Air Quality Area Of Potential
New Concern To Cattle Feeders

AMARILLO — Federal and state agencies are increasingly looking at air quality with regard to cattle feeding operations, says a researcher here.

While regulatory agencies appear to be looking mostly in California and Arizona, Dr. Brent Auvermann with the Bushland experiment station west of Amarillo says it may be an indication of what is to come.

Auvermann says a couple of key areas of the United States are the San Joaquin Valley in California and Maricopa County in Arizona. Those two regions are considered "non-attainment" areas. As a result, the state air regulatory agencies are clamping down on all the emitters.

"Agriculture is a key player in those areas," Auvermann says.

Consequently, there is regulation of agriculture in the context of air quality that has not been seen in the past.

"I would point out that up in the High Plains, non-attainment status is not terribly likely," Auvermann says. "The San Joaquin Valley is a big bowl. It doesn't take much to generate dust in the San Joaquin Valley and make that bowl a non-attainment area."

Similar problems face parts of Arizona.

But because of the interest generated in these geographical locations, other areas of the country may soon be facing closer scrutiny, and the agricultural community is going to need to learn how to deal with such scrutiny.

"We've been keeping our eyes on some of these developments," Auvermann says.

The national air quality standards are enforced in part by a national monitoring network, he says, and the monitors are set up in major metropolitan areas, most of them in heavily populated areas.

"The reason they're located there is that those monitors represent the air that lots more people breathe," Auvermann points out.

Even though the monitoring is usually done around population centers, the standards apply across the country.

"With the National Ambient Air Quality Standards," Auvermann says, "the monitors are in highly populated areas, but the standards themselves apply to property, and we've got to face that."

That includes at the property lines of the large feedyards found on the High Plains.

"What that means is if for some reason someone were to establish a monitor site at the property line of a cattle feedyard, it would be fair game in attainment studies," Auvermann says.

Clean air can be considered a property right. Air that doesn't meet the applicable standards at the property line is effectively harming the neighbor's property.

"What we've effectively said is that the neighbor's property is being used and appropriated to disperse the pollutant," Auvermann says. "If we don't apply the standard at the property line, we're effectively asking the neighbors to shoulder the load of dispersion. The neighbor's land then is effectively a 'taking' for these air pollutants."

One of the regulatory challenges facing the High Plains, he says, is the visibility issue and risk of accidents.

"We need to improve emission factors," Auvermann says, "and we need to avoid letting judges and juries issue emission factors by coming to conclusions that are not warranted by the science."

Auvermann was involved in a recent review of literature documenting human health effects from animal feeding operations emissions. The researchers concentrated on what is known and what is not known.

"We didn't want to end up knowing things that just ain't so," Auvermann says.

Human health effects generally concern people downwind suffering because of agriculture production.

In a North Carolina study, they looked at two different groups of people who lived near livestock feeding operations.

"The test group and the control group were demographically similar," Auvermann says. "It was interesting to me to find in the conclusions and the study interpretations that there were some environmental justice implications discussed."

It does not seem fair to Auvermann, he says, for scientists to hold forth on environmental justice issues when the two test groups were demographically similar.

"I would urge the scientific community to avoid this," he says. "Let's be accountable to one another to avoid interpretations like that."

The North Carolina study was heavily loaded with emotional and political values, he says.

"Moreover, they were not justified by the construct of the study itself," Auvermann says.

The study's authors, however, did present their survey of the human element.

The researchers took individual respondents within the community and had them fill out a survey about their health status. They presented their survey within the context of rural health. They said nothing about livestock production.

"That's good," Auvermann says. "We're not biasing our test group."

Another interesting and positive aspect of this study was that some of the respondents did not notice odors from the livestock operation when they were conducting the survey.

"Unfortunately, we don't have any environmental exposure," Auvermann says. "I'm not talking about environmental exposure during the administration of the survey. I'm talking about environmental exposure data throughout the overall study period, one or two years."

Without some idea of what these people were exposed to, he says, there's really no justification for interpreting the human health effect.

The North Carolina study is a mixed bag, he concludes.

In an Iowa study, Auvermann found some significant differences between the test and control groups in health responses like respiratory problems and headaches.

The researchers found little evidence to suggest that psychological factors existed.

"That is to say," Auvermann says, " there was little evidence to suggest that neighbors of animal feeding operations had elevated levels of anxiety or depression."

While dust and ammonia tend to have synergistic effects on the health of large animals, dust and ammonia may also have synergistic effects on humans as well.

"I don't have any literature handy to justify that, but we need to be thinking of plausible causality," Auvermann says. "If it affects large animals, it is reasonable to suspect that we ought to spend some time looking at it."

There are some differences in different species of livestock operations, Auvermann acknowledges.

"There are probably some good scientific reasons for that," he says.

Some livestock facilities handle their manure in solid form; others handle it in water and runoff.

Feed composition and the feeding process also contribute to the differences between feeding operations.

"The fact that urban particulate matter has been demonstrated to result in human health effects is not an air-tight argument for assuming that agriculture particulate matter will have the same effect."

The composition is different. There are a lot of differences between urban and agriculture particulate matter, he says.

Health authorities interested in these kinds of studies need to pay close attention to some of the weaknesses of the research, Auvermann says.

There is a lot of rhetoric, he warns, that people use to come to agreement or disagreement or resolution of issues related to air, water and soil.

Auvermann recently helped design a research study looking for epidemiological evidence in human health effects from animal feeding operations.

"Do local animal feeding operations impair local air quality to the detriment of public health?" he asks.

It quickly became obvious that they were going to generate more heat than light, Auvermann says.

There were two groups, he explains. The agriculture group was used to conducting research that tries to minimize certain kinds of errors.

"We want to prove that something is so with a 95 percent confidence before we're going to publish it," Auvermann says.

On the other hand, they had the public health authority whose public mandate is to make sure as best they can that they identify every possible risk to public health that might exist and take steps to mitigate that risk.

"We had two completely different mandates," Auvermann says. "One to try to avoid concluding something that's true when there is a lot of uncertainty, but the other is trying to minimize the risk to a population by trying to scope out every possible risk that population might encounter."

They had two completely different approaches. One of them was survey-oriented. The other was hypothesis-oriented. That resulted in two mandated responses.

"In that case, what may be is more important than what actually is," Auvermann says.

Once they finished their fact finding, there was an editorial issue.

"Spin was an issue," Auvermann says. "What is the consensus of the group? Well, we didn't have a consensus."

Each group was free to publish whatever it liked in the local media, and it was not always received favorably by the other group.

In this case, Auvermann says, the null hypothesis was that there was no difference in the respiratory health of groups that live close to emissions from livestock facilities versus those who were not as close.

"Simply stating the hypothesis that 'there is no effect' raised the dander of those who believed that there is an effect," Auvermann says.

Even phrasing the hypothesis well within the constraints of the scientific method ended up being a point of contention because the hypothesis, even though it hadn't been tested, stood against the bias of one group or the other.

Auvermann says scientists and engineers need to be humble about the significance of what they do.

"Yes, good science is significant," Auvermann says, "and, yes, it is indispensable, but at the end of the day, it is not the only value that is brought to the table."

Science is well suited to provide a factual basis for negotiation as a starting point, Auvermann says.

"We begin with observations and assumptions that we can justify," he says. "We use time-honored principles of logic."

But it is woefully inadequate, he cautions, as an arbiter of community values.

"Having satisfied the scientific quest, we have still not solved the problem," Auvermann says.

Scientists and engineers need to have a healthy attitude of self-deprecation in regard to how significant science is.

"It's tempting for us," Auvermann says, "to say 'this is what the science says, ergo, policy should be this.'"

He says that doesn't come close to covering all the problems.

The Western Governors Association in 1998 put together a document titled "Principles for Environmental Management in the West".

"One of the key phrases in there was 'science for facts, but process for priorities,'" Auvermann says. "In other words, it doesn't matter how good the science is, if there's no good process in place at the end of the day, you will be in the same place you started."

They also tried to establish common ground and looked at national standards and neighborhood solutions. They wanted to reward results, not protests.

That seems reasonable," Auvermann says. "These are the kinds of things that the Western Governors Association was able to agree on."

A lot of things that seem reasonable, he says, need to be put down on paper. A number of things need to be agreed to up front, he says, rather than leaving them to the end and arguing about them.

"We need to establish a solid ground of facts," Auvermann says.

There also needs to be an effort to see the problem from the point of view of the person with whom someone disagrees.

"That takes a lot of guts," Auvermann points out.

Too often people demand to be understood before they are willing to understand, he notes.

"We need to avoid putting constraints on problems so that, if it satisfies me, it won't satisfy you," Auvermann says, "and if it satisfies you, it won't satisfy me. We've got to be on the lookout for the constraints that we are putting on the system that force us into a zero sum game. We need to avoid that."

He warns about arguments that lack credibility.

"Agricultural producers are the original environmentalists," he insists. "That's not an argument. It's simply a statement. It may have been true at one point, but we can't verify that, and we certainly can't verify that now. The way the agricultural structure is changing, it is certainly an observation that the more I listen to people with whom we may disagree, the more I discover that this observation, this statement, is an argument of low credibility. Yet, very frequently, I hear us hiding behind it as if somehow a heritage or family identity was sufficient to justify taking on the label of an environmental steward."

He says the right to claim to be an environmentalist is less a matter of heritage and family identity than it is a business ethic based on and demonstrative of stewardship principles.

Constructive rhetoric, he says, means mixing gutsy decisions on the kinds of arguments used and the presuppositions brought to the table.

"It's about our willingness to stay in the room when the temperature gets warm," Auvermann says.