PFAS Contaminated a Texas County’s Farms, Threatening Animals, Water and Public Health

Johnson County’s long saga with PFAS started in 2022, with an influx of calls to Detective Dana Ames, an environmental crimes investigator for the Texas county located just south of Fort Worth. The calls sounded like “desperate pleas for help from all over the state,” Ames says, as residents were suddenly seeing dead animals. “We’re getting report after report after report,” she recounts, with people telling her “Yeah, they applied this stuff across the street from us, and our animals are dead.” More than two years later, county officials declared a state of disaster, as testing pointed to high levels of PFAS in the county’s farmland. PFAS stands for per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances, also dubbed “forever chemicals” because they require much longer spans of time to break down in soils. But in Johnson county, officials attributed these high levels of PFAS to a form of processed waste called biosolids — also known as sewage sludge — that were applied to farms as fertilizer to boost crop fertility. 

More than two million dry tons of biosolids were applied to U.S. farmland in 2018, according to a report from a biosolids industry group. Biosolids are sourced from treated sewage — waste flowing from homes and factories, everything from basic manufacturing facilities to slaughterhouse operations. In a press release, county officials characterized the test results as an “immediate threat” — to farms, drinking water and public health. 

The process works like this: first, wastewater treatment plants filter out the water from sewage, Christopher Higgins, an environmental chemist at the Colorado School of Mines, tells Sentient. The solids left behind can then be processed and turned into fertilizer. One problem, however, is that so-called forever chemicals do not break down during that process, which means these chemicals travel into soils along with the biosolids. 

Johnson County is now at the center of two lawsuits: local farmers are suing the biofertilizer company Synagro Technologies, and, along with the county itself, are also suing the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.

Biosolids, Explained

Nearly 4.5 billion pounds of sludge were used in the United States in 2023 alone, applied to farmland or used in compost for gardens and landscaping. The EPA has long promoted agricultural use of sewage sludge as an environmentally friendly way to reuse municipal waste. 

Last year, a New York Times investigation revealed that even though the EPA was aware of the potential risks of biosolids since at least 2003, the agency continued to encourage the practice. 

The strategy of applying excess waste — whether from livestock operations or city wastewater — is a common one on farms. Fertilizer, whether synthetic or manure, is used to boost yields and enhance crop fertility. But there are other consequences, as the waste and its contaminants don’t tend to stay put. In Iowa, for example, fertilizer is so over-applied or misapplied that it ends up contaminating nearby waterways. Manure storage tanks can leak or break down. Dangerous pathogens like E. coli linked to food outbreaks have been traced back to dust particles from manure.   

In early January of this year, the EPA released a draft risk assessment that warned of the PFAS contamination that can occur from sewage sludge used as fertilizer. The assessment found that around 31 percent of sewage sludge was used on farms. Any land that has had biosolids applied will have some amount of PFAS, says Higgins, but not necessarily at the levels seen in Johnson County.

Johnson County officials who spoke with Sentient expressed hope the area would receive federal assistance. Yet the Trump administration’s moves to slash EPA programs and aid provided by the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) could complicate the response, though so far EPA regulators working on biosolids risk do appear to still be employed by the agency. 

Other advocates are not so confident about future funding, in part because Texas governor Greg Abbott is a staunch supporter of the president. “I don’t have a lot of faith that it will get approved by the governor, but I hope it will,” says Kyla Bennett, the director of science policy with Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility (PEER) and a former EPA attorney. “I guess we’re just going to have to wait and see.”

“Shocking To The Conscience”

When Detective Ames first received a complaint in 2022, it was from a rancher seeing fertilizer that had been smoking on a neighboring farm for days. “He was just complaining that it was horrible. He couldn’t breathe. It smelled bad,” Ames tells Sentient. The smoke had caused the valley where the farmer lived to fill up with smoke.

Ames drove out to the farm and found 12 to 15 large piles of smoking biosolids. She then brought what she learned to her boss, Constable Troy Fuller, and County Commissioner Larry Woolley. From there, Ames launched an investigation that involved calls with scientists, environmentalists and EPA whistleblowers. “It was shocking to the conscience, honestly, what all I learned,” she says.  

“We tested the well water. We tested soil, we tested the pond water. From animals that were dying, we tested their livers. We tested fish in the ponds,” she says. “We had PFAS contamination in everything.”

A stillborn calf’s liver had over 610,00 parts per trillion (ppt) of PFAS. Fish had 57,000 ppt of PFAS. They found PFAS in a property’s well water too, according to Ames.

The levels of PFAS found in Johnson County were unusual — “really, really high,” confirms Higgins, a researcher who was not involved in the investigation but reviewed the public test results. He says there could be two reasons for that. Either the farmers applied more biosolids than is typical, or the levels in the sludge were just unusually high to begin with. “It’s more likely the latter,” he says.  

Ames feels an obligation to uncover what happened. “I think we owe our citizens to know what’s happening here, to listen, to believe them when they tell us there’s something wrong, even though we can’t put our finger on it,” she recalls telling the commissioners. “And we need to test, because if what I’m reading is accurate and what I’m being told is accurate, we may have a very dangerous contaminant that has been land applied, and that could have a lot of far-reaching consequences.”

County and Watchdog Groups Pursue Lawsuits and Legislation to Address PFAS Contamination

“The more we allow these biosolids to spread, and the more we allow this to continue without cleaning it up, or at least attempting to clean it up, is just sentencing the farmers of Texas to decades of unusable land, inedible meat, milk, fish, dairy,” says Bennett, who works for the watchdog group PEER. 

PEER is representing Johnson County and other plaintiffs in their case against the EPA, which aims to compel the agency to address the PFAS and biosolids under the Clean Water Act. “It’s rendering the farmland useless, and harming the people themselves.”

Christopher Boedeker, the county judge who issued the declaration, tells Sentient that one of the primary purposes of the declaration is to work with the state government to pass legislation that addresses and stops the contamination. “We’ve done all of this out in the daylight with the intent of shining a spotlight on what’s going on here,” Boedeker says. 

“And then the other part of it is, of course, making our citizens who have been impacted eligible for federal aid.” The affected farmers in Johnson County have kept their cattle, but are not selling them, and county officials would like to see the farmers compensated.

“I’ve had, strangely enough, a few negative interactions, and those have all been questions of, well, why didn’t you all do more sooner?” says Boedeker. “I feel like that’s in some ways validating, that people believe we’re doing the right thing here. I think we’re doing the right thing here.”

The EPA told Sentient it does not comment on ongoing litigation.

“It’s really important to recognize that this is not a partisan issue,” says Laura Dumais, legal counsel at PEER. “No one wants toxic chemicals in their food. No one wants farmers to be poisoned. Johnson County is a rural, conservative county, and everyone’s reaction is: how come the EPA hasn’t regulated this.”

How to address PFAS under current regulations can quickly get complicated, says Bennett, who is the director of science policy for PEER. “We don’t know how widespread the contamination is. We don’t know how much it will cost to try to remediate it, or whether it can be remediated. There are a lot of unanswered questions.”

Texas lawmaker Helen Kerwin has already filed a bill to require biosolids to be tested for PFAS levels. Other states have already taken steps to restrict their use. Michigan, California and Wisconsin require wastewater treatment plans to test biosolids for PFAS, while Connecticut and Maine have banned the use of biosolids on farmland all together.

If anything, says Higgins, the situation in Johnson County “indicates we need more testing. As an environmental chemist, I would not be disappointed if every single soil farm that had received biosolids over the last 50 years was tested. I think that’s not an unreasonable ask.”

Ames put it more bluntly: “Stop using our [agricultural] land as the city’s toilet.”