Connecting Agricultural Policy to Your Health: The FARM Act

The federal Fair Agriculture Reporting Method (FARM) Act is a formal, legislatively guaranteed exemption for industrial-scale livestock producers to the laws requiring other industries to report releases of hazardous materials. Because hazardous materials are hazardous whether they come from the animal agriculture industry or the petrochemical industry, the Court of Appeals ruled in April 2017 that livestock producers needed to be held to the same standards. (The two laws that require industries to report the release of large quantities of pollutants are the Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation, and Liability Act, or CERCLA, and the Emergency Planning and Community Right-to-Know Act, known as EPCRA; EPCRA is such a moderate law that President Ronald Reagan signed it into law.)

On the heels of the Court ruling, the freshly passed FARM Act now upholds the rules-don’t-apply-to-us situation for industrial agriculture. In other words, while industries such as the auto industry or the paint industry must, under CERCLA and EPCRA, tell the EPA about which hazardous materials and in what quantity they’re releasing into the environment, the agriculture industry does not have to.

And this is important, because the industrial-scale livestock industry releases hazardous materials into the environment on a regular basis.