COASTAL REVIEW ONLINE MEDIA COLLABORATION

This is the third installment in a continuing series on making the North Carolina coast more resilient to the effects of climate change, a special reporting project that is part of the Pulitzer Center's nationwide Connected Coastlines initiative.

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MERRY HILL, N.C. - At the confluence of the Albemarle Sound and the Chowan River, Bertie County residents celebrated in June 2019 the grand opening of their first public beach.

Amid the joyous splashing and squeals of laughter, Ron Wesson spied a young girl trying to coax her little brother into the water. The boy would not budge, so the older man gently offered to help.

"We kind of sat there, with our toes in the water," Wesson recounted in a recent interview. "He held my hand, and I walked out there with him. We took it real slow."

Within a short time, the little guy found his nerve and was soon playing carefree in the water with the other kids.

Bertie Beach is the community's first cool gulp of the "Tall Glass of Water," the working name for the county's outdoor recreational project.

"It's weird, though, because I can kind of relate," Wesson said, referring to the boy's hesitation and that he and the boy are both Black.

In 2019, Bertie County was ranked by Wall St. 24/7 analysis as the poorest county in North Carolina. Of its population of 19,000 people, about 68% are Black. Wesson said that, historically, the county has the highest percentage of Blacks in the state.

But the experience that day transcended race, and its implications reverberated beyond Bertie County. The celebration was part of a strategic regional approach to community resilience: Bring the environment to the people and stimulate economic growth through sustainable ecotourism.

After devoting much of his career to study of North Carolina's barrier islands and sea-level rise impacts, Stanley Riggs, a professor emeritus at East Carolina University, has in recent years focused on the inland communities of the Albemarle-Pamlico estuarine system, which comprises sounds and rivers and is threatened by sea-level rise and other climate-change impacts. Those waterways and surrounding lands offer great opportunity but are considered vastly underutilized.

"That's one of the world's great water systems and it's hardly used," Riggs said in an interview late last year. "There's nobody on Alligator River and the whole Albemarle Sound system. There's precious few people out there.

"We've lost several generations of people. Kids have never learned to swim. You take people out on boats and they're scared to death."

Riggs is chairman of the North Carolina Land of Water initiative, or NC LOW, and Tall Glass of Water is one of its first success stories.

To Wesson, a county commissioner and Bertie native, the project's multiyear effort shines new light on the county's wealth of natural resources.

"It's about broadening the opportunities and possibilities in a community," he said. "You have to look at the resources available in a community. This is economic development. This is our brick and mortar."

Perhaps more than any promotion or lecture could ever do, Tall Glass of Water is showing that climate resilience springs not only from a community's shared investment in its environment, but also from its shared access to and benefits of that environment.

Its success demonstrates to the entire region that resilience and adaptation to changing climate conditions can enrich communities and open up new economic possibilities, while protecting their environments.

People from all over northeastern North Carolina attended the grand opening of Bertie Beach, said Steve Biggs, Bertie County's director of economic development, in a recent interview. About 250 people were coming on summer weekends, he said. Swimming, kayaking, canoeing and paddleboarding are all allowed. Eventually, he said, he envisions families traveling to the Outer Banks stopping by for a respite in Bertie.

Biggs explained that the genesis of Tall Glass of Water, or TGOW, was in about 2014, when he was on the lookout for a piece of land for the county to build a boat ramp on the Chowan River. As he was heading into work one day, he said he noticed a "For Sale" sign on some waterfront property.

"I came in and jokingly told the commissioner who happened to be here that morning, 'So I found your 2 acres for your boat ramp, but it comes with an additional 135 acres,'" Biggs said. As it ended up, the county purchased the 137 acres, he said, and added 10 more later.

Even though Phase I of the TGOW project was stalled by COVID-19 shutdowns, the public outdoor recreation plan has already injected a bolt of energy in talk of ecotourism collaboratives among Albemarle communities.

"We wanted to create a place where folks can spend the day," now-retired Bertie County manager Scott Sauer said in an interview shortly before the June 29, 2019, opening day. "We think this will be a place that will draw people regionally."

Not only does the project boast a 3/4-mile stretch of shoreline - 350 feet of which is sandy beach - and shallow, calm water bordered by soundside cliffs where the Chowan River begins, TGOW also includes opportunities for kayaking and canoeing, and will eventually offer a music pavilion, picnic shelters, hiking trails, ramps and walkways, primitive campsites and environmental educational field experiences for students and adults, according to plans. There also will be restoration of the former agricultural land and woodlands, which will help restore the wetlands.

Gov. Roy Cooper announced last September that the TGOW project would receive $500,000 through the North Carolina Parks and Recreation Trust Fund, which awarded $5 million total in grants to fund 16 local parks and recreation projects across the state.

Bertie County's local match for Phase 1 is $529,591, for a total of $1,029,591.

The county-owned land encompasses Site Y, where archaeologists with the First Colony Foundation recently discovered artifacts that indicate some members of the 1587 Lost Colony relocated there after leaving Roanoke Island.

As luck would have it, a large area of adjacent wilderness was protected around the same time as TGOW was hatched. The new, more than 1,200-acre Salmon Creek State Natural Area was purchased for conservation by the nonprofit Coastal Land Trust, which turned it over to the state in 2019. Altogether, a total of 1,432 acres of undeveloped soundfront land now is protected.

Robin Payne, a project consultant for Tall Glass of Water, said the citizens provided input into the master plan, which was released in March 2020. The project is being built and funded in phases.

"You know, it really all has to be sustainable, and it has to tie together community, environment and economic development," she told Coastal Review Online last year. "And so, as we move forward, we're making sure that we connect those three points."

Until now, unless a family could go to a private pool or beach, it wasn't a realistic option to enjoy a refreshing dip - especially for African-Americans. There still are plenty of kids from Bertie who have never been to the ocean, Wesson said; the Outer Banks is about a 90-minute drive from Windsor.

Wesson, 70, was born and raised in Bertie County before leaving for college and beginning a 32-year career as a corporate executive in supply-management solutions with Dun and Bradstreet.

He returned home about 15 years ago, and hasn't forgotten what it feels like as a Black kid who had never had the opportunity to swim or go to a beach. He said he didn't get to swim until he persuaded his mother to take him at age 12 or so to a biracial pool in Rocky Mount, where one of the lifeguards informally taught him the basics of swimming.

"If you've never been in the water, other than a bathtub," he said, "you're not sure what's going to happen to you."

Bertie Beach is the first public access beach not only in the county, he said, but also along the entire Albemarle Sound. To this day, there is no public pool in the area.

Windsor, Bertie's county seat, suffered extreme flooding from Hurricane Floyd in 1999 and Hurricane Matthew in 2016, but flooding overall has increased in recent years. That realization spurred residents to support efforts to make the town more resilient to flooding.

Biggs, the economic development director, said more people are elevating their homes and businesses, but he added that, right now, there is not much state or federal help for small businesses. Still, with more people homebound as a result of the pandemic, he said, there is a lot more renovation being done, and the town is continuing to build back.

A farming community by tradition, many residents today work at the Perdue chicken processing plant or at the state correctional facility in Windsor, which houses medium- and maximum-security prisoners. Other folks raise chickens for Perdue or have jobs at Nucor Steel in adjacent Hertford County. The Hope Plantation is in Bertie County, but there are few other tourist attractions. At the same time, there are few chain stores and restaurants.

Biggs noted that more farmers and landowners in the county - as elsewhere in the region - also are leasing their land out for solar farms, which can produce steady income.

Inland coastal counties in North Carolina, especially in the rural northeast corner, are some of the poorest in the state, with losses in population and traditional industries such as timber, farming and fishing, leaving historic old towns with vacant storefronts and entire communities with too few good jobs.

Unlike the Outer Banks' beach communities that benefit from a billion-dollar annual tourism industry, those communities in the "Inner Banks" - a relatively new term used to describe inland coastal counties - often are overlooked by visitors.

As part of NC LOW efforts, Riggs, the coastal scientist, in 2018 produced a report, "From Rivers to Sounds in the Bertie Water Crescent," which detailed opportunities for economic development that enhances and protects the environment and culture of the region. That environment encompasses numerous rivers and tributaries with pristine, clear blackwater, filtered by the surrounding peat bogs and wetlands.

In a broader NC LOW report, recommendations include development of five educational and recreational "water hubs" for ecotourism development, with each plan designed for the unique qualities of each hub, but complementary to the whole system.

"All ecosystem components of these different water bodies and their vast swamp forest floodplains," the report said, "are dominated by numerous forms of wildlife including a vast recreational fisheries resource."

Within the last 15 years or so, an on-again, off-again proposal to connect the Albemarle port communities with a small ferry operation has been enthusiastically embraced by local governments for its appeal to tourists and as a potential bonanza for economic development. But for various reasons, the idea has never come to fruition. Still, it has never entirely died, and the idea may yet bear fruit.

"Every time anything about it happens, everybody gets excited: 'When are the boats coming?'" said state Rep. Ed Goodwin, R-Chowan, who also was a former director of the state ferry division, in a recent interview. "I firmly believe that sooner or later, I'll get it. I believe it will happen."

A 2018 report "The Harbor Town Project," a collaborative done by the University of North Carolina Kenan-Flagler Business School, said that a ferry system serving the Albemarle Sound could "increase tourism and create sustainable jobs and careers" and "is an attractive investment opportunity that can become profitable."

Ferries could serve ports in Elizabeth City, Edenton, Hertford, Plymouth, Columbia and Kitty Hawk, and possibly expand to Windsor, Williamston, Manns Harbor and Manteo, the report said. As many as 140,000 Outer Banks tourists, the report estimated, could be lured to extend their vacation to hop on Inner Banks ferries.

Potentially, the system could garner about $14 million in tourism revenue and create 94 jobs, with annual ridership projected to be 107,000 in the first year.

"Tourists and visitors would enjoy visiting historic towns and sites, seeing nature, and exploring the IBX region by ferry," the report said, playing off the ubiquitous OBX abbreviation for Outer Banks.

According to news accounts, plans were being made for a 100-foot private passenger vessel to start ferrying passengers between six towns in May 2020. But with COVID-19 shutdowns in mid-March, everything having to do with tourism ground to a halt.

"Everybody is still enthusiastic and wants it done next week, even if it's an expansion of the current ferry system," Goodwin said, referring to the state Ferry Division system on the coast.

Goodwin said he envisions developing routes that highlight the uniqueness of the Albemarle's environment, while promoting the strength of the region's rich culture.

"Everybody loves to ride a boat," he said. "We've got to maximize what we have. And what we have is quaint little towns with a lot of history in them."

Coastal Review Online Assistant Editor Jennifer Allen contributed to this report.

Next in the series: Learning to live with water

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This story was produced with original reporting from Catherine Kozak for the Coastal Review Online, with support from the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting. The full story is online here.


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By Dawn Attride for Sentient.
Broadcast version by Mark Moran for Iowa News Service reporting for the Sentient-Public News Service Collaboration

In a single day, Lee Zeldin, head of the Environmental Protection Agency, has spearheaded an institutional reversal of longstanding U.S. environmental policies in what he calls "31 historic actions." From questioning the well established finding that greenhouse gases are harmful to health to eradicating Clean Water Act provisions, the deregulation blitz could lead to increased pollution and risk to public health, environmental groups warn. "We are driving a dagger straight into the heart of the climate change religion to drive down cost of living for American families, unleash American energy, bring auto jobs back to the U.S. and more," said EPA Administrator Zeldin.

Weakening Water Quality Laws Garners Support From Farm Lobby

One controversial action is a set of proposed changes to the Clean Water Act, established in 1972 to regulate pollutants in U.S. waters and prevent contamination from industries like factory farms and mineral mining. In a 2023 Supreme Court decision, Sackett v. EPA, the Court narrowed the definitions of protected waters to exclude certain wetlands unconnected to "navigable" waterways. Although Biden's EPA revised protections to include this ruling, Zeldin argues his predecessors "failed to follow the law and implement the Supreme Court's clear holding in Sackett." He now seeks to further deregulate waterway protections.

"The previous Administration's definition of 'waters of the United States' placed unfair burdens on the American people and drove up the cost of doing business," Zeldin said on Wednesday.

For states like Iowa where roughly half of water bodies are polluted (thanks in part to the 109 billion pounds of animal manure produced each year by factory farms in the state), the Clean Water Act already doesn't do enough to protect water as it stands, David Cwiertny, professor of civil engineering and director for the Center for Health Effects of Environmental Contamination at the University of Iowa, tells Sentient. It fails to meaningfully address non-point source pollution, and exempts major pollutant sources like subsurface agricultural drainage, he says.

"As a result, analyses have shown that Iowa has among some of the worst water quality in the nation based on impaired stream miles and lake area under the Clean Water Act. These impairments have endangered public drinking water supplies while also limiting recreational water access for Iowans," says Cwiertny.

The EPA's latest announcement may make matters worse. "It's hard to see water quality in Iowa improving with the proposed plans to rework WOTUS, which will most likely end up further reducing the number of water bodies protected by the Act," Cwiertny says.

Zeldin credited concerns from farmers and ranchers as a factor to the change, as attendee American Farm Bureau President Zippy Duvall said he was pleased with the decision, stating it provides clarity for farmers and will help them "protect the environment while ensuring they can grow the food America's families rely on."

Stacy Woods, research director for the Food and Environment Program at the Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS), said the EPA is "giving a green light" for industrial agriculture to pollute and drain valuable wetlands. "Big Ag interest groups like the Farm Bureau pretend to represent small family farms when they are really working for giant industrial agricultural companies who could not care less about draining, polluting and flooding rural America in service of their bottom line. Missing from this conversation are the voices of farmers who are invested in being good stewards of their land and who are actually part of the rural communities that benefit from wetlands," Woods said in a statement.

Crackdowns on Environmental Pollutant Regulations Will Have an Outsized Impact on Vulnerable Communities

Water wasn't the only thing on the agenda, as oil and gas regulations are also under scrutiny, along with clean air standards and termination of the "Good Neighbor" rule that requires states to manage their own pollution that can be blown into nearby states.

"EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin today announced plans for the greatest increase in pollution in decades. The result will be more toxic chemicals, more cancers, more asthma attacks, and more dangers for pregnant women and their children. Rather than helping our economy, it will create chaos," Amanda Leland, Executive Director of the Environmental Defense Fund said in a statement.

Ending or revoking such regulations means fewer protections for communities with high numbers of low socioeconomic status residents. Pollution also disproportionately impacts Black and Hispanic communities, due in part to historical practices like redlining, which meant rejecting financial services to those looking to move to a residential area, often based on race or ethnicity. This practice, as well as ongoing pollution and other inequities, leads to concentration of vulnerable communities near hazardous pollution sources. Research shows these communities have higher rates of asthma and poor mental health. The EPA also plans to shut down its climate justice offices across the country whose primary focus is to help those most affected by the burdens of pollution and climate change.

These latest policy moves are likely to be met with legal action from both sides; environmental groups have already promised to "vigorously oppose" Zeldin's "attack" on public health while Trump's FBI pledged to criminally charge climate groups who received funding from the Biden administration.

"Though [these actions] will not hold up in the face of science or the court of law, they already pose grave and immediate threats to people and the environment," Dr. Rachel Cleetus, the policy director with the Climate and Energy Program at the UCS, said.


Dawn Attride wrote this article for Sentient.


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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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