Source: ENVIRONMENT NORTH CAROLINA RESEARCH AND POLICY CENTER, 7/7/16


Pollution from agribusiness is responsible for some of America’s most intractable water quality problems – including the “dead zones” in the Chesapeake Bay, the Gulf of Mexico and Lake Erie, and the pollution of countless streams and lakes with nutrients, bacteria, sediment and pesticides. 

Today’s agribusiness practices – from the  concentration of thousands of animals and their waste in small feedlots to the massive planting of chemical-intensive crops such as corn – make water pollution from agribusiness both much more likely and much more dangerous.

The shift to such industrial practices is no accident. It is largely the result of decisions made in the boardrooms of some of the world’s largest corporations. Major agribusiness firms are responsible for the degradation of many American waterways, and they must change practices throughout their supply chains to clean up the mess.

Big agribusiness is a major polluter of America’s waterways. 

According to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), agriculture is the probable cause for making more than 145,000 miles of rivers and streams, 1 million acres of lakes and reservoirs, and 3,000 square miles of bays and estuaries too polluted for swimming, fishing, drinking, and/or maintaining healthy wildlife.

This agribusiness pollution is a leading cause of the dead zones that plague waters from the Chesapeake Bay to the Gulf of Mexico. In fact, this pollution is so severe that it is beginning to threaten our drinking water as well.   In Toledo, Ohio, runoff from agribusiness operations contributed to a toxic algae bloom in Lake Erie which contaminated the drinking water for 500,000 people around Toledo with cyanotoxins in 2014. In Iowa, nitrate pollution from agribusiness operations have so badly polluted the Raccoon River that Des Moines is now suing three counties for failing to stop contamination of its main drinking water source. And factory farms have contaminated drinking water wells from Washington to Wisconsin.

Top companies are producing staggering volumes of pollution.  In this report, we assess the water pollution footprint of five major agribusinesses:  Tyson, Smithfield, Cargill, JBS, and Perdue.   With each of these corporations, pollution in their supply chains includes manure from livestock, runoff from vast acres of grain, and direct dumping from processing facilities into our rivers and streams.

First, as the livestock industry concentrates its operations, more and more factory farms generate massive volumes of manure with no place to put it.  All too often, excess manure winds up in our rivers and streams.  We calculate the “manure footprint” of these five agribusiness companies as follows:

Table ES-1. Manure Footprint

COMPANY TONS OF MANURE
Tyson 55,289,069
JBS 45,797,269
Cargill 39,200,000
Smithfield 18,935,217
Perdue 3,715,140
TOTAL 162,936,695


Second, runoff from vast acres of commodity crops is a major pollution problem for our waterways.  A huge volume of corn and soybean production is driven by the need to feed livestock for these five companies and other agribusiness giants.  Massive production of chemical-intensive corn – driven by public policies that subsidize corn production – is wreaking havoc on waterways, including the Gulf of Mexico.

Finally, these same five companies also directly dump huge volumes of pollution into our rivers from their slaughterhouses and processing plants.  Four of them were among the top ten parent companies – from all industries - with the highest volumes of direct toxic discharges to our waterways in 2014, according to U.S. EPA’s Toxics Release Inventory (TRI).  The fifth profiled company, Perdue Farms, ranked 11th for direct dumping in the same year.  These companies had the same basic pattern of pollution from over 2010-2014 as well – all ranking among the top 15 parent companies in America for direct dumping of toxic substances into our waterways.

To read the full report, click here.