POSTVILLE, Iowa — In March, officials in Postville shut down its water treatment facility for two days as city employees worked to prevent polluted water from a meatpacking plant from entering the water supply. 

Agri Star Meat and Poultry had discharged more than 250,000 gallons of untreated food processing waste — blood, chemicals and other solid materials — into the city’s wastewater system. Chris Hackman, the city’s wastewater operator for the past 25 years, said it was one of the worst incidents he could remember. 

“We’ve never seen anything like that,” he said. 

In majority-white Iowa, most Postville residents are people of color, with more than 40% identifying as Hispanic. Many work at Agri Star Meat and Poultry, the town’s largest employer.

Across the Midwest, meatpacking plants often pollute non-white communities and low-income neighborhoods, according to an Investigate Midwest analysis of two decades of U.S. Environmental Protection Agency enforcement data. 

Those bearing the brunt of the pollution are often the same people who work in the facilities responsible for the environmental damage. Meatpacking plants across the region have been cited for various types of pollution in the past 20 years, but water pollution has been the least enforced, a situation the federal government is now trying to address.

Sikowis Nobiss, Plains Cree/Saulteaux of the George Gordon First Nation and executive director of the Iowa and Nebraska based environmental justice organization, Great Plains Action, said meatpacking plants most often pollute in rural and low income urban areas where the cost of living is also more affordable for immigrants.

“Do you really think rich people are going to move there?” she asked. 

In the past two decades, Postville has recorded the highest number of EPA enforcement cases in Iowa, involving water pollution, air pollution and other negligence charges. Of those five cases, four are linked to Agri Star, according to Investigate Midwest’s analysis.

The percentage of Postville residents living in poverty is more than two times that of the state’s average, according to U.S. Census data. The average annual household income in Postville, $46,522, is a third less than the average Iowan family.

Agri Star did not respond to repeated requests for comment.

This problem is not limited to Iowa. In January, JBS, the world’s largest meat company, sent a “sludge blanket” from a beef processing plant into a nearby Nebraska waterway. The city, Grand Island, is one-third Hispanic and has a poverty rate slightly higher than the national average.

And in February, a southwest Missouri meatpacking company temporarily shuttered its operations in the city of Pleasant Hope after its plans to dump wastewater into a nearby river were halted by the state’s natural resources agency. The majority-white rural city has a poverty rate higher than the national average. 

However, the meatpacking industry will soon be forced to change how it manages its wastewater, which could mean cleaner water in many marginalized communities.

New EPA rules aim to address wastewater issues

Last December, the EPA proposed new rules to significantly reduce water pollution from meatpacking plants across the country. This proposed regulation would change how wastewater is managed and tracked in an industry that commonly discharges directly into waterways or into a city’s treatment plant. 

The EPA has acknowledged pollution from plants endangers drinking water. In a statement provided to Investigate Midwest, the EPA said that the meat and poultry processing industry is one of the nation’s largest sources of industrial nutrient pollution in the country.

“While we haven’t linked specific meat and poultry processing discharges to human health impacts from drinking waters in specific communities, we do know that these facilities discharge large amounts of pollutants, such as nitrogen, oxygen demand and total dissolved solids, that do impact drinking water sources nationally,” the agency said.

Pollution discharge also poses a financial concern to nearby cities, which often have small budgets. 

In Postville, one of the poorest cities in the state, city staff are currently reviewing the plant’s wastewater processes and determining if the meatpacking plant needs to change its wastewater operations. The city spent nearly $20,000 in expenses related to this year’s spill, according to city records. Agri Star eventually paid the city for the cost of the spill, including a $2,000 fine. 

The kosher meat plant processes roughly 50,000 chickens a day, and can process up to 400 cattle in a day, according to a 2016 interview with Forward, a nonprofit Jewish media outlet. The plant employs 325 people based on industry estimates. 

Postville, with a population of 2,503, boasts the motto “Hometown to the World” because of its diverse demographics. Forty-three percent of residents are Hispanic, 9% are multi-racial, 9% are Black and 26% are listed as “some other race,” according to the U.S. Census.

While environmental groups believe stricter pollution regulations will benefit marginalized communities, the meatpacking industry has claimed the opposite.

Chris Young, the executive director of the American Association of Meat Processors, said meatpacking plants often provide a strong taxbase in the communities they are located. Increasing the costs for EPA’s plans can lead to lost jobs and lower revenues, Young said.  

AAMP is made up of over 1,600 meatpackers, wholesalers and distributors of meat products across the country. The organization is based in Pennsylvania and its leadership consists of owners and operators of regional meat processing facilities.

While many meatpacking towns across Iowa are economically depressed and lack proper resources to protect workers and residents from pollution, they are also reliable sources of income for undocumented and migrant workers, said Nobiss, executive director of the Great Plains Action Society.

“It’s hard to get out, because if you’re not documented, what are your choices?” she said.

How immigrant labor transformed the meatpacking industry

The communities most impacted by the various forms of meatpacking pollution tend to be communities of color or low-income because of how the industry’s labor dynamics have changed in the last half-century, relying on immigrant and migrant workers. 

“Like processing plants across the country, Postvillle’s kosher operation relies on immigrant workers: people more than happy to endure such harsh conditions for a shot at their American dream,” narrator Paul Berge said in a 2001 Iowa Public Television documentary exploring the city’s changing demographics. 

Meatpacking used to be a heavily unionized industry that employed predominantly white workers. Up until the 1960s and ‘70s, many plants were centralized in larger cities and had robust union workforces, said Joshua Specht, an environmental and business historian at the University of Notre Dame and author of “Red Meat Republic: A Hoof-to-Table History of How Beef Changed America.”

Meatpacking workers used to make wages above the national average, had paid sick leave and low turnover, according to industry experts and Department of Labor studies.

When the nation expanded its highway systems and trucking companies boomed in the 1960s, meatpacking plants no longer had to be on major rail corridors in big cities like Chicago. Soon, meatpacking plants became decentralized and set up shop in rural towns closer to livestock and feed sources.

The rural, predominantly white communities changed drastically when meatpacking plants began relocating and recruiting migrant laborers, Specht said. 

And this was exactly what happened in Postville in the late 1980s when Sholom Rubashkin bought a shuttered meatpacking plant and opened Agriprocessors. 

“The idea here was to come here out to the source, where the cattle are, and produce the kosher meat here and ship it out,” Rubashkin said in the 2001 documentary. 

While Postville’s population has grown since the early 1990s, an anomaly for many rural parts of the region, the city’s white population has shrunk, according to historical U.S. Census data. 

According to a 2020 report from the economic development group Northeast Iowa Resource Conservation & Development, the demographics of Postville sharply diverged from those of surrounding communities and counties since 1990. 

“Low prestige employment opportunities at Agri Star have attracted immigrants to Postville since its opening as Agriprocessors in 1989,” the report states.

A turning point: The largest immigration raid in US history

At its height, Agriprocessor was the nation’s largest kosher meatpacking plant, but the company and Postville would be changed forever. In 2008, the meatpacking plant became the site of the nation’s largest immigration raid. 

Almost 400 undocumented workers were arrested at the plant during the raid conducted by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement. The raid was the beginning of the end for Agriprocessors. Rubashkin was sentenced to 27 years in prison and convicted on 86 counts of financial crimes related to the plant. 

Rubashkin served eight years in prison before he received a sentence reduction from President Donald Trump in 2017. Rubashkin was also charged with 67 misdemeanor child labor law violations in 2010, all related to the initial raid of the Postville meatpacking plant, but was found not guilty. 

“In a lot of these rural communities, these plants will be the major employer in the community and it’s really hard for folks to speak out about what’s going on … Whether that’s the conditions in the plant, or the environmental impacts that the facility is having because people don’t want to risk their job.”

Angelisa Belden, a spokesperson for the Iowa Environmental Council

The plant reopened under new ownership in 2009 as Agri Star, after it was purchased by Canadian billionaire and Orthodox philanthropist Hershey Friedman.

Since the initial blow to the community, Postville officials have worked to rebuild the town and community pride, and so have plant ownership, according to media reports. 

Workers who spoke with Investigate Midwest said they haven’t noticed any problems with the plant, or just don’t have time to worry about environmental issues because they are busy providing for their families.

This is a reality seen across many parts of rural Iowa, according to Angelisa Belden, a spokesperson for the Iowa Environmental Council.

“In a lot of these rural communities, these plants will be the major employer in the community and it’s really hard for folks to speak out about what’s going on,” she said. “Whether that’s the conditions in the plant, or the environmental impacts that the facility is having because people don’t want to risk their job.”

EPA enforcement on meatpacking plant wastewater dischargers 

The EPA has fined more than 100 Midwest meatpacking plants for a plethora of pollution violations since 2003, according to Investigate Midwest’s analysis. 

The analysis shows that water pollution has been the least enforced regulation for this industry during that time frame, with only a fifth of violations related to the Clean Water Act. More than half of the cases involved violations of the Clean Air Act and a quarter of cases violated the Emergency Planning and Community Right-to-Know Act, a law created to protect and inform communities about the use of chemicals.

Meatpacking plants are currently divided into three categories for how wastewater is dealt with at the facilities: direct, indirect and zero dischargers. 

A direct discharger is a meatpacking plant that sends its waste directly into a body of water. There are roughly 170 direct dischargers in the country. Agri Star Meat and Poultry is one of them. 

Under current federal regulation, direct dischargers are the only type of facility that is required to monitor for any type of pollution the facility releases from its wastewater. 

An indirect discharger is a meatpacking plant that sends its waste to a water treatment facility, often owned and operated by the municipality where the meatpacking plant is located. The majority of meatpacking plants in the country are indirect dischargers. There are roughly 3,700 of these facilities.

A zero discharger is a meatpacking plant that spreads its waste and sludge material on farmland. These facilities can still have waste that pollutes groundwater through land application, but the EPA has excluded them from all regulatory decisions.

Dani Replogle, staff attorney for the environmental advocacy group Food and Water Watch, said the EPA hasn’t meaningfully updated its standards for meatpacking wastewater in more than 20 years.

Food and Water Watch is among the 10 organizations that sued the EPA in 2019 to update their wastewater standards for meatpacking companies. 

There are three options the EPA is considering for what new meatpacking standards would look like. Based on interviews with environmental groups, meat industry representatives, filed public comments, and public hearings, two options stand out that the agency is considering in its final decision next year.

The first option is the most lenient of the two, and would: 

• Increase limits for nitrogen pollution for direct dischargers.
• Establish limits for phosphorus for direct dischargers.
• Establish limits for conventional pollutants for indirect dischargers.

The meat industry has supported this option in public hearings, but in filed comments with the EPA a coalition of major industry trade groups said it would prefer an option that only focuses on direct dischargers and to drop all standards for indirect dischargers, citing burdensome rules on meatpacking facilities across the country. 

“The EPA should also recognize that many (meat and poultry) facilities are the largest employers in many rural communities, and they provide significant benefits which must be taken into account and balanced with other goals,” a coalition of major meat industry organizations wrote in public comments. 

Replogle said the first option would not require meatpackers to track nitrogen or phosphorus pollution for indirect dischargers, the largest applicable category for meatpackers.

“The meatpacking industry doesn’t have any incentive to try to push EPA beyond what their preferred option is already,” she said.

Environmental groups like Food and Water Watch support a more stringent option that includes:

• Increasing and establishing limits for nitrogen pollution for direct and indirect dischargers.
• Establishing limits for phosphorus for direct and indirect dischargers.
• Establishing limits for conventional pollutants — grease, oil, chlorine, total suspended solid material (like fat and blood), fecal coliform and ammonia — for indirect dischargers.

Replogle said the most stringent option will manifest in real-world change, such as reducing fish kills in waterways, less algae blooms caused by nitrogen pollution and healthier communities.

“It’s alarming when you look at those really, really high pollutant numbers and think about what that can mean for our waterways,” she said. 

When updating the proposed meatpacking wastewater pollution ruling, the EPA will use guidelines set by the Clean Water Act to evaluate what techniques and technology currently exist and are economically viable for the industry in order to prevent wastewater pollution.

In doing so, the EPA anticipates that cleaning up meatpacking plant pollution will help clean up disenfranchised communities. 

“EPA’s analysis supports more generally that meat and poultry products facilities can do more to control discharges of nutrients and other pollutants and that revisions to the rule could reduce discharges affecting environmental justice communities,” the agency told Investigate Midwest in an email.

Young, with the American Association of Meat Processors, said the meatpacking industry wants to be environmentally responsible, but believes the EPA didn’t provide enough due diligence in its proposal. 

“My pushback to EPA is I don’t believe that they know the industry well enough,” Young said.

Young said he worries that the cost of compliance will lead to plant closures. The EPA estimates that between 16 and 53 meatpacking plants could close under new regulations, but the agency said its estimates don’t include scenarios where meat processors shift costs of compliance onto consumers through raised prices or changes in production. 

Lingering pollution violations in Postville

Postville’s plant has had continuous problems with its wastewater pollution for the past two decades. 

“Because of how centralized these facilities are, the pollution is almost unavoidable,” Specht, the historian, said.

Agri Star has also had problems adhering to standards set by the state, according to records obtained from the Iowa Department of Natural Resources.

In January 2020, IDNR sent a notice of violation to the plant, stating that the company had not submitted routine compliance reports to the agency. Later that year, the plant issued a notice that 1,000 gallons of wastewater overflowed into a nearby storm drain.

The plant was in “significant noncompliance” with the amount of solid material found in its wastewater between December 2021 to May 2022. 

The plant has also failed to report the amount of E. coli, nitrogen, ammonia and chloride it released into wastewater on various dates from 2020 to 2022, according to an Iowa DNR inspection and permit review conducted in 2023.

In the 2023 review, DNR inspection staff referred to the stream that receives Agri Star’s wastewater as “turbid.” It contained a lot of suspended solids, a term used to describe organic materials such as fats, fecal matter, grease and other animal parts.

In a response to emailed questions, Postville Mayor Dennis Koening told Investigate Midwest he believes Agri Star has been a good neighbor to the residents of Postville. 

After the plant’s spill earlier this year, Shane Dodge, an environmental program supervisor with the Iowa DNR, told Investigate Midwest that the agency took action by issuing a notice of violation to the plant, which requires the business to report actions that have been taken to prevent future spills.

In an email obtained from the Iowa DNR, the plant’s management claimed the spill was caused by sabotage. 

Agri Star supervisor Egan Guerrero told the Iowa DNR that a foreign object was found lodged in a pipe that led to the plant’s flooding and overflow into the city’s treatment system.

“We have taken this to be an intentional act of violence toward our plant,” Guerrero wrote.

The plant was not fined by the Iowa DNR. Michele Smith, an environmental specialist for the Iowa DNR, told Investigate Midwest that fines are not part of the agency’s “enforcement response” when issuing these notices.

Smith said the allegation of sabotage did not affect the agency’s response or the meatpacking plant’s responsibilities. 

The agency “did not attempt to substantiate or disprove this claim,” she said.

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