If you live near a giant hog barn or dairy, you already know the air can be foul. What's in it is no mystery either: fine particles, ammonia, nitrogen oxides and other pollutants, blown out by barn fans or rising off huge lagoons of liquid manure.
On October 30, four days before the midterms, Trump's Environmental Protection Agency announced it would stop trying to measure it. The agency ended a 20-plus-year effort to build methods for monitoring air pollution from factory farms. Inside Climate News reports the move effectively shuts down the EPA's stop-and-start attempts to regulate those farms under the Clean Air Act.
The EPA pitched the news as relief for farmers. Research has found that air pollution from animal-based food production, counting both the animals and the crops grown to feed them, causes nearly 12,700 deaths in the United States a year.
Twenty years of a free pass
Big livestock operations are supposed to get Clean Air Act permits and report what they emit. For more than 20 years, they have been excused from it.
Here's how that happened. In the early 2000s, the EPA tried to go after factory farms over some of these pollutants. The industry said nobody could measure the emissions properly. So in 2005 the agency and the industry struck a deal: thousands of farms got protection from legal action. In return, they took part in a study that the industry itself paid for.
The study was supposed to produce the tools a farm could use to figure out whether it needed a permit. Those tools never arrived in final form. A 2017 report from the EPA's own inspector general faulted the agency for moving too slowly.
Now the EPA says the data is too old to use.
"Good science requires good data, and these data are too old and too limited to support methods that farms could rely on," said Abigale Tardif, the acting head of the agency's air office.
Read that again with the timeline in mind. The EPA spent two decades not finishing the work. Then it said the work was too old to finish.
Who asked for this
Rob Brenneman, president of the National Pork Producers Council, praised the decision. His group has long pushed for it. "This move confirms what farmers have long known: Every farm is different, and there is no one-size-fits-all model to apply to them," he said.
Tarah Heinzen, legal director at Food & Water Watch, sees it differently. Her group has tracked this from the start and filed dozens of lawsuits over factory farm pollution. She says the agency "has announced it has no intention, basically, of ever holding factory farms accountable under the Clean Air Act."
She also points out that the EPA had already been taking apart its other tools. Trump's administration and Congress have gutted the rules that made these farms report air pollutants under two other federal laws.
The same goes for methane, the powerful gas that heats the planet. The livestock industry is the biggest source of it in the country. Yet Congress effectively blocks those farms from reporting it, year after year, through its annual spending bills.
Republican lawmakers have been shielding this industry from the people who live next to it for a while. We've reported on a North Carolina congressman's work protecting hog operations, and on the meat and pesticide money behind an Iowa Republican.
The law still says what it says
There's one catch. The Clean Air Act hasn't changed. Heinzen notes that facilities over the limits still need permits, and the old amnesty ends now that the deal is over.
"That does not absolve these factory farms from their obligation to comply with federal law," she said.
California already has its own models for estimating livestock pollution, and it uses them. But for the rest of the country, there will be no national yardstick from the EPA. "No one's going to estimate anything," Heinzen said.
The bottom line
On October 30, 2026, Trump's EPA ended a 20-plus-year effort to develop ways to measure air pollution from factory farms, after giving thousands of farms protection from legal action since 2005 and never finishing the job. The pork industry's lobby praised the decision. Research ties air pollution from animal-based food production to nearly 12,700 U.S. deaths a year, and the people breathing that air now have no federal measuring stick to point to.
Source
Trump's EPA Will Abandon Efforts to Limit Air Pollution From Factory Farms, Inside Climate News via Mother Jones.
