Stop Taxpayer Funding of Industrial Animal Agriculture

CAFOs, including manure storage, have a tax advantage over pasture-based livestock operations.

Tax exemptions reduce revenue to the state and county, while CAFOs themselves put extra strain on local resources, with additional wear on country roads, water use, and potential need for pollution remediation. Iowa has reported a loss of $4.5 million in county revenue due to CAFO property tax exemptions. State policymakers should consider sunsetting tax exemptions that disproportionately benefit CAFOs and implement exemptions that incentivize pasture-based livestock operations.

In many states, legislators with ties to agribusiness have passed laws to favor CAFO development and have dismantled provisions that give communities a voice in CAFO siting or that protect public health. For state policymakers wanting to slow or reverse this trend, perhaps the most important action is to be aware of any new or recent legislation proposing to exempt agriculture from regulation or tax – these are generally bills to promote CAFO development and should be opposed.

Environmental Protections

Lawmakers can push for stricter environmental protections to regulate air and water pollution from large-scale livestock operations; require setback distances from homes, schools, businesses. and roads; ensure that manure is responsibly managed; and increase public participation in CAFO permitting and siting.

In almost all states, responsibility for enforcement of the federal Clean Water Act has been delegated to the state’s environmental protection agency. The states should be issuing National Pollution Discharge Elimination System (NPDES) permits for CAFOs over a certain size. Permits should protect surface and groundwater, include agency monitoring and inspections, have mechanisms for enforcement, and include robust public input. Unfortunately, the CAFO permitting process is often simply pro forma, and state agency budgets are often too low for effective inspection and enforcement. State policymakers can support adequate funding for the agencies that oversee CAFO permitting to cover inspection, compliance, and enforcement, as well as ensuring they have the authority to issue penalties for bad actors and repeat violators. If policymakers think that the enforcement agency is not properly doing its job with regard to CAFOs, they can advance legislation to require the state agency to report on the number of permits, inspections, violations. and enforcement actions that have been taken against CAFOs in the state.

Manure-to-energy projects are rarely economically feasible without public subsidies, particularly when construction and operation costs are taken into account. Additionally, they require an enormous volume of manure in order to operate. While manure-based biogas is touted as being environmentally sustainable, its development actually relies on CAFO expansion – which is definitely not sustainable. In fact, manure-to-energy projects are generally a way for CAFOs to externalize costs of productions onto the public. Further, since they are not renewable energy sources, they should not be included in state renewable energy portfolios or receive tax credits. State officials should work to strike any existing manure-to-energy components of a state renewable energy portfolio.

The Environmental Quality Incentive Program (EQIP) of the USDA Natural Resource Conservation Service (NRCS) provides funds to farm operations to implement environmentally sustainable practices. CAFOs access millions of dollars of EQIP funds for pollution control measures such as upgraded manure storage, but mitigating manure pollution does not make these facilities environmentally sustainable. EQIP funding is distributed from the USDA through a state conservationist, advised by a technical committee of stakeholders. State policymakers could pass a resolution encouraging the state conservationist to direct all EQIP funding to pasture-based livestock operations to avoid subsiding CAFOs with public funding. State policymakers could also work to ensure impacted communities or pasture-based producers are seeking appointments to the state technical committee, which oversees the distribution of EQIP funds.

Animal Welfare

There are also animal welfare concerns with CAFOs. These include use of gestation crates for breeding female pigs that are too small for the pigs to turn around; battery cages for chickens that do not allow the hens to spread their wings; and the practice of docking the tails of dairy cows, which is painful and causes distress, as they are then unable to swat biting flies. There are no animal welfare regulations at the federal level, and because of this, some states have taken action to ban cruel farming practices.

Overall, the landscape of CAFO regulation in the states is bleak, in that community protections from CAFO pollution are inadequate at best. As a result, lawmakers in some states have proposed an outright moratorium on permitting of new and expanding CAFOs altogether.