[csusbpeace] Air pollution from farms leads to 17,900 U.S. deaths per year, study finds

From: "raccoon" <dmarc-noreply@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> (Redacted sender "bigraccoon1" for DMARC)
To: "CSUSBPEACE@xxxxxxxxxxxxx" <CSUSBPEACE@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Date: Tue, 11 May 2021 22:29:23 -0700

https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/2021/05/10/farm-pollution-deaths/

<https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/2021/05/10/farm-pollution-deaths/>

Air pollution from farms leads to 17,900 U.S. deaths per year, study finds

The first-of-its-kind report pinpoints meat production as the leading source
of deadly pollution

May 10, 2021

A hog farm in Vanceboro, N.C., is surrounded by floodwater in the aftermath
of 2018's Hurricane Florence. (Alex Wroblewski/Bloomberg News)

The smell of hog feces was overwhelming, Elsie Herring said. The breezes that
wafted from the hog farm next to her mother’s Duplin County, N.C., home
carried hazardous gases: methane, ammonia, hydrogen sulfide.

“The odor is so offensive that we start gagging, we start coughing,” she told
a congressional committee
<https://energycommerce.house.gov/committee-activity/hearings/hearing-on-building-a-100-percent-clean-economy-the-challenges-facing>
in November 2019. Herring, who died last week
<https://www.newsobserver.com/news/state/north-carolina/article251211414.html>,
said she and other residents developed headaches, breathing problems and
heart conditions from the fumes.

Now, a first-of-its-kind study
<https://www.pnas.org/cgi/doi/10.1073/pnas.2013637118> shows that air
pollution from Duplin County farms is linked to roughly 98 premature deaths
per year, 89 of which are linked to emissions directly caused by hogs. Those
losses are among more than 17,000 annual deaths attributable to pollution
from farms across the United States, according to research published today in
the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Animal agriculture is the worst emitter, researchers say, responsible for 80
percent of deaths from pollution related to food production. Gases associated
with manure and animal feed produce small, lung-irritating particles capable
of drifting hundreds of miles. These emissions now account for more annual
deaths than pollution from coal power plants
<https://www.eenews.net/assets/2021/05/05/document_gw_01.pdf>. Yet while
pollution from power plants, factories and vehicles is restricted under the
Clean Air Act, there is less regulation of air quality around farms.

“The food system has really flown under the radar” as a source of deadly
pollution, said University of Minnesota professor Jason Hill, the lead author
of the new report. “But what we eat affects not just our own health, but the
health of others. We’re showing that directly.”

Jim Monroe, a spokesman for the National Pork Producers Council, criticized
the study as “highly suspect,” saying it “irresponsibly draws conclusions
based on modeling and estimates.”

“U.S. pork producers have a strong track record of environmental
stewardship,” he wrote in an email, citing a 2019 study from Harper
Consulting and Southern Utah University that found significant reductions in
ammonia content from pig farms.

A spokesman for Smithfield Foods, which operates industrial hog operations in
Duplin County, referred The Washington Post to a 2019 report
<https://files.nc.gov/ncdeq/Air%20Quality/monitor/specialstudies/duplin-county/DCAMS-Draft-Report-12-16-19.pdf>
in which the North Carolina Department of Environmental Quality said it did
not find significant air-quality problems in the region.

Ethan Lane, vice president of government affairs for the National Cattlemen’s
Beef Association, also questioned the methodology of the study, which
utilized relatively new air-quality models. “It appears to be based on faulty
assumptions and riddled with data gaps,” he said in a statement.

This is the first major report to link air-pollution deaths to specific food
items, Hill said. While greenhouse gases cause the same amount of warming no
matter where on the planet they’re produced, the health effects of air
pollution are dependent on atmospheric chemistry, local weather, and the size
and health of communities living nearby. Only with advanced new air-quality
models has it become possible to pinpoint the consequences of pollution
produced hundreds of miles away.

“Agriculture is a tough industry” to monitor, said environmental scientist
Maya Almaraz, who was not involved in the study. “They’re already working at
such thin margins, and really important to the economy. Regulations are not
taken lightly in those systems.”

But, she added, “we have to be working with those systems to protect the
people who live in those communities.”

Farm pollution is most dangerous when it occurs upwind of densely populated
areas, Hill said. Most of the deaths in his analysis happened in California’s
Central Valley, eastern North Carolina and the Corn Belt of the Upper Midwest.

The most insidious kinds of air pollution
<https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/2021/04/28/environmental-justice-pollution/?itid=lk_inline_manual_25>
are known as particulate matter (PM) 2.5 — tiny particles one-thirtieth the
width of a human hair, which can become lodged in lungs or absorbed into the
bloodstream. Exposure to PM 2.5 can lead to asthma and other breathing
problems, and over the long term increases the risk of dying of heart
disease, cancer and stroke.

These particles are directly produced when farmers till fields or burn crops
before harvest. They can also come in the form of dust kicked up by livestock
in large animal feeding operations.

This “primary” PM 2.5 is associated with about 4,800 premature deaths per
year, the study found.

But “secondary” particulate matter, which is generated when emissions from
farms interact with other gases in the atmosphere, is even more problematic.
This is especially true for ammonia, a highly reactive molecule released by
manure and fertilizer, which can combine with other pollutants such as
nitrogen and sulfur compounds to create small, hazardous particles.

“Of all pollutants, ammonia is the one that has the greatest impact on
mortality,” Hill said. His analysis suggests that ammonia emissions
contribute to about 12,400 deaths per year.

This is what makes pollution from animal agriculture so dangerous, Hill
added. At many beef, pork and dairy facilities, animal waste is stored in
massive “lagoons,” such as the one near Herring’s mother’s home in Duplin
County. There, the microbes that break down feces release huge amounts of
ammonia. Many facilities spray nitrogen-rich liquid waste on nearby farm
fields, another source of contamination.

Ammonia is also produced from over-application of fertilizer on such crops as
corn. Because much of the nation’s corn goes to animal feed, Hill counted
those emissions toward animal agriculture’s footprint.

All those emissions added up to make meat the biggest source of deadly
emissions, Hill said. Per serving, the rate of air-pollution deaths linked to
red meat was twice as high as that of eggs, three times as high as that of
dairy, and at least 15 times as high as that of all fruits and vegetables.

“This type of research is extremely important,” said Blakely Hildebrand, an
attorney at the Southern Environmental Law Center who has fought emissions
from North Carolina hog farms. “The lagoon system that has existed for
decades harms people and harms the environment and it’s time for a change.”

Yet because ammonia is so reactive, it’s difficult to detect unless huge
amounts are released at once. When the North Carolina Department of
Environmental Quality agreed to monitor air pollution in Duplin County as
part of a settlement with Rural Empowerment Association for Community Help
(REACH) and other civil rights groups, it found just five instances of
elevated ammonia levels, none of which were high enough to trigger federal
action. The program was discontinued after a year, when the department said
<https://files.nc.gov/ncdeq/Air%20Quality/monitor/specialstudies/duplin-county/DCAMS-Draft-Report-12-16-19.pdf>it
found no significant air-quality problems.

But the survey was criticized as inadequate because the environment
department intentionally situated its monitoring stations far from hog farms.
Almost all Duplin County residents live within three miles of at least one of
these operations.

And the health disparities in Duplin County and places like it are
substantial. A 2018 study
<https://www.ncmedicaljournal.com/content/79/5/278.full#sec-2> by researchers
at Duke University found that mortality rates in North Carolina communities
with hog farms were 30 percent higher than in the rest of the state.
California’s San Joaquin Valley, another hot spot for ammonia pollution, has
the highest rate of childhood asthma in the United States, according to the
American Lung Association
<https://www.lung.org/media/press-releases/20th-sota-ca>.

“You go through the central valley and it’s just this thick layer of gray,”
said Almaraz, who is the program manager for the Working Lands Innovation
Center at the University of California at Davis.

Although California has some of the country’s strictest air-quality standards
for cars and smokestacks, she said, “we’re not really doing anything at a
regulatory standpoint to decrease emissions coming from farms.”

“But recognizing these sources really provides mitigation opportunities,” she
added. “Now that we know this is an important source, what can we do about
it?”

Hill and his colleagues found that farmers could halve the number of
air-pollution deaths from food production by changing their practices.
Instead of leaving manure to decompose in lagoons, they could incorporate it
into soil as fertilizer. Covering lagoons, separating urine from feces, and
controlling the acidity and temperature of lagoons would also reduce ammonia
emissions.

“We know the technology is there,” said Devon Hall, an environmental justice
advocate who co-founded REACH in Duplin County. “And we would hope that the
industry would do the right thing.”

Targeted fertilizer applications would reduce the amount of ammonia released
into the air on croplands, Hill said. Reducing tillage and burning of waste
and cutting emissions from equipment could also lead to small health gains.

But the greatest power to save lives lies with consumers, the scientists
found. If Americans switched to a “flexitarian” diet, getting at least half
their calories from fruits and vegetable and limiting animal protein to just
a few meals per week, air-pollution mortality from agriculture would fall 68
percent.

That cultural shift would deliver a host of other benefits. Research suggests
that reducing meat consumption could reduce global mortality by 6 to 10
percent <https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5216044/> — preventing
hundreds of thousands of premature deaths.

Meat production is also the most resource-intensive form of agriculture
<https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-solutions/2019/11/18/are-my-hamburgers-hurting-planet/?itid=lk_inline_manual_54>.
A whopping 30 percent <https://www.pnas.org/content/110/52/20888>of Earth’s
ice-free land mass is used for pasture for livestock, and red meat requires
more water and carbon than any other food. If Earth’s biggest beef eaters
limited their intake to 1.5 hamburgers
<https://www.wri.org/research/shifting-diets-sustainable-food-future> a week,
they could avoid about 5.5 billion tons of greenhouse gas emissions per year
— twice the annual emissions of India.

Discussions about dietary changes are always sensitive, Hill acknowledged.
When Colorado Gov. Jared Polis (D) declared a “MeatOut” day in March,
Republican state Sen. Barbara Kirkmeyer called it
<https://www.cpr.org/2021/03/09/meatout-or-meat-in-governors-declaration-ignites-carnivorous-culture-war/>
an attack against her county and the Colorado Cattlemen’s Association called
for people to flock to restaurants and order meat dishes.

But Hill hoped the study would give consumers one more thing to consider when
they’re putting food on their plates.

“It’s one thing to eat a low-carbon diet,” he said. “But it’s another to say,
‘Gosh, if I eat this delicious lentil dish instead of a hamburger, it might
be better for my own health but also for other people.’ ”

[csusbpeace] Air pollution from farms leads to 17,900 U.S. deaths per year, study finds

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