are called phosphorus indexes or indices, depending on who you talk to. And those also have contributed to a sort of disastrous over application problem across the country because they look good on their face if you don’t understand them in great detail, because they purport to be evaluating risk but what they actually do is evaluate the risk of runoff, not the risk of pollution.

When they’re doing these risk evaluations, what they’re doing is allowing people to continue long term with nitrogen based application in a lot of cases up until the point where the phosphorus reaches very high levels.

A few [00:17:00] fields, a few types of fields might end up being unavailable for nitrogen based application. But others, they just continue to do the exact same thing. And it is the most extreme case where you end up being told not to land apply any more phosphorus at all.

Circling back to that point that I was going to make about the structure of the industry. In a lot of cases, the regulatory agencies have set it up like this because of the way the industry chose to design itself. So concentrating its CAFOs in a small geographic area around the processing plants, which we’re also going to talk about today, the slaughterhouses and other processing plants by their nature, they’re going to be producing more waste than they could possibly need [00:18:00] for crop growth.

If we’re going to solve these problems, those regulations definitely have to change. More facilities need to get the permits. There needs to be enforcement of the requirements. And, there needs to be a massive revision to how we’re allowing these facilities [00:23:00] to deal with the land application of the waste.

They should never be allowed to land apply more than they actually need for beneficial use for crop growth. Ever. And that is a really fundamental aspect of it that needs to change. 

But the industry in a lot of cases is raising these animals in CAFOs under contracts with growers, swine growers or poultry growers. And in many of those instances, those contract growers don’t have any options. The industry has sort of pushed their waste off onto them and told them to figure it out, despite knowing that they can’t figure it out, that there isn’t an easy answer.

For some of the smaller, contract growers that are working in the poultry industry, they may or may not know how significantly harmful that practice of constantly over applying poultry waste to the ground is because you have the NRCS telling them it’s fine.

Thomas Hynes: Right. 

Kelly Hunter Foster: And it’s not. 

Thomas Hynes: And economically they don’t have any other choice, right? 

It sounds like, and this is, you know, this is [00:19:00] something I’ve kind of gleaned over the years, is that it’s not an independent farmer, but you have sort of an independent contractor almost who works for a larger multinational and they grow the pigs for them.

And then that larger company is saying, okay, well you deal with the waste. And then on top of that, you have the quote unquote regulators who are like, yeah, everything’s fine. Everything’s cool. 

Kelly Hunter Foster: Right. 

Thomas Hynes: I was going to ask you if there are any gaps in the regulatory landscape. And it sounds like it’s mostly gaps. It sounds like there’s a lot of gaps. So I guess you’ve sort of began to answer this question. Like, I mean, the most plain way I want to ask this is like, how can this happen? Because I’m hearing you discuss this and I have said the benefit of working with you for the last couple of years and understanding this issue better than I did before I started working here.

It just seems like such a farce almost and like a dangerous toxic one at that. How can this happen? How does this, how? I don’t have a better way of asking that. 

Kelly Hunter Foster: I mean, I think that’s a complex answer as well. But, I mean, it’s not the only industry that’s not, [00:20:00] well-regulated in terms of controlling its water pollution, but it’s a major one that’s operating all across the country and they have a lot of power and they often oppose any efforts to strengthen regulatory requirements in state legislatures, at the regulatory agency, in court.

So, fixing it is not as simple as just getting a regulator that decides they want to do the right thing. 

Thomas Hynes: Right. That’s not going to do it. Right. 

Kelly Hunter Foster: Yeah. 

Thomas Hynes: So, maybe a foolish question. But one that I had already decided to ask. How can this be solved? And maybe having listened to you for the last couple of minutes, I should reframe that and say, can this be solved? And if it can, how?

Kelly Hunter Foster: The easiest answer is, I mean, of course it can be solved. 

I think it has to happen on numerous fronts. One of the things that absolutely must happen is the industry, the large corporate agribusiness, often [00:21:00] multinational corporations, they need to take responsibility for the environmental impacts. That they’re a model they’ve created, is causing, and solve it, and take responsibility for solving it. 

That’s key. They’re aware of the impact that they’re having. They know it’s possible to solve it. To date, they haven’t been willing to change. We’re basically not only operating under the same model that we were decades ago, they’re propagating it, not just in the United States, but also internationally.

Another aspect in terms of the solution would be that EPA has undertaken a review of its regulations. A scientific review of  the standards that apply to Clean Water Act permits are called effluent limitation guidelines, and then there’s also some [00:22:00] other types of regulatory requirements. 

 

But EPA has undertaken a review of its effluent limitation guidelines, or ELGs, and that’s ongoing right now, and at the same time, EPA, in response to a petition that Waterkeeper Alliance and 50 other groups filed. As well as a petition filed by Food and Water Watch and some other groups, EPA decided to form this Animal Agriculture Water Quality subcommittee, to take a look at the regulations, including the ELGs and for this group of people to make recommendations to it for how it needs to change those regulations. 

There are also all kinds of federal policies that are propping up this way of doing business, but I’m not going to try to get into all of those. But that’s a part of the solution too, is reform and the federal, and the farm bill and the federal funding structure for the industry.

Thomas Hynes: And what would you do if you were fully in charge, what would you do if you had all the power in the world to solve this? 

Kelly Hunter Foster: If I had all of the power in the world to solve it? 

I don’t know. I feel like it’s a really hard question to answer. And I would have different answers for the different aspects of it. We’ve been speaking today about CAFOs as if they’re a monolithic entity and they’re very much not. And there’s major differences in the [00:24:00] way we’re producing dairy versus poultry versus swine versus cattle.

And it’s a really complex problem. Probably because I’m a lawyer, I want to put a disclaimer on it because I’ve been speaking in generalities with probably swine and poultry in mind the most when I’m answering your questions. There’s similar problems for the others, but I don’t think there’s an easy fix.

And if I had all the power in the world to fix it, I would probably marshal a whole bunch of really intelligent people together and then we would figure out what to do. 

Thomas Hynes: Well, that’s something. And, so we’re talking a lot about these confined animal feeding operations or animal feeding operations or factory farms. How are slaughterhouses different and how do they come into play?

Kelly Hunter Foster: Animal feeding operations and concentrated animal feeding operations feed into this national system of corporate, largely corporate owned slaughterhouses and rendering [00:25:00] plants. The slaughterhouses and often rendering plants that are also owned by the companies sort of process the animals. And they are a massive independent source of water pollution. 

Slaughterhouses and rendering plants are the number one and number two industrial sources of phosphorus and nitrogen pollution across the country.

Similar to CAFOs, the reason for that is that EPA hasn’t established protective effluent limitation guidelines or ELGs. And what are called pretreatment standards. So these facilities are discharging either directly into a waterway, or they’re discharging indirectly into a waterway through a municipal wastewater treatment plant or a sewage treatment plant.

And so direct discharges are subject to ELGs, [00:26:00] indirect dischargers are subject to pretreatment standards. Unfortunately, EPA has failed to revise the ELGs for slaughterhouses in any substantial way for almost a couple decades. They’re very out of date. They don’t cover all of the pollutants.

Some of the slaughterhouses and rendering facilities are subject to standards that were established in the mid-70s. None of EPA’s existing regulations limit the discharge of phosphorus, even though this industry is discharging more phosphorus than any other industrial category.

So similar to CAFOs, thus it should not be a mystery to anyone why we have a massive crisis with nutrient pollution. We’re not regulating it, even when the agencies are required to by federal law. 

Even more [00:27:00] concerning than that, is EPA has never published national standards that apply to the vast majority of slaughterhouses and rendering facilities.Those are the ones that discharge through sewage treatment plants. And for those, when they discharge, so stepping back, the majority of slaughterhouses and rendering facilities across the country are those indirect dischargers. They’re discharging into sewage treatment plants. And EPA has known that these facilities, when they discharge into these wastewater treatment plants, in large part, the cities, towns, often very small towns’ sewage treatment plants aren’t set up to deal with all that pollution.

They don’t treat all of the pollutants that are coming in from these facilities. And so, EPA has long known that just pollution just moves straight through, untreated [00:28:00] into the receiving rivers and streams. And, yet they haven’t adopted any standards to control that. 

Thomas Hynes: I mean, when I hear that as sort of a civilian, very much, not an expert in this. That sounds really like helpful, but it’s when you, the way you put it, it’s just passing through into these drinking sources 

Kelly Hunter Foster: Or recreational waters, yeah. 

Just, and there are rivers and streams untreated and disturbingly, about 60 million people live near rivers and streams that are polluted by slaughterhouse waste. And EPA has acknowledged recently that that pollution is disproportionately harming underresourced communities, low income communities, and communities of color.

Very similar to the situation that we have with CAFOs. And that’s because these slaughterhouses and rendering plants are co-located in the same areas that CAFOs are. And so these areas that are being impacted are getting a double and triple from when you take a look at the [00:29:00] industry as a whole.

Thomas Hynes: Yeah. And I mean, it makes a tragic kind of sense. And you have these underrepresented communities who don’t have the political cloud of other neighborhoods and communities. And so the facilities are sited there. And then obviously the slaughterhouses want to be nearby because why do you want to spend extra money transporting them somewhere else?

Just leave them here. And, when you add the environmental justice lens to it it’s just a deeper and even worse tragedy. 

So we’re talking about this issue and obviously knowing that you’re one of our senior attorneys here what’s happening with Waterkeeper Alliance legally speaking, as much as you can say, I know you can’t say everything, but where do things stand on, I hope I’m using this term right, on the docket or what’s on the legal horizon for Waterkeeper Alliance in this issue? 

Kelly Hunter Foster: With regard to slaughterhouses, we have a number of things going on with regard to CAFOs and slaughterhouses. But one thing I want to mention to people because it’s really important is that Waterkeeper Alliance and our partners brought a lawsuit [00:30:00] in 2019 and another one in 2022. Sort of companion lawsuits with a lot of environmental and community groups against EPA and challenging their failure to adopt appropriate water quality protections for slaughterhouses and rendering facilities.

Eventually EPA entered into a consent decree with us to resolve that litigation and promised to update those standards by December, proposed new standards that are updated by December of 2023, and to finalize those standards by August of 2025. EPA followed through and they did that. They published the proposed standards and the comment period for those proposed standards closed in March.

Now they’re looking at public comment on them. And we’re looking forward to seeing what the standards look like in final form. It’s concerning [00:31:00] because the EPA, when they sent out the proposed standards, ended up proposing three different options. The first option, the one that they selected, was extremely inadequate, and would only require about 22 percent of slaughterhouses and rendering plants that discharged directly to use some sort of modern pollution control.

And for pretreatment facilities, they had only a subset and they wouldn’t control any limits on nitrogen and phosphorus pollution. And it would only apply to a very small subset of them. And so that was EPA’s preferred option. And it would only reduce discharges of nitrogen by 10 percent and phosphorus by 37 percent.

They also put out a third option, which is far better. Still not adequate in our comments that we put in to outline all the ways that it’s still not adequate. But their third option that they put forth was way [00:32:00] better. It would apply to a large number of facilities. It would control phosphorus and nitrogen discharges for the direct dischargers and the indirect dischargers, it ends up bringing in a lot more facilities. And it would reduce pollution substantially. Nitrogen pollution across the country by 83 percent or 76 million pounds each year and phosphorus pollution by 94 percent or 20 million pounds per year.

So we hope everyone continues to encourage EPA to do the right thing and adopt strong standards and we’re going to keep our eyes out for it.

And we’ll be reviewing that in August [2025] to see whether or not they followed through and did the right thing. 

Thomas Hynes: And those are big numbers that would be really encouraging. Um, well, Kelly, thank you so much for being here today. It was great speaking with you as always. And thank you for all your work, uh, on this very important issue. 

Kelly Hunter Foster: Happy to be here. [00:33:00] Thanks.

Thomas Hynes: Our next guest is Sandy Bihn of Lake Erie Waterkeeper in Ohio.

Sandy previously served as the finance director for her hometown of Oregon, Ohio, but moved into environmental advocacy when she began to notice that her local bay’s waters were turning green. She also happens to be one of the first Waterkeepers I ever met.

Sandy, thank you so much for being here today. It’s great to see you again. 

Sandy Bihn: Thank you for having me.

Thomas Hynes: Absolutely. So we were talking earlier about the regulatory landscape governing CAFOs, and in a lot of the cases, it’s the absence of any regulations. And we got sort of a 10,000 foot view of that from Kelly Hunter Foster. What I want to discuss with you is how that landscape, or however you want to describe it, has impacted Lake Erie and where you sit locally.

Sandy Bihn: Well, maybe we need to start from the issue here that drives the CAFO issue or the manure issue. And that is we’ve had harmful algal blooms. In 2014, the city of Toledo put a water ban and told half a [00:34:00] million people not to drink the water because of the microcystins that got into the water intake and into the treated water system.

It was publicized all over the world. And, we all wanted to know what was causing it, what was driving it. And that is, as Kelly discussed, excess phosphorus in our watershed is what the driver the scientists tell us. So where’s the phosphorus coming from? So we back into that with, it’s from agriculture, which is pretty much what Kelly was talking about 90 percent of what’s coming into the system now is from Ag. 

And then what about agriculture? Is it a commercial fertilizer? Is it manure? What’s going on? So when we started looking into that, we were told that 90 percent of the land is commercial fertilizer and 10 percent is manure and it’s no big deal.

But you know, and they didn’t give us the numbers and they really didn’t tell us about manure and CAFOs growing in our community. And it wasn’t until an Environmental Working Group study came out in 2019 that we really got a better handle on the numbers, even though people here [00:35:00] were in their own areas talking about CAFOs and manure and the impacts on both the quality of their life in the rural community here, because there are rural areas where these are located here and what was happening to the water and what they were observing.

But in 2019, the study came out, in about 90 percent of the facilities located here are not permitted. So they’re under no rules, so to speak. And, the studies came out that there’s been over 100 percent increase in the number of animals in our watershed. So we now have 1.4 million hogs and 400,000 cows, and 24 million chickens in our watershed.

And they’re located in pockets, as Kelly said, kind of close to processing plants and where they can make the most money. And, so I think one of the things that escaped me from the beginning was the fact that when you have hog and dairy manure, it’s now put in lagoons or in concrete vats underneath, but it’s applied to the fields as a [00:36:00] liquid, and our area in Western Lake Erie is the old black swamp, so it’s been tile drained.

It’s the most extensive tile drained area in the country, along with ditches, because they drain the swamp literally. So, when you put liquid manure on the fields in the hogs and the dairy, naturally it’s going to drain down into the tiles and come into the waterways, and it’s when we have those heavy rainfalls that flush the fields in the spring and early summer that puts the phosphorus into the lake that’s causing our problem. 

And so, you talk about regulations, and the reality is most of these are not regulated. Literally none of them have the discharge permit that Kelly talked about under the Clean Water Act. They say they have a zero discharge, which when you put liquid on a field in millions and millions of gallons of manure, there’s obviously a discharge.

It makes no sense. But that is what they told us and that’s what’s been going on. So it’s the lack of [00:37:00] regulation, the lack of universities even being willing to study this issue and bring it out and talk about manure and the implications of having all these confined operations concentrated in our watershed.

Thomas Hynes: Are the universities afraid to talk about it because it’s going to jeopardize their funding ?

Sandy Bihn: Both funding and political power. Land grant universities across the country are very much an advocate for agriculture, I used to count the word manure in reports and in the beginning there were none or would be in the back of a report that they wouldn’t even mention it. And, the University of Michigan came out with a study on Lake Erie that basically said manure should be looked into and they were forced to take it out.

So, there’s a huge political component to this that’s going on and in the meantime, because of the problems that the algae is causing in the intakes, municipalities like Toledo have had to put millions and millions of dollars into treatment to avoid the microcystin that comes into the system. 

[00:38:00] So we’re passing along the cost of the pollution from these confined animal feeding operations and their manure instead of preventing it from the source, we’re then saying you have to treat for it.

That’s wrong. That’s just backwards. And that’s not how we did the Clean Water Act when we had the major discharges from industry, they were required to reduce their inputs. Likewise, way back when, that I like to go with, the algae situation that happened before, was phosphorus and laundry detergent. Twenty-eight states passed a ban to ban phosphorus in laundry detergent and that allowed the lakes to not have excess phosphorus and to recover Lake Erie is the poster child for that. 

So, we have history, but the change that happened that most of the public doesn’t understand, I think, is the fact that we went from pastured, good agricultural practices with family farms to this confined, business model where you put as many animals in a small space, grow them as fast as possible, let their manure go on the [00:39:00] fields untreated with the pathogens and the heavy metals and the antibiotics and everything else that happens, and then come into your system, and no one is doing anything about it.

And more egregiously, most recently, in 2023, we had something called Schmucker JBS move into our area, and it’s a problem today. They literally have brought in an estimated 100,000 cattle into our area. We’ve never had cattle before in those numbers. None of them are permitted.

And, people started complaining they had violations this last summer where the Ohio EPA documented the problem from this. Because they put manure on top of the ground from these cattle manure, unlike dairy manure, is applied as a solid. And so, they just put it in piles. And you could literally go down the road and see the manure and see the runoff from the manure, into the ditches, into the streams and it is something called fish creek, which has endangered mussels and like 40 different species of fish. And no one was [00:40:00] doing anything about it. And in Ohio, at least, it’s a citizen driven complaint system that we have, so if people don’t complain, nothing happens. So the whole system is broken in terms of, the regulations, the way we address problems, what’s going on.It’s just a really bad situation, and it certainly isn’t just here. 

It’s in the Chesapeake. It’s in Okeechobee. It’s in the Gulf of Mexico. It’s in Washington. It’s in Iowa. It’s in North Carolina. And we have not effectively banded together and addressed this issue and brought it to the forefront.

So that things like Kelly is suggesting, both in regulations. My solution is, human waste has to be treated at a wastewater plant. And the volume of waste they’re putting at these facilities needs to be treated. I think, need to have a treatment process paid by Big Ag, not the local farmers, because the local farmers, the only thing they really control is the manure.The animals and the feeding and everything else are controlled by [00:41:00] the giants. 

And so they leave the responsibility cleverly, to the local farmer to deal with the one cost and the one problem. And so the local people, like that farmer, and they’re used to manure going on the ground. Many of us know manure has been used for years as a fertilizer, but too much of anything is not good.

Any more than you can have every house in a community have a septic system instead of a wastewater treatment system. It becomes too big and too voluminous and that’s the problem we have today. 

Thomas Hynes: I think about this with a lot of industries.

It’s  externalizing the costs of cleanup or treatment to me and you. And, to have such a business friendly country, I guess. And I think we were so cost conscious. And price conscious. And yet, yeah. We end up paying for it in cleanups and in health costs but it’s never adequately really presented as though, you can pay less at the supermarket for a pound of bacon, but you will pay like that.

And now there’s no such thing [00:42:00] as a free lunch. Like it really is going to come back eventually to get us. And that’s this thing I just constantly harp on is that this is not just bad science, not just bad for environmental justice and for the ecology, it’s bad for business. It’s bad for our household costs. 

But I digress. When we spoke a few years ago, I have this memory of this narrative arc of the story of Lake Erie obviously being one of the great freshwater sources in the world to being this greatly industrialized region, heavily polluted.

Correct me if I’m wrong, but I remember you sort of telling me that there was this brief period where kind of Lake Erie had kind of come back and then these harmful algal blooms, and it kind of revealed this blind spot for lack of a better term in the Clean Water Act.

Sandy Bihn: Absolutely, and the truth of the matter is that the Cuyahoga, which has a watershed that doesn’t have a lot of agriculture, has come back and is quite healthy today and in quite good shape and doing well. While the Maumee, at the very end of Western end of Lake Erie, is [00:43:00] the place, the excess phosphorus and these CAFOs or these, the amount of manure, the billions of gallons of manure have located.

So it’s kind of like the comparison of two rivers. One is actually recovering because of the Clean Water Act. And I think it’s important to know that when the Clean Water Act happened, no one told industry what to do or how to get rid of their hazardous waste that they were discharging into the rivers and lakes and streams.

The Clean Water Act put maximum amounts, not always great, but at least they said this is the most you can discharge. And industries met that mark, by and large, and have helped the waters. Our waters have recovered wonderfully because of that practice. The flip of that is, agriculture is exempt in so many ways from these same laws. I mean, how can you put, twice the waste of human, two, three, I mean, there’s more manure than there is human waste.I mean, everybody agrees with that. 

It’s like, okay, we always had it. Yeah, we did, but it was spread over millions and millions of acres. And today it’s concentrated in these [00:44:00] local areas and there’s just too much manure to effectively use on the fields that are near them economically.

And then they left the manure up to the local farmer instead of to the big Ag that really should be responsible for it. If you read the history of Procter and Gamble, they complained a lot about people saying that it was the phosphorus and laundry detergent that was driving the algal blooms then, but 28 states passed bans to say no and recognize the problem.

And today, I think we need a ground swelling of local governments and hopefully, at some point state governments, to begin to take on the manure issue, because in order to get to where we need to go, there has to be public awareness and public pressure that you can’t put that much manure on the fields and not have green water.

Thomas Hynes: I think we have a good understanding of why this is bad, ecologically speaking, as someone who lives near Lake Erie on Lake Erie. But what are the economic impacts [00:45:00] of all of this?

Sandy Bihn: There’s economic impact and there’s health impacts. So, in the charter boat, we are the water like capital of the world. When the charter boat captains go out and take people out and there’s algae, they’re now having respiratory issues. They’re now having a major study to determine those respiratory problems that the algae is causing. And the economic impacts are simply that no one wants to swim in the green water. In terms of prices and the cost of land along the lake are okay, but when the green is there, people just don’t go in the lake, so they don’t come to the lake.

I’ve had people call me who have rented a cottage and said, “Is it okay this year? Should I come?” So those are the impacts that are happening all over the lake. Lake Erie is a little different than many watersheds throughout the U. S. in that it has a huge turnover and a lot of oxygen in it.

So we don’t get the massive fish kills like they get with the oyster and the crabs that happen in the Chesapeake and other places because the water is constantly in motion. But, the problem [00:46:00] is upstream in this fish creek that I just talked about with Schmucker, there was a fish kill issue this year where there was a problem and the state of Indiana just decided to dismiss it and not to do anything about it.

And Ohio where it more than likely came from in our stream in Fish Creek from this Schmucker, this huge cattle growth that’s happening. No one even wanted to investigate it. And so in there, we talked about regulations a little bit ago. So the regulations for Schmucker with the violations they had, the state of Ohio did say here you got to quit discharging into Fish Creek and into the local streams.

And those were good. So they went out and they took the manure and they moved it to another place and stockpiled it someplace else. No one knows where it went. One farmer told me or one neighbor told me that they applied the manure three times in the field next to him. That’s excess manure application.

And yet the state of Ohio wouldn’t do anything about that. The fact that they just got rid of the manure and it’s no [00:47:00] longer there makes it appear that it’s okay. We still haven’t received the water quality tests that we need to kind of verify that Ohio is going to let them off the hook. But how do you have 100,000 cattle, give or take a few, in your watershed, descending on it, no permits, no rules, literally just taking over the area.

And if you’re a neighbor, they locate right next to you. Because they’re Ag, they don’t have to have a permit. They can draw well water through their barns. It’s so un-American to think that there’s no zoning rules. There’s no other rules. There’s no testing. There’s, and they just pile the manure on top of the ground and let it run off. How can that be in 2024?

Thomas Hynes: There’s no protection, right? 

Sandy Bihn: Absolutely none. After all these years of, the permitted facilities and whatever that I’m aware of, and the unpermitted, which are somewhat managed, at least they’re not like the Schmucker thing, which is just, proliferating the area and buying more land and taking it [00:48:00] all over and now we’re told they’re going into horse and taking horses and raising them for slaughter.

No rules, no, I don’t understand how that could even happen now, but it is. 

Thomas Hynes: Yeah, and that’s it’s pretty terrifying. And, what really stuck out to me when we spoke in 2021, was this 2014 event, as you mentioned, as you alluded to this sort of internationally recognized crisis that happened in Toledo that this microcystin got into the Toledo water intake and forced the city to warn citizens.

They’re not to drink tap water for three days. Want to know more about that from your perspective. But then I’m also struck by how did everything not change there? I was like, whoa, this is like a huge wake up call. But it sounds like people are still sleeping to continue that metaphor.

Sandy Bihn: Well, Toledo put in an ozone treatment, so chances of it ever happening again are, really small, hopefully, but we’re all paying for [00:49:00] that. And we didn’t cause it, and then the other part of that is that Toledo and Lucas County fought to have the Clean Water Act imposed where they call something called the 303d list where it becomes impaired and then you have to do a total maximum daily load and all of that. That process has gone through and that’s being tested now in the courts because Ohio EPA dismissed literally the CAFO manure issue as not being a factor in it.

That it was just not there. And, Environmental Law and Policy Center and some others are contesting that, which is a good thing. But the reality is, what happened in 2014, since then, we’ve added more and more animals, and more and more manure to the watershed, unchecked. Now we have, in 2023, this huge Schmucker mess, right, with cattle coming into the watershed.

And the reality is, the regulations, there has been no reduction, and they’ve spent millions and millions of [00:50:00] dollars. We have something called H2Ohio here, which is trying to help the algae situation, but it never measures how much is reduced. They don’t target the areas where we know the greatest concentrations come from, and by the way, those are where the CAFOs are.

We know, if you really look at the maps, you can figure it out. But there isn’t the political will to address, and I would suggest not only here but nationwide, to address manure and the impacts of manure on water quality. And if the public doesn’t start speaking out and understanding this better, we’re stuck.

They just have so much political power. How, you can’t, 100,000 animals, no permits, no nothing, you can see the runoff, you can see it going in the ditches. So they issue violations and what do they do? They just shuffle it and take it around and take it somewhere else. That’s not managing it.

Thomas Hynes: You just think about, I mean, I’m hearing you say this and I’m thinking, imagine just like if a city, it would have to be more than 100,000 people because I know it’s not one for one. 

Sandy Bihn: It’s half a million people that couldn’t drink the water. I mean, this, it was in the media everywhere and we all thought [00:51:00] that would be a turning point. And the reality was, it was not. 

Thomas Hynes: That’s terrifying. What were the health impacts? Were there fatalities?

Sandy Bihn: The strange part of it is, there were no regulations at the time that would have required Toledo to tell the citizens not to drink the water. And I credit the Water Department in Toledo for taking the test and giving it to the officials, and the officials for having the integrity and the courage, quite frankly, to tell people not to drink it. So, the amount that got in for the length of time it was in, some people say it has some health consequences, but we don’t really know of anything major.

We do know that animals in our area, they will die if they get into the algae and drink it. But the health effects from it are more like going out in the lake and ingesting it in your lungs and things now that we’re seeing the implications.

So, the good news is, we don’t know of anyone that died, there were some consequences that we’ll probably never understand because it was a half a million people and they took the action, [00:52:00] preventative action, to make sure that people didn’t get sick, that was really, quite amazing and quite courageous in today’s world.

And now, after that, they’ve actually made regulations in terms of drinking water standards as to how much microcystin can be. It’s not a standard, I shouldn’t use that word, but it’s a narrative.

Which is like a suggested standard. So, U.S. EPA, at the time, Toledo lost and told people not to drink their water. The World Health Organization had the only microcystin standard at the time that they could use. And the reason the people from Toledo did what they did was because in Brazil this happened, and it got into the water, and then people who were having dialysis at the time, when it’s coming through, people did die from the microcystin in Brazil, and people here knew that, and were, concerned and wanting to be protective.

I just give Toledo a lot of credit for what they did. The sad reality is it didn’t have the impact that all of us wish it would have had. 

Thomas Hynes: Yeah, that’s, that is kind of [00:53:00] discouraging for sure. Because that is something that really sticks out to you. And you think to yourself, gosh, we really dodged a bullet here and the writings on the wall as to what we can do better.

And I just keep coming back to also, you talk about dodging a bullet or recovering, let’s say, recovering from the positive impacts of the Clean Water Act just to be hit over the head again with this new threat and to know that it’s a problem and to have very little done about it is discouraging, to say the least, I’m sure.

Why do you think these gaps and protection or another way to ask this why did this wake up call not get as heated as maybe you’d hoped it would have? 

Sandy Bihn: Because the political reality is that the Farm Bureau and the five major meat and dairy companies, Smithfield, Tyson, JBS, Cargill, all of them are so controlling with their lobbying money.

I mean, what better model, if you think about it, could you have than you get to [00:54:00] control the animals and the feed and you leave the local farmer with the manure or the problem piece of that puzzle. And quite frankly, if they had to pay for the manure to be treated, it would increase the cost a bit.

I’m not debating that, but for those that are doing it right with organic and regenerative ag it would make it more competitive and make it more equitable. The way it is now, they’re passing their pollution costs to us having to treat the water when we shouldn’t have to treat it and the laws like the Safe Drinking Water Act where you have source water protection, we try to do that in our community and the source water protection could only be in the county we’re in.

Well, guess what? The stuff isn’t coming from the county we’re in. The majority of it, it’s coming from 50, 100 miles away. From these concentrated animal feeding operations in the manure coming in, we did a study with Wisconsin and Marquette universities that show that every time you locate another CAFO in our watershed with the continuous monitoring, they showed a 3 to 5 percent increase in what they call dissolved reactive phosphorus, which is the driver of the [00:55:00] algae here. And the state of Ohio refused to even acknowledge the report because at the time it wasn’t published.

It is now, but they wouldn’t even look at their own data to show what the impact of the excess runoff is that proves the problem. If you can’t use that kind of factual base for changing policy, then we’re stuck in the big Ag control of our system and of our waters until, we as grassroots communities start to do something about it. You know, one of the things I’m looking at right now is doing some kind of a basic grassroots ordinance that basically says you can’t have this many animals. If the, just the numbers are so compelling that you have too many animals and too much manure and not enough land to put it on.

It’s simple math. If we could actually pass something that would say, you can’t do this, well, you can’t put too many animals. You’re not going to do this to our water and impact our quality of life. It’s wrong. And [00:56:00] so I think, I go back to the laundry detergent thing. That was a grassroots groundswelling, and I think to get to where we need to go with this, we need to have the community, nationwide communities, getting involved and understanding.

When people call me, I’ve had somebody from New York call me and say, Sandy, my lake turned green. Do you know why? And I’m like, no, and she’s actually an author, she’s a really neat lady, and I said, go to your local ag person or NRCS person and ask if there’s these factory farms, so to speak, in your area.

And she said when she went into them and started talking to them, at first they were very receptive. And then when she got, she kept calling me and asking me what questions to ask. And when she got right down to it, what happened was two dairies located in her area that were running off and causing the lake to become green.

They didn’t know the dairies were there. There were no permits for those dairies. They were the “one unders,” as we’re going to call them. And so you don’t even have to tell anyone. There’s people in Indiana right now, where there’s a lake, they have a hundred lakes [00:57:00] in our watershed, and they did water quality testing for five years with the University of Bowling Green, and they took the water quality test to Ohio State’s Stone Lab, which is very credible, and people paid for that, and had the water quality testing, so that they live in Michigan, by the way, and which is, thought of as a more progressive state.

And they gave the state of Michigan their water quality test and said, please declare these waters impaired and do something about the problem we’re having. The state of Michigan said it wasn’t credible data. They wouldn’t accept it. They went out in dry periods when there was no runoff. There was no proof that anything was happening.

So the waters aren’t impaired. So for five years, they tested and then weren’t even able to get on a list to say there’s a problem in their lake when you can clearly see it. So the games we play, so that they come out and they test when it’s dry. Yeah, you’re not, generally you shouldn’t find anything in the water, although I’m waiting for the Schmucker results to come out because normally, if it’s dry, you should have no runoff, right?

There should be no runoff, [00:58:00] but we get our pushes in the heavy rainfalls, and then the programs that we have with these best management practices, BMPs as they’re known for, cover crops and all the other things. We don’t measure before and after. We don’t target the areas where the runoff is coming from.

The answer to the problem for algae is source reduction. We’ve always gotten results for water quality when we’ve reduced what’s coming into the system and helped to make sure that we don’t put as much into it. So why are we allowing more and more animals and more and more manure to locate in these already troubled watersheds like ours and letting the runoff happen when we’re supposedly trying to reduce it when we’re adding?

And yet we don’t talk about that. It is the craziest thing that I’ve ever seen, because it makes no economic sense. It makes no factual sense. You can’t keep increasing what you’re putting into your system. At the same time, you’re supposed to be reducing, managing it once it’s in the system and not trying to stop what’s coming into it in the first [00:59:00] place.

Thomas Hynes: And a few things that struck me with what you just said. One is, and it’s not funny, it’s like, tragic, but in like, a funny way that they’re like, oh, well, it’s by county as if pollution or water understands or follows county lines or even state lines or anything. But yeah.

And what’s also so interesting about this form of pollution. Is that when we talk about PFAS and we talk about microbacteria and things above my head, you can’t see it. Right. But with this pollution, you can see it with your own eyes, right? That’s how you got started in this work. And you can’t argue with a green lake. You can’t argue with algal blooms that you can see. And. For that reason, and a dozen others, you’d think that this would be so much easier to solve, 

Sandy Bihn: People took me down highway 1 in between Ohio and Indiana that runs in Williams County, Ohio and Steuben County, Indiana. And when I went down the road, I saw cattle, calves that were by the road with the manure piled. They [01:00:00] split the parcels there so they don’t have to get permits. So they put fences between each parcel. You could see those. 

And in the back where the calves were at, there were quonset barns with larger cattle in them with a manure pile next to them. And then you could see the swale. The brown water in the swale in the area that I went, and this is mile after mile of this stuff piled up, and I was just shocked.

And then the road is pulverized, it used to be paved, and so now it’s gravel because so many trucks went on it, and it was just unbelievable as to what happened. So we filed the complaints and the state of Ohio did step up and tell them they had to stop that.

And if you go down that same road today, you will not see any of it because you know what they did? They took the animals and they moved them in the back lots. They moved them where you can’t see them. They moved the manure around on the parcels we reported and removed it someplace else. They didn’t manage it. They’re not doing anything different. And yet, that’s okay. It’s not okay. But to be so bold and brazen. [01:01:00] Is to do that kind of cattle and manure pile up that washes into your watershed in 2024 is scary. 

Sandy Bihn: What’s ironic about that whole story is that originally in 2023, in early 2023, in Steuben County, Indiana, they actually have a zoning law and Schmucker and JBS put in for a permit for 8,000 calves. And the 8,000 calves were to be coming into the community and they banned, the zoning board turned that request down and didn’t allow it and on the way out the door, Schmucker and JBS told the local people, we’re coming one way or the other, we’ve bought the cattle, we’ve bought the barns and we’re coming and sure enough, they came, they just build them one [01:02:00] under so they don’t have to have permits. And they go wherever they want and pile it up.

Thomas Hynes: What does that mean? One under? 

Sandy Bihn: One under, remember Kelly talked about the permitting limits like the 799. For cattle it’s a thousand. In Indiana actually, they have a lower permitting number. So there it’s less. But the point being, they know how to play the game.

In Ohio in 2017, there was a dairy farm that local people turned in and said they had to have a permit. And the Ohio Department of Agriculture went after them and said, yes, you need a permit. Do you know what they did? They split the parcels, divided them up, and never got a permit. And that 90 percent of the facilities, these factory farms that we have in our area, are not even permitted.

So they don’t even start to get into the system. You don’t even know the animals exist. There’s no reporting. There’s no, what is happening in this country? And this is not just a practice that’s happening here. There’s fewer and fewer permits coming out because if you just divide your parcels amongst your family, you can do a lot.

Thomas Hynes: But it’s chicanery trickery. It’s nonsense. So we know that there’s bad actors, bad faith, and bad discharge. Are there any reasons for hope?

Sandy Bihn: I think the laws and things, as Kelly said, are very complicated and the systems are complicated, but the reality of animals and manure and runoff is not.

And the reality that if you have just as much as, people have septic systems in this country, right, when you live in the rural areas. But if you get too many people in an area, they require human sewage to be treated. This is no different than that. And it just has to be treated the same way and held accountable in the same way.

It’s not complicated. It’s easy. And yet, the agricultural would say that, I’m absurd and I’m, they would call me all kinds of names for saying this. But it’s very simple. If you have too many animals and too much manure, you need to treat it, reduce the number of animals, do something different.

You cannot have [01:04:00] that many animals and that much manure in your watershed and not have a problem, period, with the way that we’re doing it. It’s just, it’s very clear that this problem is solvable. But it’s also very clear that agriculture will pound on anyone who tries to do anything to hold us accountable and for them to have to pay for the pollution they’re causing into our streams and rivers and lakes, which is their responsibility. 

Toledo shouldn’t have had to put in an ozone system, nor should Des Moines, Iowa have to put in a nitrate system. That is wrong. Why aren’t the people producing the pollution, as has been done in other areas in our country, why aren’t they required to treat the waste, reduce the numbers or do something differently than they are because they’re killing our waters and it’s not right.

Thomas Hynes: If just like a city popped up out of nowhere with like half a million or a million people, and they’re like, wow, we’re just not going to, we don’t do that. We don’t treat our waste.

Sandy Bihn: You can’t do it.

Thomas Hynes: Yeah, you wouldn’t do it.

Sandy Bihn: The government would force you to put in a system. We have a little area here [01:05:00] that is, in something called Curtis and Williston, Ohio, which have like 4,000 people. They’re requiring them to put in a treatment system that’s going to cost 25 million dollars. Obviously those people can’t afford that. And yet you can have that same amount of – 4,000 people is nothing compared to what these, all these CAFOs are. 

And as Kelly said, the pathogens and the heavy metals and the antibiotics and all the other stuff in the crap isn’t even being evaluated. So they’re getting a get home free card and passing on their costs to everyone else. How can that continue in this day and age? It’s too much manure coming from too many animals in an area that’s polluting the water, period.

Treat it, reduce your animals, or manage it differently. You should never get away with that. It can’t happen in a city, it can’t happen with an industry. Why does it happen when you changed your practices for animals, you knew darn well what you were doing, as Kelly said, they know.

You can’t put liquid [01:06:00] waste and manure on the ground and not expect it to get into your waterways. Hello? And even solid waste, if you pile it up and it rains, it’s going to go into your water rains. And if you put too much on the ground, it’s saturating and it’s going to go into the water waste.

Hello? It’s not complicated. It’s just not. 

Thomas Hynes: I really love the way you keep saying it’s not complicated because it’s not. And you’re converting me on that. And you’re totally right. Like it is something we tell three year olds, like why you wash your hands. I mean, it’s like, it is not a complex concept as a matter of fact. 

Sandy Bihn: It’s almost like an urban versus rural. And, but there’s these things are in urban areas as well. I mean, in North Carolina, there’s certainly in the urban areas. But you know, when pollution is defined as it is in this country in so many ways, how is this source of pollution given a pass and everybody else has to deal with it.

And then, what is even more egregious to me, as a finance person, is they’re paying people to help the problem. They [01:07:00] never measure how much phosphorus is reduced. We’ve had these programs in Ohio for 20 years now. They’re like, it’s going to take time. Well, it’s already been 20 years that they’ve been messing around with this.

And these practices are supposed to redo it. They never measure them. They never target where the largest area is. What business would ever do this business model and pay farmers for reductions that there are no results shown from, that there is no measurement taken, and then it just, it informs the public, like it makes them believe something’s being done when in reality, no, it’s not because they will not focus on the one major cause this, too many animals and too much manure being spread on the ground, untreated, causing problems for our water.

Thomas Hynes: It’s not complicated. 

Sandy Bihn: It’s not complicated. 

Thomas Hynes: Well, Sandy, thank you so much for talking with us today. This has been maddening, but also illuminating and hopefully, I’m not going to go as far as to say that we feel inspired because it’s just [01:08:00] frustrating, but I think it’s important to be frustrated.

And I think it’s important for our listeners and just for everybody out there to know what’s being done and what’s being done with terrible intentions and bad faith and bad actors and all that and bad consequences. And it is a problem we can solve. But I think knowing about it is the first step.

So I really appreciate you joining us here today. 

Sandy Bihn: Thank you.