A group of Pierce County residents is awaiting a response to a petition for a contested case hearing for the expansion of Ridge Breeze Dairy to grow four times its size.
Larry Brenner, owner of Vino in the Valley, said his home, land and business is about a mile below the hill where Ridge Breeze is located. He said it makes his land and tributaries, like the Rush River running next to his property, especially vulnerable to things like manure runoff and accidents.
"That river is where my grandpa's land flowed through, so the fact that I now have a piece of that river flowing through my property, it's very special," Brenner observed. "And boy, it's threatened."
Brenner pointed out the expansion could result in almost 80 million gallons of untreated manure annually, potentially affecting water sources and causing increased odor issues and noise from hundreds of manure trucks.
Jenelle Ludwig Krause, executive director of the group Grassroots Organizing Western Wisconsin, lives about 20 minutes from Ridge Breeze. She said the personal effects of environmental and health concerns compelled her to take legal action.
Krause's mother has terminal cancer and she lost her brother to depression eight years ago. She explained when she learned that these conditions could be caused by exposure to carcinogens like those used to treat manure, she was horrified.
"Manure contains large amounts of nitrogen which is a probable carcinogen," Ludwig Krause pointed out. "The odors that come from the manure can increase anxiety and depression, and this really hit me close to home."
Both Ludwig Krause and Brenner said fighting concentrated animal feeding operations is challenging due to federal and state support but emphasized the importance of local ordinances and community involvement in curbing their growth.
"On my own, there wasn't much I could do. I felt really isolated and powerless," Ludwig Krause acknowledged. "I contrast what happened then to what's happening now, and I'm just so deeply grateful and hopeful that when people come together, we actually are building power to be able to change the things that are around us and have a voice in the decisions that impact us. "
Grassroots Organizing Western Wisconsin said it expects the expansion will be paused until the contested case hearing is resolved. In the meantime, it will continue to work with local communities to get more operations ordinances passed to help better regulate the agribusiness.
get more stories like this via email
By Nina B. Elkadi for Sentient.
Broadcast version by Mark Moran for Iowa News Service reporting for the Sentient-Public News Service Collaboration
Iowa has a cancer problem: over 20,000 people are expected to be diagnosed with cancer in the next year, with over 6,000 likely to die from the disease. One of the most frequently cited reports in the state is produced by the Iowa Cancer Registry, which has historically refrained from mentioning agriculture as a potential factor in increasing cancer risk. Yet farming is the dominant industry in the state — over 85 percent of the land is devoted to agricultural use and millions of animals are raised on factory farms contributing to environmental pollution. A new initiative, co-developed by The Harkin Institute at Drake University and the nonprofit Iowa Environmental Council, aims to fill this gap and hone in on the role agriculture plays in increasing cancer risk. The initiative was announced at a conference on water quality, held at The Harkin Institute on April 16.
“Even though there are lots of groups talking about studying the high cancer rates, there are some groups that want to limit what we’re looking at when we’re having these conversations,” Adam Shriver, Director of Wellness and Nutrition Policy at The Harkin Institute, said at the conference. “They might want to look at personal behaviors like going to tanning beds or smoking or drinking. And we feel like there’s a really important part of the conversation that’s being left out.”
While behaviors like smoking and binge drinking are linked to higher cancer risk, the new initiative wants to see the link between agriculture and cancer investigated with the same rigor, especially given the prominent role of industrial animal agriculture in Iowa.
The overwhelming majority — 99 percent — of farmed animals in the U.S. are raised in factory farms. In Iowa, there are almost 124 million farm animals at any given time — around 55 million chickens, 53.4 million hogs, 11.5 million turkeys and 3.7 million cattle and cows. Manure spills are commonplace: a recent report by Food and Water Watch found that from 2013 to 2023, there were 179 documented manure spills that killed almost 2 million fish.
Sarah Green, Executive Director of the Iowa Environmental Council, tells conference attendees that Iowa’s cancer rate is not the only outlier statistic about the state. “Iowa has the most factory farm waste of any other state in the country. Iowa has more concentrated animal feeding operations than any other state in the country. Iowa is among the top five states with the highest industrial pesticide use,” she said. “What role do these factors play in Iowa’s cancer rates? What else might be at play?”
In Iowa, waterways are just as impaired as the health of its residents. Almost 2 million fish were killed from the manure spills that occurred in Iowa between 2013 and 2023. The 179 spills were documented throughout the state, with a major hotspot for spills in Iowa’s northwest corner, where hog and other livestock operations are especially dense. Earlier this year, the group reported that Iowa factory farms produce more waste than any other state, at 109 billion pounds of manure annually, based on U.S. Department of Agriculture data. In March, just one manure spill in northeast Iowa killed over 100,000 fish.
For the new initiative, researchers will conduct a review of existing scientific studies and reports for what the research shows (and what it doesn’t) about the connection between agriculture, both row crop and livestock operations, and cancer in the state. The next step is to determine whether there is sufficient evidence based on the review to recommend stronger public health policy.
The project will also host 15 listening sessions around the state to allow Iowans to “share and record their lived experiences with cancer,” Green said. Public awareness is at the heart of the project. “This entire initiative is about each of you and about Iowans, making people’s lives better, giving families more years to make memories together, helping Iowans from all walks of life have healthier, longer futures in our state,” Green said. “The cancer crisis touches every single county in Iowa.”
The initiative is funded by the Walton Foundation, which provides funding to organizations working to protect rivers, “oceans and the communities they support,” as well as philanthropic organizations Builders Vision and Grace Communications and Iowa Radiology, a radiology imaging practice. Disclosure: Builders Vision and Grace Communications are donors to Sentient; donors have no say over Sentient’s editorial coverage or content.
In an email to Sentient, Jim Larew, legal counsel for the nonprofit environmental advocacy group Driftless Water Defenders, praised the new initiative, noting “those holding visible and prominent positions in cancer research in Iowa” have focused their attention on binge drinking, making no mention of industrialized agriculture. A more “objective” review is necessary, he wrote.
“Established institutions have a tendency to avoid naming environmental causes of cancer, which normally can be addressed by policy changes and, instead, point to behavioral contributors to new cancers. Such tendencies have the effect of insulating the investigating institutions from intense political pressures exerted by powerful industrial-agricultural oligarchs,” Larew wrote.
Shriver told Sentient in an email that the plan is to have the report on the literature review completed by fall of this year.
Nina B. Elkadi wrote this article for Sentient.
get more stories like this via email
An east Texas farming family is reaping the benefits after transitioning from industrial chicken farming to growing hemp.
For 30 years, the Halley family in Cookville raised chickens but in 2019 they started working with the nonprofit Transfarmation Project and transitioned into growing hemp.
Morgan Deany's grandfather started the business. She said over time, they realized they wanted to give back to people and animals.
"The living conditions for the animals are unhealthy," Deany explained. "It's hard for people to actually even work in that environment. It comes with awful lung infections and just all kinds of things."
The Halleys also operate an animal sanctuary on the land. The Let Love Live organization provides rehabilitation for donkeys.
The 13 chicken houses on the Halley farm were located on 50 acres of land. As contract growers, the family raised six batches of chickens per year with more than 190,000 birds in each batch. Deany noted after decades of taking from the earth, they were ready to give something back.
"It feels good to do something positive," Deany emphasized. "To bring life back around and to do something positive for people and animals and show other people that there's other options other than this big industrial farming."
She added during the transition, they have noticed a reawakening of the land.
"As good as chicken manure is for the soil, when you're operating at such a high capacity like that it really strips a lot of the nutrients," Deany pointed out. "The hemp actually regenerates the soil and it puts nutrients back into the soil and it encourages all these other forms of wildlife to come around like birds and different bugs."
get more stories like this via email
By Grey Moran for Sentient.
Broadcast version by Zamone Perez for Virginia News Connection reporting for the Sentient-Public News Service Collaboration
Last August, the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Food & Safety Inspection Service, the federal team responsible for ensuring the safe and accurate labeling of the commercial meat supply, issued letters to several dozen meat producers to inform them of antibiotics detected in beef. This isn’t an unusual finding — antibiotics are widely used on industrial animal farms — yet the meat sampled was on track to be sold as “antibiotic-free,” “raised without antibiotics” or a similar label promising that the animals were never administered antibiotics.
These letters, recently obtained by the advocacy group Farm Forward through a Freedom of Information Act request, reveal that the world’s largest meat producers — JBS, Cargill, and Tyson — raised cattle that tested positive for antibiotics prohibited under USDA-approved labels advertising the beef as free of antibiotics.
“This strongly suggests that the US antibiotic-free beef supply is deeply contaminated and deeply deceptive to American consumers,” Andrew deCoriolis, the executive director of Farm Forward tells Sentient.
The USDA’s Food & Safety Inspection Service found that 20 percent of the samples under this label tested positive for antibiotics, raising questions about how widespread mislabeling is in the U.S. commercial beef supply. These findings were announced last August, but the names of the companies which tested positive for antibiotics were not made publicly available until recently, as part of a new report released by Farm Forward questioning the validity of this popular label.
“It does seem to violate the nature of the label,” says Keeve Nachman, the associate director of the Johns Hopkins Center for a Livable Future. Nachman is not concerned about immediate health impacts — consuming antibiotic residue does not cause an immediate illness, but contributes to the rise of antibiotic resistant bacteria — though he is concerned about the broader lack of transparency around antibiotic use on farms and how that contributes to longer-term antibiotic resistance in humans and animals.
These faulty labeling practices result in a “mischaracterization of the magnitude of antibiotics being used in agriculture,” Nachman says. It’s been estimated that 70 percent of medically-important antibiotics sold in the U.S. — those used to treat human infections — are used to produce meat, dairy and other animal-sourced products. The difference between what’s presented on labels and actual use means the public may not understand the urgency. “It is going to mean that we don’t have the full appreciation of the pressure our agricultural industry puts on the ability of those drugs to resolve human infections,” says Nachman.
The World Health Organization calls antimicrobial resistance “one of the top global public health and development threats,” responsible for millions of deaths every year. The problem is only going to get worse, according to public health experts. The misuse and overuse of antibiotics — both in humans and farm animals (who often receive the same antibiotics) — leads bacteria to develop more resistant genes that then fail to respond to the medically necessary use of these drugs.
The USDA’s Food & Safety Inspection Service (FSIS) sent a total of 27 letters to offending meat companies, advising them to “conduct a root cause analysis to determine how antibiotics were introduced into the animal and to take appropriate measures to ensure future products are not misbranded.” FSIS sampled between one and four cattle carcasses per processing facility, which were randomly selected as part of a 2023 initiative. In the letters, FSIS stated that it would “not take immediate enforcement action in response to individual test results.”
“USDA is continuing to review policies and actions taken by the previous administration,” a FSIS spokesperson told Sentient in an e-mail, in response to questions about whether they intend to take any follow-up enforcement or policy actions. “FSIS remains committed to ensuring the safety of the nation’s food supply and protecting public health.”
deCoriolis points to the USDA’s lax oversight of this voluntary certification program, which requires that companies submit documentation to receive the USDA’s approval for use of this label. The USDA relies on self-reported information to validate these and many other claims, including humanely-raised and free range claims.
Meat brands are required only to submit written statements attesting to their process for ensuring antibiotics are not part of their meat supply chains. As deCoriolis sees it, the certification process is vulnerable to exploitation — companies can charge a higher price for meat sold as antibiotic-free but there is not enough oversight to ensure compliance.
“Despite the USDA knowing that this label claim is, in many cases false, they continue to approve the label without requiring testing to verify the claim,” continued deCoriolis. ”From our perspective, this is the USDA deliberately maintaining labeling policies that allow meat companies to mislead the public. And the effect of that is the USDA is giving meat companies a consumer liability shield to protect them from consumer protection laws.”
The Federal Meat Inspection Act (FMIA) and Poultry Products Inspection Act (PPIA) set the federal legal frameworks for meat and poultry product labeling, which refers to the language on the back or front of meat packaging in grocery stores. Previously, courts have held that if the manufacturer’s labels are approved by the USDA, they can be legally used for advertising — effectively giving the USDA the final say on what winds up on meat labels.
Following these test results, the USDA updated its guidelines to “strongly encourages the use of third-party certification to substantiate animal-raising or environment-related claims,” but the agency fell short of actually requiring third-party verification. The updated guidelines were announced in August under President Biden’s administration, and there has not been any further action in this vein under USDA Secretary Brooke Rollins.
Sentient reached out to every meat producer that received a letter to see if they had followed the USDA’s recommendations in conducting a root causes analysis to determine how antibiotics entered their food supply, or any other additional measures.
According to FSIS’s letter, inspectors identified monensin — an antibiotic that is banned in the European Union as a growth promoter in farm animals — in animal carcasses sampled at Swift Beef Company in Greeley, Colorado, a subsidiary of JBS USA, one of the largest meat companies in the world. JBS USA claims beef sold under its Aspen Ridge brand come from cattle that “have never received growth promotants of any kind.”
In an e-mail to Sentient, Nikki Richardson, JBS USA’s Head of Corporate Communications, wrote that “the product impacted in this instance was identified at the facility and never made it into the food supply.” She also wrote that JBS USA conducted an audit following this incident. No evidence of either statement was provided. Sentient asked if the company would be willing to provide Sentient with “the results of the audit, for the sake of consumer transparency,” but Richardson did not reply.
Similarly, FSIS detected monensin in an animal carcass at a Cargill facility in Fort Morgan, Colorado and tulathromycin (used to treat bovine respiratory illnesses) at a separate Cargill facility in Wyalusing, Pennsylvania. Chuck Miller, the global external communications lead for Cargill, replied that the company has not violated any regulatory requirements.
“Cargill complies with USDA and FSIS regulatory requirements to ensure safe and compliant products enter the market,” stated Miller, in an email to Sentient. “I would also like to reinforce that there has been no evidence that meat with antibiotic residue levels in excess of regulatory standards entered the food supply.”
Tyson did not respond to a request for comment. However, Tyson has scaled back on its previous pledge to raise beef without antibiotics, following previous public scrutiny of these labeling claims.
There are shortcomings to FSIS’s testing program. The tests performed didn’t distinguish between selective antibiotic use to treat an illness and constant low-dose exposure to antibiotics administered directly into the animals’ feed. While both are prohibited under the labeling program, the excessive, chronic use of antibiotics poses a much more serious risk to public health, contributing to the development of antibiotic resistance.
“If a cow is selectively treated for penicillin two years ago and gets harvested, that’s one thing. But if it’s been constantly exposed to a drug, over and over again, leading up to 30 to 60 days prior to the time it was harvested, that’s going to be a whole other level of residue,” says Marshall Bartlett, the co-founder of Home Place Pastures, a cattle and pig farm and processing house in Como, Mississippi. FSIS’s letters don’t indicate the level of residue.
FSIS found that one of Bartlett’s cattle tested positive for penicillin, which is commonly used on small farms to selectively treat illnesses. He performed the root cause analysis as recommended, tracing it back to a nearby producer who sells him cattle, who forgot to tag that animal to indicate that it could no longer be sold under the labeling program. “The producer was very apologetic and understood,” says Bartlett.
Out of all of the meat producers, Bartlett is the only one who said he performed this analysis and was willing to share the results. He hopes that the USDA expands and refines its testing for antibiotics use. “As far as we’re concerned, we’re really committed to transparency and figuring this out, trying to be an advocate for local farmers in our supply chain,” he says.
Grey Moran wrote this article for Sentient.
get more stories like this via email
Contact
