What happened: In a significant victory for the U.S. pork industry, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, based in San Francisco, rejected a lawsuit from several activist groups who sought to impose sweeping changes to the Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) concentrated animal feeding operation (CAFO) rules.
Last month, NPPC participated in oral arguments before the Ninth Circuit, successfully urging the court to reject the baseless lawsuit. At that hearing, the Ninth Circuit expressed frustration and significant concerns with Food & Water Watch’s approach and candor.
In its decision, the court made clear that EPA’s preferred approach to regulating livestock production, including the formation of its Animal Agriculture Water Quality Subcommittee, which includes representatives of the pork industry, to study water quality issues is the appropriate path for EPA and does not warrant throwing out decades of established law. As the court explained, EPA “deemed it prudent to first seek information about how best to tackle the problem before directing resources towards” new regulations. The court declared this process, which NPPC has been a close partner with the Biden Administration, “reasonable and hardly at odds with the Clean Water Act’s requirements,” as Food & Water Watch claimed.
NPPC’s take: For decades, the pork industry has demonstrated leadership in addressing environmental challenges and has maintained successful working relationships with federal, state, and local regulators to ensure their farms are constructed and maintained as zero-discharge operations. Major changes to long-standing federal laws can only come from congressional action, and it is inappropriate for these activist groups to seek to rewrite federal law through the courts when Congress has consistently rejected their outlandish demands.
Why it matters: This baseless lawsuit sought to use the court to upend livestock production across the country. By attacking core notions of due process and fundamental civil rights, including changing the burden of proof for proving violations of the Clean Water Act and having judges reject the clear intent of Congress to not regulate rainwater running across agricultural fields, these activists sought to put pork producers around the country out of business.
