We won a nationally significant case against the EPA for its lax permitting of factory farms in Idaho, and we are now working to implement it across the country.

For decades, factory farms have polluted lakes, rivers, streams and groundwater in communities across the country. We know this from fish kills, drinking water contamination, harmful algae blooms, and other water quality degradations that these communities see and live with every day. But the Clean Water Act, our foundational federal environmental law for protecting our waterways, states that factory farms are strictly prohibited from discharging pollution and causing this damage. How is this possible?

The answer is that factory farms have long received special treatment from federal and state regulators. The Clean Water Act limits pollution released into waterways through permits that impose pollution limits. But unlike all other industries, water pollution permits issued to factory farms do not require monitoring to determine whether a facility is actually complying with its permit limits. This has allowed factory farms to pollute with impunity while claiming to be “zero discharge” operations.

Monitoring is a cornerstone of the Clean Water Act. Once citizens and regulators know if a polluter is violating their permit, they can take enforcement action and require them to reduce their pollution. This tool is essential for making industrial farms more responsible. That’s why we’re fighting back in court and winning to demand comprehensive and effective pollution monitoring in factory farming permits.

In 2020, we sued the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) with our partner, Snake River Waterkeeper, in the Ninth Circuit Federal Court of Appeals for issuing a permit for Idaho factory farms that did not include monitoring. We argued that all Permits issued under the Clean Water Act must include oversight: Factory farms do not receive special treatment under the law.

The court agreed and sent the permit back to the EPA to add monitoring, because there was no way to know if a factory farm was violating the Clean Water Act without monitoring in place.

But it’s a national problem. Across the country, there are thousands of factory farms that produce large quantities of waste laden with pollutants such as fecal pathogens, nitrogen, phosphorus, pharmaceuticals and heavy metals. It’s difficult to understand how much animal waste industrial farms produce in the United States: 941 billion pounds. every year. And factory farms are not responsibly managing these nearly 1 trillion pounds of waste – quite the contrary, they are storing it in leaky retention ponds, then dumping it into neighboring fields at the lowest possible cost. Leaching and runoff into waterways is proceeding as usual.

So we’re ensuring that regulators in other states follow suit and issue factory farming permits that hold these polluters accountable through effective pollution monitoring. We’ve already challenged factory farming permits in Washington, Colorado, and Montana, and we won’t stop there: we’re tracking state permit renewals to promote reforms across the country in the meantime EPA’s rewriting of Idaho’s permit.

And we continue to win. A Colorado administrative judge ruled in our favor, finding the state permit illegal. But the director of the Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment rejected the judge’s ruling and instead said no oversight was necessary, doubling down on the state’s illegal permit. The state agency has the support of the Colorado Livestock Association to resist common-sense oversight that would provide accountability. We took them both to state court.

In Washington, a state appeals court had already ruled that monitoring was a necessary part of the factory farming license. But state regulators issued a permit anyway without sufficient oversight. So we took them to court, where the Ministry of Ecology recently acknowledged that increased monitoring was needed.

We will continue to fight for pollution monitoring from factory farms across the country so we can protect our lakes, rivers, streams and drinking water. And we will continue to win.