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EPA’s feedlot control still lagging

 June 5, 2013 – As huge livestock farms have boomed in the U.S. the last 30 years, federal environmental regulators have failed to keep up. Even efforts to identify and track possible factory-farm polluters — much less stop them — have been cut back in the face of legal and agribusiness pressures. 

Manure runoff from these farms can contain hormones, pathogens and toxic metals, which contribute to drinking-water pollution, fish kills and a massive dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico. Yet the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency often doesn’t even know which operations are potentially the biggest polluters or where they are. READ MORE