Nebraska Cattlemen seeking to include ag exclusion in EPA dust

The Nebraska Cattlemen has worked diligently recently, contacting Nebraska's congressional delegates and U.S. Secretary of Agriculture Mike Johanns, seeking their assistance in getting an ag exclusion included in the EPA proposed rule regulating dust.

Nebraska Cattlemen President Pete McClymont said, "We have been involved from the beginning of this rule making process, submitting comments to EPA, participating in a national air quality working group and visiting with public officials. We continue to work to get more common sense included in the proposed rule."

On Jan. 17, 2006, the EPA issued a proposed rule to revise the National Ambient Air Quality Standards of the Clean Air Act. The NAAQS is a health-based standard. In other words, Congress determined that in order to regulate a pollutant under the NAAQS, health studies must show that the pollutant causes adverse health effects. Conversely, if scientific health studies do not show that a pollutant causes adverse health effects, it is not supposed to be regulated under the NAAQS.

Duane Gangwish, Nebraska Cattlemen Vice President of Technical Services said, the EPA tries to build a case in its proposal for regulating coarse particulate matter, while admitting throughout the document that the evidence linking CPM to human health effects is very weak. "In fact, the EPA acknowledges in the proposed rule that the scientific uncertainty is 'too large to use the reported air quality levels directly as a basis for setting a specific standard level,' and that the scientific studies do not provide a sufficient basis to perform a quantitative risk assessment," he said.

Examples of agriculture and rural dust that would be regulated include dust produced by tilling soil, cattle romping in feedlots, planting and harvesting crops, mixing feed or grinding hay, hauling cattle or grain on unpaved roads, as wells as mail carriers and school buses driving on unpaved roads.

The National Cattlemen's Beef Association asked a Yale School of Medicine epidemiologist and toxicologist to assess the quality of the studies on which EPA has based its proposal. His conclusion is that the studies do not provide a scientific basis for regulation in urban or rural areas.

Another reason cattle producers are concerned about this proposal is that in normal practice, well-controlled cattle feeding operations may produce dust at levels the proposal would define as a violation. The violation could occur in spite of best management practices such as sprinkling pens with water and scraping to minimize dust, Gangwish said.

Chuck Folken, Nebraska Cattlemen Natural Resources and Environment Committee chair added, "We are not seeking to roll back regulations, but what is being proposed would require that dust be controlled to an unattainable level, requiring producers to sell cattle and cease other ag operations."

NCBA estimates the economic impact on the cattle industry of such a regulation is $10.6 billion, not including the economic ripple effect of cattle feeding operations being reduced or closed.

The Nebraska Cattlemen association serves as the spokesman for the state's beef cattle industry and represents professional cattle breeders, ranchers and feeders, as well as 46 county and local cattlemen's associations. Its headquarters are in Lincoln and second office in Alliance serves cattlemen in western Nebraska.

Date: 8/23/06

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