EPA’s Decision On Feeding Operations Decried

Aug. 16, 2023 Editor, The News-Gazette: Announced this month, the EPA refuses to remedy the environmental hazard posed by Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations, claiming these animal factories’ waste disposal practices need “more study.”

This year, the global cow inventory rose to 1.545 billion head, a biomass equivalent to 10 billion humans, each of these hapless critters munching on blades of grass that will cease to uptake carbon dioxide while sliding down the gullet of a cow. Salubrious grass mass in the stomachs of cows contributes nothing to carbon sequestration, but it does contribute to ten times the mass of human toilet waste ... most all of it untreated.

This waste reaches the ground to pollute the surface and underground sources of our culinary water supply … a portion reaching the oceans contributing to extensive dead zones ... silent places where the sounds and activities of biological life have been replaced by a deathly quiet.

No one who reaches for a 16ounce steak from a refrigerated display case seems to be aware of the multiple areas of environmental damage caused by the raising, feeding and slaughtering of livestock … but like a tsunami generated by a sub-ocean earthquake, the wave’s catastrophe is inevitable. DON HENKE Goshen