Leaps of Logic: A study that blames hog farms for pollution it never traced to one

A recent headline claims hog farms are harming endangered species. What the study actually did was draw a map, ignore every other source of pollution in the picture, and point at the one target its authors were already suing.

The so-called “study” never sampled a stream, never measured a pollutant, never traced anything back to a farm, and never documented harm to a single fish or mussel. That is all by the article’s own account.

So how do you get from “we measured nothing” to “hog farms are harming endangered species”? You take a giant leap.

Leap #1: If a farm and a species share a watershed, the farm must affect the species. As described, the study is a mapping exercise. Watersheds are enormous. A farm can sit miles from where a species lives, with a city, a highway and a hundred other sources in between. Sharing a watershed tells you where a farm is located. Nothing more.

Leap #2: Because nutrients can harm species, these species are being harmed. Even in the article’s own telling, nutrients "can" be discharged, runoff "could" affect development, and species "may" be impacted. Somewhere between the report and the headline, every “could” became “did.”

Leap #3: Whatever is in the water, a hog farm put it there. Nobody even tries to justify this one. The study never tests the water, traces a nutrient, or fingerprints a discharge. It simply assumes that if a hog farm is nearby, the hog farm did it. That's not science.

Why hog farms? Look at everything they ignored.

Here's the question the study never asks: of everything in these watersheds, why blame the hog farms?

These same watersheds take in treated sewage from municipal plants that pipe straight into these rivers every day. They collect stormwater off every road, roof and parking lot. They carry industrial discharge and legacy contamination sitting in the sediment for generations. And yes, they take in other agriculture, too.

Then there are the reasons these species were listed in the first place: a combination of dams, sedimentation, lost habitat, and invasive species. Most of the endangered species on this list are freshwater mussels, and mussels have been disappearing across America for the better part of a century, for reasons that have nothing to do with farms.

The study looked at all of it and attacked the one group it was already predisposed to blame. Everyone else got a pass.

Look at who wrote the study

None of this is an accident. The byline tells you why. The study was written by a staff scientist at Earthjustice, an activist litigation group that is, right now, petitioning the EPA and suing to force new regulations on hog farms.

It was published by The New Lede, a project of the Environmental Working Group, another activist organization. The idea for the study grew out of a 2022 petition targeting hog farms.

When you're in court against hog farms, you don't commission a study that blames wastewater treatment plants. You start with the target you're already suing and work backward until the map points where you need it to point.

That's advocacy disguised as research.

Where is this study?

For a story built on the premise that farmers hide things, the article is awfully coy about its own evidence. It never links to the study, so there’s no way to examine the work. (It does link to plenty of other material, just not to the one document the whole story rests on.)

Where was it published? Was it peer reviewed? Did anyone outside the group that commissioned it ever review the methodology or test the assumptions?

The bottom line

Strip away the ridiculous leaps of logic, and here's what's left: farms and fish exist in the same part of the country, and a group that sues hog farms wants you to believe the farms are to blame. Meanwhile, our farmers keep feeding American families under some of the strictest regulations in the country, including annual inspections, required nutrient management plans, and a permanent moratorium on new lagoon systems.

The "study" measured nothing. It simply picked a target, drew a map, and called it a finding.