WASHINGTON - About 11,000 more huge livestock, poultry and hog farms whose wastes run into the nation's waters will have to file for manure permits and devise ways to cut back their waste, the Bush administration announced yesterday.
The new animal-waste rules, enacted late Sunday, would more than triple the number of "factory farms" - giant commercial enterprises - that must file manure permits.
However, environmental groups criticized the rules as cosmetic and ineffective pollution-control measures, because farmers will be able to write their waste-management plans with little regulation.
Farm interests said the new rules would be workable but costly. However, under last year's sweeping farm-subsidy law, most of the cost will be borne by the federal government through grants.
The new rules are intended to reduce by 25 percent the amount of phosphorus and nitrogen that flows from factory farms into U.S. waterways, often choking ponds and bays by fueling the growth of algae and other plants, according to the Environmental Protection Agency.
"We took a major step toward making America's waters cleaner and purer by making new controls on animal manure and wastewater generated by large livestock operations," EPA Administrator Christine Todd Whitman said at a news conference.
Under the rules, farmers will decide how to reduce manure runoff and by how much, on a farm-by-farm basis with state government oversight. To environmental groups, that's a major problem, because the farmers can draft their pollution-control plans.
"What they've done is they are requiring the largest facilities to get permits, but those permits don't mean anything," said Melanie Shepherdson, an attorney with the Clean Water Project of the Natural Resources Defense Council. The council and the Sierra Club triggered the rule change with a lawsuit they filed in 1989. "These are all kind of window dressing."
The Bush rules are more lenient than a proposal that was made in the final days of the Clinton administration. The Bush rules would regulate farms that have at least 1,000 cattle, 700 dairy cows, 2,500 pigs, 125,000 chickens or 55,000 turkeys in confinement. The Clinton version proposed thresholds about half as large, and would have applied to 39,000 farms.
EPA officials said the new rules would regulate 60 percent of factory-farm pollution, and that the Clinton administration's approach would add only 10 percent more coverage at nearly triple the cost.
Maryland has had a law on the books since 1998 requiring all farmers in the state to limit runoff of nutrient-laden animal waste, which had been linked with an outbreak in the summer of 1997 of fish-killing Pfiesteria microbes in the Chesapeake Bay. But fewer than half the state's 12,000 farmers had filed plans for curbing runoff by July, six months after the requirement took effect. The poultry industry also has successfully appealed state regulations that would hold large companies like Perdue and Tyson responsible for the manure produced by farms on the Eastern Shore growing chickens under contract.