CHARLESTON, W.Va. — A vote this week will determine if West Virginia and seven other states will lose some pollution-control standards for the Ohio River.
The eight watershed states and the federal government belong to the Ohio River Sanitation Commission. ORSANCO sets uniform pollution standards for the 1,000-mile river, from Pittsburgh to the Mississippi.
On Thursday, commissioners will vote on a plan to scrap their rules and allow state and federal standards to take precedence. Gail Hesse, director of the Great Lakes Water Program at the National Wildlife Federation, said that would have a big impact on communities.
"In cities like Cincinnati, they've just made an enormous investment in their waterfront properties,” Hesse said. “And turning the clock back - Ohio could have one set of standards for its section of the river, but just across the river on the other side, Kentucky could have a completely different set of standards - is a bad idea."
Those in favor of the proposed change say each of the states has its own water quality standards, making ORSANCO redundant. The Ohio River is the source of drinking water for 5 million people.
Angie Rosser, executive director with the West Virginia Rivers Coalition is also a member of ORSANCO's Watershed Organization Advisory Committee. She said ORSANCO was created specifically because someone needed to oversee pollution controls for the entire river system. She added the plan to end that oversight is very unpopular, judging from public comments.
"Hundreds and hundreds of comments, and just a handful supporting the change,” Rosser said. “There are facilities, industrial facilities up and down the river, being able to discharge higher levels of pollution, relieving them of treatment costs."
Those in favor of keeping the rules as they are say ORSANCO helps the member states - where environmental agencies are often understaffed - by assessing pollution risks and setting control standards. And individual states may be unprepared to take over those jobs.
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By Nina B. Elkadi for Sentient.
Broadcast version by Mark Moran for Nebraska News Connection reporting for the Sentient-Public News Service Collaboration
The Clean Water Act, salmonella inspections and equity in the Packers and Stockyards Act are just a few of the regulations that the industry lobbying group the Meat Institute, formerly known as the North American Meat Institute, is calling for the Trump administration to pull back.
On January 27, Meat Institute president Julie Anna Potts penned a letter to the White House providing the new administration with "strategies to reduce burdensome regulations and address meat prices for consumers." In the letter, Potts blames the previous administration for inflation, which she claims was caused by increased regulation in the food industry. Potts also targets increased worker protections against discrimination, which she claims are part of diversity, equity and inclusion practices.
"Based on what they propose, the path to lower food prices is exploiting child labor and engaging in sharecropping production models," Austin Frerick, antitrust expert and author of Barons: Money, Power, and the Corruption of America's Food Industry, tells Sentient. "They're grab-bagging words in the moment to fit their deregulatory race to the bottom."
If Trump takes the advice of this lobbying group - which touts its representation of meat packers and processors that "account for more than 95 percent of U.S. output" of processed meats - experts do not agree that prices will necessarily go down. According to Food & Water Watch staff attorney Emily Miller, the real issue at play is consolidation in the industry.
"We know that the real cost of high food prices in this country is not inflation or the cost of regulatory compliance, as the industry is claiming. It's corporate consolidation and greed," Miller says. "Rolling back regulations that are meant to protect farmers, slaughterhouse workers, frontline communities and consumers from exploitation and pollution will just allow the meat industry to break even more profit."
While food prices have increased at a fast rate - as much as 2.5 times the rate of inflation - corporate profits have sky-rocketed five times faster than inflation. Four companies control around 70 percent of the pork industry and four companies control more than half the chicken processing market.
Even if the industry successfully de-regulates and lowers costs associated with stricter environmental and worker protections, there is no guarantee that would result in lower food prices. Corporations can continue to pocket the difference.
What This Could Mean for Workers
One rule the Meat Institute wants to rescind is the Inclusive Competition and Market Integrity Under the Packers and Stockyards Act. The rule, which went into effect in 2024, "prohibits the adverse treatment of livestock producers and poultry growers based on race, color, religion, national origin, sex (including pregnancy, sexual orientation, and gender identity), disability, marital status, or age."
The Meat Institute claims this rule "attempts to enshrine" diversity, equity and inclusion concepts into the act.
"I think this is definitely a way of baiting Trump to act," Miller says. "What they're really asking, pretty unabashedly, is for the ability to discriminate against other people for personal characteristics that have nothing to do with their business or the economy or anything that would have any sort of justification, which is pretty outrageous."
Another set of protections the Meat Institute targets in its bid to the new administration relates to contract chicken producers - farmers who raise chickens on a contract basis for mega-corporations like Tyson Foods. Passed under the Biden administration, the regulations had been intended in part to help chicken farmers who end up taking on enormous debts as part of their contractual agreements with poultry companies.
What This Could Mean for the Environment
The Clean Water Act is considered one of the cornerstones of environmental protection in the U.S., but when it comes to regulating the discharges from agriculture, it has long fallen short. Clawing back the already weakened regulatory power of the act could further pollute waterways that are already in poor shape, especially in states with increasing density of factory farms. For instance, more than half of rivers and streams are degraded in Iowa - a state where most counties are "severely or highly concentrated with factory farms."
Miller, of Food & Water Watch, notes that the federal government is under a court enforceable settlement that requires them to finalize the rule the Meat Institute wants to disassemble. Any effort to roll that back, she says, would be in direct violation of the settlement.
"The industry would, of course, want the least amount of regulation possible and to maintain the status quo that allows them to really harm the communities that neighbor these operations, which overwhelmingly are low income communities of color," she says.
In states dominated by factory farms, manure discharged into waterways has led to detrimental health outcomes, fish kills and higher drinking water costs.
In addition, much of the meat produced in Iowa factory farms is in turn exported. "We're basically destroying rural communities in the Midwest, notably Iowa, to feed foreign nations," Frerick says. "The environmental destruction these production models do and that says something when it's cheaper to do it here than in China."
Frerick argues that Republican administrations "turbocharge" the race to the bottom with de-regulation, opening the doors for catastrophic changes to not only the food system itself, but consumer trust and confidence that they are getting a safe product.
"You're playing Russian Roulette with people's health and safety. If you have one big scandal, one big outbreak, you could really shift people's consumption and food diets in profound ways that really can wreck an industry," Frerick says.
What This Could Mean for Food Safety
Pulling back proposed salmonella regulation could endanger consumers, Jaydee Hanson, Policy Director of the Center for Food Safety tells Sentient. Meat Institute is calling to replace a proposed rule that would increase monitoring in the poultry slaughter process with "a performance standard with the input of stakeholders."
"I'm concerned that the next thing they'll be pushing for is less aggressive enforcement of rules on E coli," he tells Sentient. "We don't want to go back to poor inspection with state inspectors that are being bribed and say that that's going to give us cheaper meat."
"You want a regulatory system where consumers know they're getting a healthy, safe product that was produced in a way that was ethical," Frerick says. "When you get rid of that, you're incentivizing the worst people."
The Bottom Line
"Any regulatory rollbacks that allow the meat industry to further consolidate its market power will just have the opposite effect on consumers and on food prices generally," Miller says. "Efforts to roll those things back would just continue to inflict harm on the people who are growing and producing our food in this country, and simply give a bigger profit margin to the corporations that are at the top of the food chain."
Though no distinct moves have been made to address the Meat Institute's requests, on January 31, the Trump White House announced a de-regulatory blitz, requiring that "whenever an agency promulgates a new rule, regulation, or guidance, it must identify at least 10 existing rules, regulations, or guidance documents to be repealed."
"Concentrated markets gouge. It's what they do. You see innovation and quality decline," Frerick tells Sentient. "Once you add in the cost, the negative externalities, all the pollution stuff, it's even more expensive. So we're being doubly-screwed, to be blunt."
Nina B. Elkadi wrote this article for Sentient.
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By Nina B. Elkadi for Sentient.
Broadcast version by Mark Moran for Iowa News Service reporting for the Sentient-Public News Service Collaboration
In Postville, Iowa, a town with a population of 2,503, the slaughterhouse Agri Star Meat and Poultry LLC is the largest employer. Although there is no publicly available data on how many animals are slaughtered at Agri Star every day, in 2010, CEO Hershey Friedman hoped the plant could “process 1,000 head of cattle per day within a couple of years.” In December 2024, three non-profit organizations filed an intent to sue Agri Star for illegally discharging animal waste products into public waterways. The slaughterhouse has until February 21, 2025, to respond and answer how they will comply with the Clean Water Act — or the suit will be filed.
Attorneys working on the current case claim that Agri Star has been violating its National Pollution Discharge Permit — a Clean Water Act rule aimed at limiting excessive pollution from point sources — by illegally discharging large quantities of animal processing waste. Last year, “250,000 gallons of untreated beef processing waste,” flowed into the Postville water supply, the notice states.
Agri Star, formerly known as Agriproccessors, is no stranger to controversy (under different ownership, in 2008 it was the site of one of the largest immigration raids in U.S. history, which also found child labor violations).
“The City of Postville stated that while Agri Star worked to fix the blocked sewer line, Agri Star did not appear to limit or cease production — processing waste continued to flow to the City’s treatment system at a rate of 148 to 164 gallons per minute,” the attorneys wrote. This resulted in “an interference with the City of Postville’s normal wastewater treatment process,” which is a violation of their permit. As a result, the Postville water treatment facility was shuttered for two days.
The intent to sue notice was co-authored by Driftless Water Defenders, a non-profit Iowa-based group working to protect Iowa waterways from agricultural polluters, as well as Public Justice and FarmSTAND, both non-profit legal advocacy groups.
“We’ve got a very powerful structure of industrial agriculture that has found a way to feel immune to the pressures of individual citizens to rebuff them, particularly on political fronts,” counsel for the Driftless Water Defenders board of directors James Larew tells Sentient. “They’re so strong and that litigation is a critical ingredient that we need, because the laws like this one are on the books. They need to be enforced. And so we state that we’re there to litigate.”
A State Built on Animal Agriculture
Iowa is at the forefront of what some experts are calling a water quality crisis. As the state with the most animals being raised in confinement, animal waste, which is often illegally discharged, has become a central component of Iowa life.
Chris Jones, a water quality expert and president of Driftless Water Defenders, explains that prior to the passage of the Clean Water Act, Iowa’s waterways were completely “dead” due to slaughterhouse discharges. The Clean Water Act changed things — but without enforcement, the law obviously becomes less efficacious.
“Our [Department of Natural Resources] is not exactly zealous about enforcing rules and doing things that are going to improve the quality of our water,” Jones tells Sentient. “Anybody with eyes and ears in their head can see and hear that. I think they’re reluctant to do things that might appear to be unfriendly to industry or to agriculture, and as such, they sort of abdicated their role as a deterrent for these sorts of things.”
The overwhelming majority — 99 percent — of farmed animals in the U.S. are raised in factory farms. In Iowa, there are over almost 124 million farmed animals; around 55 million chickens, 53.4 million hogs, 11.5 million turkeys, and 3.7 million cattle and cows. With a new federal administration, Jones predicts that the livestock industry has the potential to expand even further, and regulations could diminish.
To demonstrate the extent of this issue, Jones poses a hypothetical scenario: What if the Des Moines wastewater treatment plant did not follow their pollution discharge permit requirements and decided to dump unlimited quantities of human waste into the Des Moines river, poisoning the water supply of a community 75 miles downstream?
“That’s essentially what [the Department of Natural Resources] is doing,” he says. “They’re just saying, okay, Agri Star, go ahead, dump whatever you want into the stream.”
The Iowa Department of Natural Resources and the Environmental Protection Agency have recently come under scrutiny for not enforcing these discharge permits strongly enough. Several groups sued the EPA for their lack of enforcement under the Clean Water Act, and in October 2024 the court struck them down.
Holding polluters accountable through targeted lawsuits, Larew tells Sentient, is one potential path forward.
The Iowa Department of Natural Resources declined to comment due to pending litigation.
Private Attorneys General
In lieu of strong federal or statewide enforcement, these legal groups see themselves as “private attorneys general,” Public Justice attorney Daniel C. Snyder says. To remedy the harm caused by these discharges, the groups are calling for civil penalties against Agri Star.
“Those civil penalties are meant to deter these exact types of violations. You have a penalty that is high enough so that everyone goes, ‘Wow. We should take notice of that. We should make sure we’re complying with our permits so that Driftless Water Defenders or other groups don’t come around and say, hey you you are also in violation of the act,’” Snyder tells Sentient.
For these advocacy groups, the goal is not to put these operations out of business. Larew emphasizes that they are simply using public information and public laws to hold polluters accountable.
“I think there’s a public realization these last couple years in particular, that something’s really out of whack, that we feel threatened with the quality of our water,” Larew says. “[We have an] imbalance right now with the new industrial agricultural model, the concentration of livestock into particular areas, with waste so concentrated that it can’t be adequately used and it ends up being in our water.”
Agri Star did not respond to multiple requests for comment.
Nina B. Elkadi wrote this article for Sentient.
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Watchdog groups said the West Virginia Department of Environmental Protection seems poised to allow coal company Keystone West Virginia to walk away from its obligation to treat acid mine drainage at a 160-acre surface mine near Marmet, in Kanawha County.
When a company is done mining and is done doing required reclamation work, it will ask the state to return the bond money given when it received its permit to mine. But in this case, the company has not done the cleanup.
Chad Cordell, coordinator for the Kanawha Forest Coalition, said the company has been involved in numerous complaints related to water pollution in Lens Creek.
"This is really a push where we're telling the DEP, not only do you need to not grant this bond release, but you really need to start enforcing the water quality laws and get this company to deal with this water pollution," Cordell outlined.
Keystone West Virginia has been plagued with regulatory problems and lawsuits. The mine the company is seeking for bond release has received 36 notices of violations and 12 cessation orders since it was first permitted, according to the coalition.
Cordell added decades of research and lived experience from residents show the high levels of heavy metals from acid mine drainage, which color the water a coppery brown, can cause permanent damage to drinking water quality, local infrastructure including bridges, public water and power plant supplies, and public health.
"There's really no debate about that at this point," Cordell contended. "We know that there are all sorts of health impacts from these mines. A lot of that is connected to the water impacts of these mines."
There are roughly 400 miles of freshwater trout streams in West Virginia that are impaired because of increased acidity levels from acid mine drainage, according to the West Virginia Water Research Institute.
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