The Trump EPA is protecting companies poisoning farmland with toxic sludge. When the farmers asked what to do about it, the agency told them to do their own research.
The decision, published this month to the federal register, killed proposed regulations for sewage sludge contaminated with PFAS — the “forever chemicals” linked to cancer, liver disease, kidney failure, birth defects, and decreased immunity. The EPA threw out its own scientific research from less than two years ago, research that found any level above one part per billion of PFAS in sludge increases health risks to the farmers whose land it gets spread on. Most sludge does not have less than one part per billion. In the place of regulations, the agency advised the public to “research” sludge companies to protect itself.
A neighbor’s well down the road from my shop tested at fourteen milligrams per liter of nitrate last spring — four above the drinking-water standard of ten. The CAFO on the south side of the county came in around 2008. The manure lagoon off County G has been stinking up the road since before I opened my shop. The Adams County Land and Water Conservation Department has published the data. The pattern playing out nationally with PFAS and biosolids is the same pattern on the roads I drive every day: the toxic byproduct of the waste stream gets externalized onto the cheapest available land, which is rural farmland, and the people who bear the cost are the farmers and the communities downstream. The same administration has been rolling back Biden-era PFAS limits in drinking water, and now it has killed the regulations on PFAS in biosolids — the same chemical class, the same agency, the same rural communities left holding the bill.
The practice works like this. The nation’s sewer system produces sewage sludge — a mix of human and industrial waste. The waste-management industry needed somewhere cheap to put it, and in the early 1990s the EPA began allowing it to be spread on cropland as fertilizer because it contains plant nutrients. Current EPA rules only require monitoring for nine heavy metals. The sludge can contain any of 90,000 human-made chemicals, including PFAS.
The EPA’s own draft health risk assessment, issued in the Biden administration’s final days, found that PFAS levels above one part per billion in sludge increase cancer and other health risks to farmers. The assessment covered PFOA and PFOS, two of the most common and toxic PFAS compounds, and was based on health risks to the farmers who work the land. It did not examine how the chemicals affect the public through contaminated produce, dairy, and meat.
In Maine, regulators found PFAS in every single sample of sludge they tested. More than a hundred farms have been affected. Chemicals spread decades ago are still contaminating the land — including organic farms where farmers grew crops in soil they did not know was poisoned. The same pattern has shown up in California, where half of tested waterways were found contaminated with PFAS. The Southern Environmental Law Center filled in the gap the EPA left open: more than thirty-six children out of a thousand who drink one to two glasses of milk daily from a farm where sludge containing PFOA at 9.4 parts per billion was spread could get cancer later in life from that milk alone. Their risk of non-cancer health problems is 319 times higher. PFOA levels have exceeded 9.4 parts per billion in sludge tested in Maine.
The EPA’s defense is that sludge is spread on only one percent of farmland. But no government agency at any level has tracked where it has been spread. Most states do not test the land. The chemicals migrate into surrounding properties and pollute water sources. The agency that just killed the regulations does not know where the sludge it failed to regulate has gone.
The waste-management industry lobbied the EPA on this. Disposal is expensive when done properly. It is cheap when you can spread it on a cornfield.
Wendell Berry named the extractive mind fifty years ago — the habit of treating land and people as expendable inputs to a profit column. The chemical changes. The program does not. Spreading PFAS-laced sludge on a soybean field and calling it fertilizer operates on the same logic as dumping industrial waste into a river and calling it progress: the people who own the waste stream find the cheapest place to put it and the weakest political constituency to absorb the cost. I have watched that logic work on the roads I drive — the manure lagoon, the well tests, the CAFO. PFAS in biosolids is the same program with a different chemical payload.
Jean Zhuang, a senior attorney at the Southern Environmental Law Center, said the decision “puts polluters first and leaves farming families and rural communities to bear the consequences.” Laura Dumais, an attorney with Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility, called it “a bit bonkers” and said, “basically, they’re saying: farmers’ lives don’t matter.”
I will say it without the hedging. The administration is protecting the companies that dump toxic sludge on farmland and calling it fertilizer. The science the agency conducted shows it sickens the farmers, kills their livestock, poisons their water, and contaminates the meat and milk and produce sold to every American who eats. The agency threw out the science and kept the sludge.
Berry argued that a community’s economy is its membership — that what you do to the people on the land, you do to the community. When you poison the membership’s water and the membership’s soil and the membership’s children, and then tell the membership to figure it out on their own, you have told the membership what it is worth to the people in charge. The manure lagoon off County G is the same story. The well down the road is the same story. The waste goes where the political power is weakest. The cost gets borne by the people who can least afford it. And the agency that was supposed to protect them threw out its own science and walked away.