LIVESTOCK FARMERS NOW MUST REPORT EMISSIONS FROM ANIMAL POOP

Beginning Monday, Jan. 22, if you have possibly as few as 1,200 hogs, you’ll need to estimate and report your air emissions to the U.S. Coast Guard. (Click here for more information and how to file reports.) Yeah, HOTH is flabbergasted, too!

The requirement isn’t exactly new, it’s just new to livestock farmers, who until April 2017 had been exempt from the reporting mandate of a federal law enacted to address environmental disasters such as the Exxon Valdez oil spill and the Hooker Chemical waste dump in Love Canal, N.Y. But activist groups, including that great environmental organization the Humane Society of the United States, convinced a federal court to throw out the exemption, making a mockery of the nation’s emergency reporting systems.

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency issued a rule in 2008 exempting livestock farms because, clearly, their emissions were not the kind of “releases” Congress intended to cover with its emergency response law and because, while livestock emissions might exceed thresholds that would trigger responses under the law, such responses would be “unnecessary, impractical and unlikely.” (Emergency responders do not see value in the reporting from farms.)

But the court’s action last spring has forced about 100,000 livestock farms under the regulatory authority of this emergency release reporting requirement.

Now livestock groups, which along with EPA had defended the exemption and got a delay of the reporting deadline, are turning to Congress to address this court-ordered overreach.

Visit FreedomToFarm to weigh in on this matter, which if not corrected, could wreak regulatory havoc on livestock farmers.