USDA, EPA Can’t Get Together
On Ag Air Quality Agreement

By David Bowser

WASHINGTON — The U.S. Department of Agriculture and the Environmental Protection Agency aren't speaking to each other.

The two agencies were expected to sign a "memorandum of understanding" here last week at a meeting of USDA’s Task Force on Agricultural Air Quality. They didn’t.

"It wasn't that there was any problem with it," says Dr. John Sweeten, an Extension specialist in Amarillo, who helped draft the memorandum. "It just needs to be done at a time when they could get the Secretary of Agriculture and the EPA administrator around the same table. Apparently that's hard to do. But it is just a matter of getting them together."

The task force was scheduled to discuss the MOU between USDA and EPA concerning air quality coordination and issues related to agricultural production and air quality, including agricultural burning.

Established by Agriculture Secretary Dan Glickman earlier this year, the task force is made up of farmers and ranchers, representatives of public and private agriculture organizations and agencies, public health officials, and educators and engineers, USDA officials said.

What the memorandum does, Sweeten says, is formalize a procedure in which EPA and USDA talk to each other and work together.

"It takes those entities that are working on air quality," Sweeten says, "and ensures that they communicate and work together. That's basically what it is. There's some fairly formal-looking verbiage, but it is basically saying, ‘hey, we haven't been working together like we should and communicating, and we ought to do it.’"

Sweeten says that in the past, EPA's air quality group has developed its statistics and taken actions which impact agriculture without checking with USDA. Also, he notes, USDA has not put a priority on air quality that he thinks they should have.

"What this does is provide for USDA to give it more priority," Sweeten says. "I would say that there's been millions upon millions of dollars spent on water quality in agriculture. There's been very little spent on air quality in agriculture, relatively speaking. We're way under-invested in agricultural air quality, both by USDA and its agencies and by EPA. When you get into subjects like odor control from confinement livestock feeding facilities, particulate emissions from concentrated animal feeding operations, and from fields such as harvesting operations, most of the funding has come from agriculture commodity groups.

"But these things are very much in the public interest and public arena, particularly when the public starts howling about it. Then you find that the agencies have not put forth the funding or the priority that they could have. A whole lot of what has been done in air quality has been bootlegged off of other projects."

He says researchers use water quality funding to stay in business and then may do a little on odor control.

"I don't think the commodity groups, through their different funding mechanisms, can support the very, very expensive research projects that are needed," Sweeten says. "Whenever EPA changes policies for all industries and municipalities across the board, that's when we find that the research that will address the new questions has not been done.

"This is particularly true on the new fine particulate standard and ozone standard EPA put in place back in July of this year. There's been very little data collected in agriculture. In fact, there's almost no samplers available in the State of Texas."

The new standards focus on particles in the air that are 2.5 microns and smaller. Previously, the trigger was 10 microns. To put this in perspective, Sweeten says, the width of a human hair is about 70 microns.

Officially known as the National Ambient Air Quality Standards, the rules deal with particles that individually are invisible to the naked eye. The reasoning behind the new rules, according to EPA Administrator Carole Browner, is to alleviate problems with industrial pollution and make the air safer for those who breathe it.

The problem is that, as written, the regulations could be interpreted to include everything from diesel fumes to odors from feedyards to mesquite smoke from barbecue pits. To complicate matters, EPA has little or no accurate data concerning supposed hazards that the new standards are designed to cure.

Sweeten says they just bought two air samplers for the research station in Amarillo, but other than that, there are few if any samplers in the state of Texas that will measure 2.5 micron particles accurately.

"When EPA does reach out for data," Sweeten says, "we find that those public institutions that have been well-funded, they may not represent all of agriculture, but they tend to give EPA their information."

For example, there has been a lot of emphasis on air quality in California, but production agriculture in California and production agriculture in San Angelo, Texas, are extremely different. The climate is different. Production agriculture's proximity to population centers in California is unlike West Texas.

"What EPA tends to do is find one short answer," Sweeten says. "If it comes from California, they don't make the transition between that and the Great Plains, where most of the beef is produced. The downside of it is they tend to pick and use numbers that come from places that do not represent us very well, whether it's East Coast or West Coast."

One of the concerns of atmospheric scientists is that ammonia which is emitted from feedlots can create particulate matter, but that doesn’t happen unless it’s mixed in the right proportion with nitric oxide.

"That comes from combustion sources, so you'd have to have your feeding facility located in proximity to a major source of nitric oxides for you to have the correct ingredients to produce PM 2.5 — that, plus the right blend of humidity and other compounds, some of the hydrocarbons," Sweeten says. "It's very complex, but whatever data comes out of other areas may not represent us here."

Data from the East or West Coasts may not represent the area from New Mexico and Texas through Oklahoma, Colorado, Kansas and Nebraska, where about 75 percent of the nation's cattle are fed.

Under a memorandum of understanding with the Department of Interior, EPA has about 200 sampling sites, but they are all in national parks.

"The national parks in our state are down at Big Bend and there's one at Guadalupe Peak, but then you skip to the Rocky Mountains and then over to the eastern part of the Plains and there's really nothing that represents production agriculture in our state or represents it up through the Great Plains," Sweeten says. "That's another concern."

Sweeten says the MOU should provide an opportunity to help EPA improve its data collection system and provide the agency a chance to make decisions based on solid science.

"We can work with them and improve sampling networks we already have that are better databases to begin with," says Sweeten.