This is a public service announcement to any farmer who either has fertilized their crops with sewage sludge or is considering doing so this spring to save on input costs.

Stop. Don’t. To do otherwise potentially puts your farm at risk.

The Environmental Protection Agency promotes the agricultural use of biosolids, which is sewage sludge that has been treated to meet the requirements in the EPA’s regulation, “Standards for the Use or Disposal of Sewage Sludge.” 

The EPA’s 2022 Biosolid Annual Report shows that 31% of all biosolids were used in agricultural applications. Another 24% were used on home gardens, landscaping, golf courses and the like.

But EPA is asleep at the switch when it comes to testing sewage sludge for the presence of polyfluoroalkyl substances — more commonly known as “forever chemicals.” It doesn’t.

Which is inexcusable since EPA was informed in 2003 by 3M, then the nation’s chief producer of PFASs for products like Teflon pans, that high levels of PFAS were turning up in the nation’s sewage.

Yes, more than two decades ago. EPA’s tepid response was to ask 3M for more information. EPA’s slow walk has proven costly.

It wasn’t until last April that the feds ramped up a PFAS testing program for the nation’s drinking water. As for sewage sludge? In January, EPA finally released a draft risk assessment for sewage sludge that:

“…reflects the agency’s latest scientific understanding of the potential risks to human health and the environment posed by the presence of PFOA and PFOS in sewage sludge that is land applied as a soil conditioner or fertilizer (on agricultural, forested, and other lands), surface disposed (e.g., placed in a sewage sludge-only landfill called a monofill), or incinerated.”

For agricultural applications the EPA risk assessment considered three particular scenarios:

• application to a farm raising dairy cows, beef cattle or chickens
• application to a farm growing fruits or vegetables
• application to reclaim damaged soils such as an overgrazed pasture

The results of the draft risk assessment should be alarming to farmers fertilizing with sewage sludge:

“…in some modeled scenarios, there could be human health risks exceeding the EPA’s acceptable thresholds to those living on or near impacted farms or primarily relying on their products. These risks are associated with multiple individual exposure pathways if the impacted person consumes the modeled amounts of food or water from the biosolids-amended farms (e.g., drinking 32 ounces of milk per day, drinking 1 liter of water per day, eating 1 egg per day, or eating 1-2 servings of fish from the impacted waterbody per week).”

What risks? Last year, EPA classified two types of PFAS that can be found in sewage sludge — perfluorooctanoic acid (PFOA) and perfluorooctane sulfonic acid (PFOS) — as likely to be carcinogenic to humans.

And more concerning, EPA in April 2024 declared “there is no level of exposure to these contaminants without risk of health impacts, including certain cancers.” Forever chemicals can also be responsible for hepatic, immunological, cardiovascular, and developmental effects.

For its part 3M was less than forthright back in the day in sharing with the feds what it knew about PFOS. Sometime this year, 3M claims it will cease forever chemical production. But hundreds of millions of pounds of forever chemicals produced over more than 50 years remain in the environment and our blood.

The bottom line is that farmers all over the United States have unknowingly spread contaminated sewage sludge loaded with forever chemicals on their land, thanks in no small part to EPA’s failure to make investigation of PFAS a priority more than 20 years ago.

Farmers are just now waking up to the unfortunate news that they may have polluted their own fields.

Lawsuits are already flying. One to keep an eye on is Farmer, Alessi, Schultz, and Coleman v. EPA. The lawsuit accuses EPA of negligence in informing the public of the the dangers of forever chemicals:

“EPA’s failure, in its biennial reports, to identify toxic PFAS that available information shows are present in sewage sludge in concentrations which may adversely affect public health or the environment under 33 U.S.C. § 1345(d)(2)(C) is arbitrary and capricious, while EPA’s failure to regulate certain toxic PFAS despite ample available information warranting such regulation constitutes an agency action unlawfully withheld or unreasonably delayed.”

The lawsuit could potentially be a bellwether for a flood of litigation against EPA and perhaps 3M.

And in case you were wondering, cleaning up of existing forever chemicals currently in the environment falls into the realm of science fiction.

So what to do?