The animal agriculture lobby is powerful in this country. Over the last few years, one of its accomplishments has been creating federal grants for the expansion of meat production. However, these meat factories have a track record of heavily polluting our soil and water, leading to hundreds of thousands of Americans getting sick and even dying from exposure to nitrates, detergents, PFAs, antibiotics, and more.
The EPA has environmental regulations in place, but they rely on these factories to self-report. So, of course, soil and water contamination surrounding meat factories have sky-rocketed over the past couple of decades, and so have cancer cases and premature deaths among people who live nearby. Even babies are being born deformed by these chemicals!
Below is a letter we wrote to Oregon Governor Kotek about this issue. While it focuses on Oregon, the same problem is happening in agricultural-heavy states across the US, like California, Iowa, Nebraska, and Illinois.
The truth is that no matter where you live, your tap water is polluted by animal agriculture, and it may already be making you sick. These meat production expansion grants are reckless and dangerous and need to be stopped. Please consider writing your local representative about this issue.
Dear Governor Kotek,
We strongly oppose the $8.2 million grant recently approved by Oregon legislators to expand meat production in Oregon. This expansion will increase air, soil, and water contamination in Oregon, where fellow Oregonians are already getting sick, some even dying from farm-factory chemical exposure.
Hundreds of thousands of animals are slaughtered in Oregon each day, and you can smell the putrid animal waste as you drive across I84. This puts Oregonians living in animal-agriculture-rich counties such as Morrow and Umatilla at increased risk as they are exposed to antibiotics, detergents, PFAS, methane, and excessive nitrites, all caused by the factory farm model.
Specifically, toxic nitrite exposure causes respiratory infections, thyroid dysfunctions, birth defects, cardiac dysrhythmias, circulatory failure, progressive nervous system effects, and bladder cancer. Meanwhile, antibiotic exposure makes humans more susceptible to dying from infections, and PFAS have been linked to non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma. This is just the beginning of the detrimental health effects.
Contaminants in the air, soil, and water in Oregon have been steadily increasing over the past thirty years. This grant will make the pollution even worse!
Water contamination is mostly caused by the improper disposal of animal waste by existing mega-meat processors. Environmental regulations are routinely ignored and violated due to the use of a self-reporting system. Earlier this year, DEQ flagged two major wastewater violations that added more than 254 million tons of excess animal waste to the area’s groundwater over a six-year period!
This grant rewards the reckless behavior of existing meat processors by giving money to expand their operations!
This expansion is even more outrageous because Oregonians were never asked about it. The funds came from a federal grant, and Oregon’s legislature accepted it without a ballot vote or even the polling of Oregon’s citizens. If Oregonians were asked, we believe they would reject this attack on their health and well-being. Besides making people sick, factory farms suck up fresh water in drought-stricken areas, destroy grasslands, cause soil erosion, and create ocean dead zones! All of this is against the average Oregonian’s basic environmental and humanitarian principles.
If you oppose this meat expansion like we do, you have to act now. On January 16th, the expansion funds will be distributed to the mega-farm factories. The man in charge is Gary Neuschwander. Write to him at gary.neuschwander@oda.oregon.gov
Tell Gary that the problems with meat processing need to be addressed before any additional funds are distributed. The money should be reallocated to cleaning up existing facilities, improving the welfare of the animals, and compensating Oregonians harmed by existing pollution.
Think of the wife who lost her husband to bladder cancer, the mother whose baby came out deformed, the cow who never gets to breathe fresh air or see the sun, and the child playing outside among the deadly farm chemicals. This is not the Oregon we want to live in, and we don’t think you want it either. Let Gary know that this expansion has to stop!
