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hurricane florence
The Scary New Math of Factory Farm Waste
Factory farms are exempt from reporting requirements under the Clean Air and Clean Water Acts. Now a new tool can provide solid evidence of the environmental harm they can cause.
Jun 20, 2019
It has been almost a year since Hurricane Florence slammed the Carolinas, dumping a record 30 inches of rainfall in some parts of the states. At least 52 people died, and property and economic losses reached $24 billion, with nearly $17 billion in North Carolina alone. Flood waters also killed an estimated 3.5 million chickens and 5,500 hogs.
A lesser-known impact of the devastating hurricane was revealed through satellite photos released after the storm. Excessive rainfall flooded concentrated animal feeding operations (CAFOs) in low-lying areas, carrying riverbed sediment and animal waste previously stored in open-air lagoons into nearby waterways and then into the Atlantic. The difference between the photos, taken just five months apart before and after the storm, is striking.
Agriculture is the leading cause of pollution in the nation's rivers and lakes, according to the EPA, much of it emanating from large-scale factory farms.
Generally, CAFOs dispose of animal waste by spraying it as fertilizer and storing the excess in massive underground pits or open-air lagoons, where sulfur-eating bacteria often turn the mixture bright pink. Given that cropland can absorb only so much, a good deal of the waste ends up in groundwater, rivers, streams, and the ocean. In fact, agriculture is the leading cause of pollution in the nation's rivers and lakes, according to the EPA, much of it emanating from large-scale factory farms.
Floods can have even more devastating consequences for water quality. The risk is particularly pressing for North Carolina, a state regularly smacked by hurricanes, because it houses more than 2,200 hog CAFOs and 3,900 poultry CAFOs, and produces up to 10 billion gallons of animal waste a year. These estimates come from the Environmental Working Group.
One problem is that they are just that--estimates.
The truth is no one really knows how much factory farm waste is escaping into our environment because no federal agency collects consistent and reliable information on the number, size, and location of large-scale agricultural operations, nor the pollution they're emitting. This means there is considerable variation on how thoroughly states track and monitor CAFOs. Without this information, no one can monitor and hold CAFOS accountable for mismanaged waste and related health and environmental damage.
Stanford Law Professor Daniel Ho and Ph.D. student Cassandra Handan-Nader are hoping to change that. In a paper published in Nature Sustainability in April, they show how a new algorithm can help put CAFOs on the map. Their research focused on hog and poultry operations. The latter can contribute as much nutrient runoff to watersheds as pig operations but are largely unpermitted in North Carolina and therefore much harder to detect.
The Clean Water Act requires permits for CAFOs that discharge pollutants directly into federally regulated waters. However, permits are not required for facilities that may discharge pollutants, say, if there was a break in the manure storage tank or a hurricane. An estimated 60 percent of CAFOs do not hold permits, reported the EPA in 2011, and so monitoring these facilities for unintentional pollution is nearly impossible.
Due to the lack of information about CAFOs and the failure of the government to provide oversight, several environmental and public interest groups have conducted their own studies of the issue. Several of these organizations have hired contractors to manually scan satellite images or physically identify facilities by plane or car. But this process is time- and resource-intensive. For North Carolina alone, contractors need about six weeks to manually scan satellite images on Google Maps, according to the Environmental Working Group.
Ho and Handan-Nader's automated approach could accomplish the same task in less than two days.
The development is a welcome one in an industry notoriously lacking in transparency. Around 25 states have pushed for "ag-gag" laws, which criminalize undercover filming or photography at factory farms without the consent of the owner. Nine states have passed these laws, and legislation is pending in two additional states, Kansas and North Carolina. In Idaho, Utah, and Wyoming, ag-gag laws were later struck down in higher courts as a violation of free speech and equal protection.
Proponents of ag-gag laws argue that they protect the animal agriculture industry, and farm owners' privacy. Critics say it gives factory farmers license to continue practices that are dirty, unsafe, and cruel. "This project helps mitigate a dangerous dearth of information about CAFOs," says Katie Cantrell, executive director of the Factory Farming Awareness Coalition. "Because CAFOs are exempt from reporting requirements under the Clean Air and Clean Water Acts, many communities across the United States are subjected to contaminated drinking water and dangerous levels of air pollutants, with little political recourse."
The Public Health Menace No One Knows About
The health and environmental impact of CAFOs is indeed enormous. "CAFOs are large-scale facilities that house thousands if not tens of thousands of animals in very small spaces," says Ho. "One CAFO can produce as much manure as a medium-size city in the United States"--with one critical difference: A medium-size city in the United States is required under the Clean Water Act to have a municipal wastewater treatment plant. CAFOs have no such treatment plant.
"Flint is everywhere here."
When animal manure escapes from CAFOs into nearby water sources, it can have devastating health consequences for people and ecosystems. Manure can contain nitrogen and phosphorus, pathogens such as E. coli, growth hormones, antibiotics, chemicals used as additives to the manure or to clean equipment, animal blood, and silage leachate from corn feed, reports the National Association of Local Boards of Health. Ammonia is also often found in surface waters surrounding CAFOs. When exposed to air, ammonium converts into nitrate, and elevated nitrate levels in drinking water have been connected to poor general health, birth defects, and miscarriages. For infants, it can mean blue baby syndrome and even death.
The New York Times recently exposed the devastating effects of nitrate contamination from animal manure in low-income farmworker communities in California's Central Valley. The widespread application of chemical fertilizers and dairy cow manure has made the water unsafe for drinking, cooking, and even showering. Camille Pannu, the director of the Aoki Water Justice Clinic at the University of California, Davis, likens the situation to the water crisis in Flint, Michigan. "Flint is everywhere here."
Tying Data Patterns to Factory Farms
To put factory farms on the map, the Stanford team figured out how to teach a computer algorithm to analyze data patterns. They got help from Google's advances in image learning, the USDA's National Agricultural Imagery Program (NAIP), and the Environmental Working Group and Waterkeeper Alliance.
The environmental groups supplied locations of CAFOs they had collected manually. The researchers matched those locations to NAIP satellite images, hand-validating the presence of CAFOs using these same processes. Once CAFOs were confirmed, the team combined this information with open-source image-recognition tools released by Google, which were already trained to identify different types of objects, buildings, people and animals in photos.
In receiving this information, the algorithm was retrained to identify CAFOs by looking for certain visual cues. "Swine farms were identifiable by compact rectangular barns abutted by large liquid manure pits, and poultry by long rectangular barns and dry manure storage," note the researchers in their report. The algorithm could then be applied to unscanned locations to identify unseen CAFOs.
Handan-Nader explains this process as the retraining of an existing technology. "Instead of working with a baby, we got a toddler, who knows what an arm is, but maybe doesn't know what an entire person looks like," says Handan-Nader. In this case, the arm is a building, and an entire person is a CAFO.
To improve the tool's accuracy, the team also fed the algorithm photos of stadium bleachers, airplane hangars, and mobile home parks, which only appear to match the CAFO visual cues. "Just as humans learn from being tricked, so does a computer," says Handan-Nader.
There's another way to look at the research effort, she added. They were "very unglamorously looking at poop for months and months."
It paid off. Ho and Handan-Nader identified 15 percent more poultry farms than what was found through a manual census. The researchers estimated their algorithm could identify 95 percent of existing large-scale facilities using fewer than 10 percent of the resources required for a manual census.
"Dr. Ho's work makes my job much easier," says Soren Rundquist, the director of spatial analysis at the Environmental Working Group. "While humans will always need to validate and quality check computer-generated results, any innovation for locating CAFOs will make the process much more efficient. This is paramount when keeping up with an industry that can grow quickly, having an immediate impact on the environment and public health."
Replacing Guesswork With Evidence
The tool works with conventional satellite imagery, but future iterations could be trained to identify new spectral signatures, like building materials, lagoons, or actual discharges into waterways. The tool could also help detect other forms of environmental degradation, like oil spills. Stephen Luby, a professor of medicine at Stanford University, is already using a similar technology to track brick kilns, a huge source of air pollution.
Katie Cantrell envisions using the tool to provide solid evidence of the harm done by factory farming. "This mapping project provides an invaluable resource for advocates at the local, state, and national level," she says. "They can use it to document correlations between the location and density of CAFOs and socioeconomic data, health data such as asthma and mortality rates, and air and water pollution data, that can hopefully help drive better regulation and protection of front-line communities." Adds EWG's Rundquist, "The need for this utility is becoming more important as public information around these operations becomes more opaque and unavailable."
In the meantime, Missouri voted last month to prevent counties from passing more stringent laws regulating CAFOs. Now, local standards for health and environmental protection cannot be tougher than those of the state. In doing so, Missouri joins seven other states this year who have considered strengthening protections for CAFOs, which raises the question: Who is strengthening protections for our environment and local communities?
This article was produced as part of a partnership between Stone Pier Press and Earth | Food | Life, a project of the Independent Media Institute.
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Top Scientists Confirm 2018 Fourth Hottest Year on Record, Last Five Years Rank Hottest
Statement by Brenda Ekwurzel, Union of Concerned Scientists
Feb 05, 2019
NASA and the National Oceanic and Atmosphere Administration (NOAA) announced today that 2018 was the fourth hottest year worldwide on record.
Below is a statement by Brenda Ekwurzel, director of climate science and senior climate scientist at the Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS).
"Despite the recent cold snap across the Midwest and East Coast, the planet is still heating up, and the warming is unprecedented. The Earth has taken a walloping since 2014. The last five years rank as the hottest on record globally--far and away hotter than previous years with temperatures running roughly 1 degree Celsius warmer than pre-industrial times. Temperatures for 2018 came in just behind the three years preceding it with 2016 ranking hottest year yet.
"Eighteen of the nineteen warmest years since record keeping began have occurred since 2001. That means kids graduating from high school have only known a world of record-breaking temperatures. With global emissions rising for the second year in a row, this disastrous trend shows no signs of changing any time soon.
"The new normal is a world with stronger hurricanes, polar vortex shifts, recurrent high tide flooding, life-threatening heat waves, longer wildfire seasons and more rain during heavy downpours. It also comes at a cost--with both the loss of human lives and catastrophic economic impacts. According to NASA and NOAA, there were a total of 14 billion-dollar weather and climate disaster events in the U.S. in 2018 alone, costing the nation $91 billion in direct economic damages and resulting in 247 deaths. These included the terrible wildfires in California and the devastating hurricanes Florence and Michael, all of which bear the fingerprints of climate change."
For years, climate change has been grossly ignored by President Trump, as well as Congress writ large. With roughly one decade left to tackle this problem head on, House Democrats have signaled that the climate crisis is at the top of their agenda by scheduling a slew of hearings on the subject this month, including one today at which Ekwurzel will testify.
Government shutdowns can delay the collection and timely release of important scientific information, as was the case with the information released today.
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#ExecutiveTime Takes Off on Twitter After 3 Months of Trump's Daily Schedules Leaked
"Wow and this whole time I thought he was diligently looking through policy proposals and carefully deciding a course for the country."
Feb 02, 2019
Somebody inside the Trump White House leaked three month's worth of the president's daily schedule, which Axios published on Sunday afternoon, and the internet quickly took up the cause by ridiculing the nation's chief executive for the amount of time he reportedly spends holed up in his private residence each day watching television, reading newspapers, sending bizarre tweets, and making phone calls.
Termed "Executive Time" by his former chief of staff John Kelley, the #ExecutiveTime hashtag was given new life on Sunday.
According to Axios:
What the schedules show: Trump, an early riser, usually spends the first 5 hours of the day in Executive Time. Each day's schedule places Trump in "Location: Oval Office" from 8 to 11 a.m.
*But Trump, who often wakes before 6 a.m., is never in the Oval during those hours, according to six sources with direct knowledge.
*Instead, he spends his mornings in the residence, watching TV, reading the papers, and responding to what he sees and reads by phoning aides, members of Congress, friends, administration officials and informal advisers.
Based on its analysis, the president spent roughly 60 percent of his total working day in "executive time" over the last ninety days. In order to protect the identity of their source, the news outlet published re-typed versions of the schedules they received. Read all three month's worth here.
"Safe to assume #ExecutiveTime is trending?" asked one member of the Twitter community. Yes, the internet responded, safe to assume.
\u201cLeaked #trumpschedules covering nearly every working day since #2018midterms show #Trump has spent about 60% of his scheduled time over past 3 months in unstructured #ExecutiveTime. \u201c[T]here's almost no [historical] parallel"for how #45 spends his days. https://t.co/0jA6j1Zihs\u201d— goldngater (@goldngater) 1549225775
\u201cDonald Trump is fundamentally terrible at his job. #executivetime\u201d— John Anderson \ud83c\udf3b (@John Anderson \ud83c\udf3b) 1549226323
\u201cWow and this whole time I thought he was diligently looking through policy proposals and carefully deciding a course for the country #executivetime\u201d— toph (@toph) 1549224043
Not that it's anything new:
\u201cHurricane Florence threatens millions along the east coast\nHundreds of children remain separated from their families\nThe government runs out of funding in 17 days\n\nHowever, @realDonaldTrump has no events listed on his official schedule so #ExecutiveTime continues\n\nAll. Day. Long.\u201d— Rep. Mark Pocan (@Rep. Mark Pocan) 1536862498
\u201cThanks, @MitraEbadolahi. #ExecutiveTime\u201d— Ben Wizner (@Ben Wizner) 1521221895
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