The Problem With Local CAFO Bans

A Q&A with Professor Silvia Secchi on the limits of regulation

Iowa has over 20 million hogs within its borders. That’s approximately seven times more pigs than people. As water quality expert Chris Jones wrote, Iowa pigs excrete the same amount of waste as 83.7 million people.

Last month, I reported that Sonoma County, California has a November ballot measure aimed at banning concentrated animal feeding operations (CAFOs) — confined, crowded spaces where most animals raised for consumption live. CAFOs are notorious for their detrimental impact on the environment. In March, I interviewed Iowa Farmers Union President Aaron Lehman about the Supreme Beef CAFO polluting Bloody Run Creek in northeast Iowa:

“Food is being controlled by folks who have very little concern for our communities and our landscapes,” he said.

Iowa lakes and streams feed into the Mississippi River, which flows thousands of miles across the country before reaching the Gulf of Mexico, where agricultural runoff is a major contributor to hypoxia in the dead zone.

“Our waterways do not stop at the state line,” Lehman said.

University of Iowa Professor Silvia Secchi raised an interesting point on X (formerly known as Twitter): a ban on CAFOs in one area might not reduce their numbers overall but could simply push production elsewhere…to places like Iowa.

Here is my Q&A with her on the topic:

Note: this interview has been edited for clarity.

Nina: As you know, Sonoma County has a ballot measure where they're aiming to ban the construction of new CAFOs and also phase out current CAFOs over three years. What were some of your immediate reactions to hearing about that?

Silvia: What you see are “not in my backyard,” approaches to solving the problem. Just don't do it here. And to some extent, actually, you see this happening in Iowa too. If you look at the maps of CAFOs, there are very few CAFOs in Johnson County, in Polk County, in Linn County. The big cities, even though they have no power to limit it, these guys don't want to mess with it, so they go somewhere else. So my first reaction was, oh, “this is going to become somebody else's problem,” but not a real solution. My other reaction was, well, let's see what the industry does.

In Iowa in the 1990s there were many counties that were taking that kind of [local banning] approach. In fact, there were enough counties that the industry essentially decided to lobby government, and successfully so, to basically eliminate this zoning power of the counties. This is a very good example of a conundrum that we face when we talk about environmental policy, including climate policy, which is that the scale of the policy that is actually doable is not the right scale to solve the problem.

It's not at the right scale that counties go after CAFOs. It's not at the right scale that California has a Low Carbon Fuel Standard, but that's what we get. And because the scale is not appropriate, you have a lot of unintended consequences and feedback effects that may negate or make the problem worse. I don't think Sonoma County is bad for doing this. Sonoma County is doing what it can do, but within the governance setup that we have, what will likely happen is that they're going to get more CAFOs in adjacent counties.

I was just going to read you what you tweeted about this. You said, “for me, the main issue is that this approach is likely to move CAFO production somewhere else, not reduce it overall. It mirrors what California is doing with the low carbon fuel standard, re ethanol, biodiesel and bio digesters.” Could you expand a little bit on this, for maybe people who don't know what has been happening in California? And how, as you mentioned, these changes on a small scale are really not fixing anything. They're just moving things.

I'm going to start with the biodigesters, because it's really directly related to the CAFO issue. So California has a point system, a carbon intensity scale, and it considers biogas produced by capturing the methane from these large, confined animal feeding operations as carbon negative. It pays a really large premium for this biogas. If you have a confined animal feeding operation, and you build a biodigester, you now have two streams of income. You have your usual stream of income, which, if you're a dairy — they are the first ones that are really doing this because of their setup and the type of of manure they have —they sell their milk, and then they sell their gas.

The federal government is also subsidizing this in the Inflation Reduction Act. There is money to build these structures through existing conservation programs, and this has been very controversial. They've added these practices on a temporary basis. The [United States Department of Agriculture] now has this thing where temporary basis basically becomes permanent. So farmers can get subsidized to build the practices, and then they get subsidies for the product of the practice. And the thing is, California is allowing biogas from out of state to be sold in California. So this is triggering an expansion of these biogas facilities in places like Wisconsin, Michigan, Iowa, all places where there's dairies, besides California, and now there is an incentive to build these biodigesters.

The real fear is that this is going to trigger what we call rebound effect. Because now the production system has become more profitable because you have two income streams, including an income stream, which is much more secure than milk, because milk prices have been more volatile. This is going to cause, not necessarily even an increase in herd size, but it's going to cause an increase in CAFOs, or in the size of CAFOs across the country.

California is essentially exporting its water pollution problems to us because they want our biogas. We build more of these big dairies, which are really factories, they're enormous. We have to deal with their water use, their water pollution, their other problems, antibiotic resistance in the water, whatever it is, the environmental problems… But California is very virtuous because they have a low carbon fuel project.

What are the implications of just moving things elsewhere? Do you see a world where there are no “sacrifice zones” without national regulations? What would prevent sacrifice zones from existing?

Well, let me start by by answering the second question. A really good example I like to use is the case of North Carolina, which, by the way, I think it's interesting, because in that narrative, people talk a lot about North Carolina as being the place with a lot of CAFOs and blah, blah, blah.

But actually, in North Carolina they did do something. They instituted a moratorium, and they made that moratorium permanent. And so now the second biggest producer of pigs in the country is no longer North Carolina. It's actually Minnesota. State level regulations can have a local impact. We're raising more pigs in southern Minnesota because they have figured out that here the court is cheap.

A CAFO on the horizon on RAGBRAI, and its industrial-sized fans up close.

In Minnesota, there's more environmental compliance costs, but it's worth it because of the proximity to the processing plants, the meatpacking plants, and the feed and stuff like that, and so the additional environmental costs aren't as high. In the books we actually do have rules. And the Sierra Club earlier this year in Iowa actually went back to EPA and said, you need to take back the power that you had given to the Iowa DNR to regulate CAFOs, because they're not doing it. So I would say we actually have this in the book.

The Clean Water Act defines confined animal feeding operations as point sources of pollution that need to be regulated. Now the courts have basically gutted this provision because basically, you have to prove that these guys discharge to need a permit. But some states go beyond the federal level. Iowa does not, and this is the result, that we have such little regulation. This was an early case of what we now have an abundance of, which is judicial activism. If the courts interpreted the statutes right, we would have these things permitted at national level, and that would really help level the playing field. Because everybody has to follow the same rules, or at least a modicum of rules that are the same, and then states can do even more.

I'm still hopeful that we can use the tools we have in the form of the Clean Water Act if somebody in the next administration grows a spine. Now they're talking the big talk about going after high prices, going after high food prices, and controlling the oligopolists. But neither party has done anything to actually address that. What they have done when they've been in power is facilitated this kind of behavior, and not enforce the antitrust laws when it comes to meatpackers, when it comes to contracts with farmers. I think we have a lot of the tools that we need in the books. Is just that the federal government is as feckless as the state of Iowa in enforcing the regulations that we have.

Who should be the one enforcing standards? Let's say that a county-wide or a statewide ban is effectively implemented. Do you see organizations like the EPA actually having the power and wherewithal to enforce regulation?

Unfortunately, what we have seen when it comes to agriculture is that EPA and its administrators have been completely subservient to the agricultural industry in a bipartisan way. This was true under Trump. It's true under Biden, but it was also true under Obama, who I like to remind people was the junior senator from Illinois, an agricultural state. He wasn't like, some kind of Cory Booker wannabe, who really has an interest in promoting a more sustainable food system.

So I think what is really needed is to bring back the full independence of the EPA, and that has not been true. When we're talking about biofuels, EPA has been subservient to the agricultural industry and when we talk about these confined animal feeding operations. There was just stuff in the news about the Chesapeake Bay Watershed, where they have a regulation in the form of a total maximum daily load.

The EPA in 2011 basically refused to put that in place for the Mississippi River. Who was president in 2011?

My point is, if we had institutions that worked as intended, a lot of these things would not happen. The 2011 EPA Stoner Memo said, ‘Oh, we're going to go with the Federalist approach, and we're going to let states use their own approaches based on voluntary payments.’

It's 2024, and things have not gotten better. In fact, arguably they’ve gotten worse, because climate change has created a lot more problems upstream. So it's not just the Gulf of Mexico and hypoxia, it's also what's happening upstream in lakes and rivers and we have algae blooms, beach closures, all sorts of problems. So I would say this was clearly a failed approach. If EPA were doing its job, the job that it's supposed to do for the taxpayers, they would go back and say, “Okay, this didn't work. Let’s try this other system.” In the Chesapeake Bay, they're like,”‘Oh, you're not doing enough. We're gonna come back and do something.” We're so far back in that process because of the hold that Big Ag has on the federal government in a bipartisan way.

Is there anything else that you would like to add?

The idea of solving the problems of CAFOs with biodigesters, this kind of end-of-pipe tech fix, is it’s basically ignoring the more systemic problems that CAFOs create. First of all, you only get rid of a portion of the methane because cows also burp, and that methane is not captured. But also, you still have the digestate, and you still have to spread that digestate. You still have other problems. You still have heavy antibiotic use. You still have all the upstream processes. You still need to feed those cows with fossil-fuel intensive corn and soybeans.

I think this is almost like a three cards game that the industry is playing with us, they're saying to us, “oh, look, we've solved the problem. Look here.” But you have to look elsewhere, because the problem is not just at the end of pipe, where the manure is. The problem is the production system. The supply chain that these animals are fed from and then disposed from. So it's really trying to pretend that a band-aid is some major surgical breakthrough. This is not open heart surgery that we have discovered. This is just the band-aid. Look at the big picture. Look at the body, not at the little wound. The problem is much more systemic. I think there are a lot of false solutions in terms of biofuels, in terms CAFOs, that the industry is really flooding the zone with to help us forget about the size of the problem.

Does that make sense?

Yes, it does.

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Next week I’m following around farmers from the Iowa Farmers Union and the National Farmers Union during their annual fly-out to D.C. Expect a Sept. 19 newsletter with Farm Bill history, farmer reactions to the presidential debate, and more.