Air Pollution from Factory Farms Can be Lethal — and Secret. An Appeal Pushes the EPA for Transparency.

Farmworkers and residents living near factory farms often complain of a pungent odor and difficulty breathing. Yet it’s often hard to quantify what exactly is in the air due to a 2019 regulatory exemption. Under the first Trump Administration, the EPA decreed that the animal agriculture industry was exempt from reporting any hazardous air emission that came from animal waste. This can allow lethal gases released from animal waste, like hydrogen sulfide and ammonia, to slip under the radar.

Now, a group of eleven environmental and community organizations are moving forward with a challenge to this regulatory carve-out, in an appeal filed on October 3 to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia. This legal coalition seeks to overturn a federal court decision that sided with the EPA in upholding the exemption. The group argues that the exemption illegally excludes animal waste from the Emergency Planning and Community Right-to-Know Act (EPCRA), endangering rural communities.

“You see this very specific language included in EPCRA, just to carve out air emissions from animal waste on farms and allow them to evade reporting,” says attorney Ryan Maher at the Center for Biological Diversity, one of the groups challenging this exemption. “In terms of controlling this pollution to protect communities and their environments, transparency around what’s coming from these facilities is a bare minimum.”

The Emergency Planning and Community Right-to-Know Act, dating from 1986, requires that industries report the storage and release of hazardous chemicals to state and federal authorities, and that this information be made publicly available. Industries must report hazardous chemical releases within 24 hours, when they exceed thresholds that can pose an immediate danger to human health. This helps communities near most industries monitor their risks and react to emergencies.
But residents living near concentrated animal feeding operations (CAFOs) are left in the dark, without knowledge of toxic chemical releases.

“We’re flying blind, and that’s just the result of agricultural exceptionalism and powerful industry lobbies,” says Maher. Agricultural exceptionalism refers to the history of exempting agriculture from the labor and environmental obligations required of other industries, dating back to the days of slavery and sharecropping.

The 2019 carve-out was the latest in a long history of the exclusion of animal agriculture from environmental reporting requirements.

“The EPA has repeatedly taken action to exempt CAFOs from their congressionally-mandated duty to report releases of ammonia and hydrogen,” says Alexis Andiman, a senior attorney at Earthjustice, representing plaintiffs in the appeal.

Toxic emissions from animal waste have grave consequences for public health. Emissions from animal agriculture are responsible for 12,700 deaths per year in the United States alone, largely due to chronic exposure, according to a 2021 study on the health impacts of food-related air pollution. The dangerous gases ammonia and hydrogen sulfide, released from decomposing animal waste, are both linked to a “multitude of health problems, including, but not limited to, respiratory problems, nasal and eye irritation, headaches, nausea, and even death,” states the legal complaint challenging the Trump administration’s original exemption.

The gas hydrogen sulfide is released when animal waste decomposes in lagoons, digesters and waste pits. In high concentrations, it can cause rapid loss of consciousness and death. Hydrogen sulfide is the suspected cause of death of six farmworkers whose lives were tragically cut short while working on Prospect Valley Dairy in Keenesburg, Colorado in August of 2025. A local media station reported that the release of gas occurred while one worker was inside an underground manure pit. It is thought that the others then rushed in to save him but were also poisoned.

This tragedy is far from an isolated incident. “We see workers dying constantly on factory farms from exposure to hydrogen sulfide,“ says Christine Ball-Blakely, a staff attorney with the Animal Legal Defense Fund, one of the groups appealing the case. “I have seen stories in the past where workers are trying to do maintenance on a lagoon, having to lean over it and work on it, and they just succumb to the emissions and they fall in and drown.”

Reporting the emissions data is a crucial starting point for addressing the deaths and illnesses that these emissions cause, Ball-Blakely says.

“State agencies could take action to regulate based on this. The federal government could take action to regulate,” says Ball-Blakely. “By hiding the data, it’s hard to know until it’s too late — until people are already dead.”