"EPA's Failure to Regulate Factory Farm Pollution Draws New Scrutiny"

"The EPA Inspector General is set to release a report on the agency's lack of oversight of large livestock operations and environmental groups also plan to sue."

"The Environmental Protection Agency's inspector general is examining the agency's failure to adequately measure potentially toxic air emissions from the nation's factory farms, a lapse that environmental groups say has allowed livestock operations to spew air pollution without government oversight for more than a decade.

Air emissions from livestock facilities—including larger farms known as concentrated animal feeding operations, or CAFOs—can fall under three separate federal laws if the pollution they emit hits certain thresholds. But the government and livestock industry have struggled to agree on accurate ways of measuring those emissions, so livestock facilities have largely escaped government scrutiny.  

Nearly a dozen years ago, the Environmental Protection Agency said it would develop a way to measure emissions from feeding operations. But it still hasn't completed the process, prompting the EPA's Office of Inspector General—the agency's internal watchdog—to launch an investigation this year to determine why."

Georgina Gustin reports for InsideClimate News November 28, 2016.