By Craig Volland, Sierra Club Kansas Chapter Agriculture Chair
About 10 billion U.S. farmed animals annually live out their short lives mostly squeezed into filthy warehouse-like buildings, called Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations (CAFOs), or factory farms. Not only do these overcrowded environments give rise to animal welfare concerns, the concentration of pigs, cows, chickens, turkeys, and other animals creates problems for people.
Odors, hazardous air pollutants, and water contamination from the billions of gallons of waste generated each year turns rural landscapes into industrial dumping grounds. These mega-farms also emit massive amounts of greenhouse gases and encourage the rapid spread of pathogens, including diseases that can jump to humans.
In the 2025 Annual Report of the Kansas Water Authority, Chairperson Dawn Buehler, stated that the “water quality of our streams is declining.” This is more than fifty years after the passage of the Federal Clean Water Act. From some 30 years of work with rural Kansans who oppose animal factories, called Confined Animal Feeding Operations, or CAFOs, we can confidently advise that the primary cause of this failure is the inadequate regulation of the huge amounts of manure produced by CAFOs.
While there are several ways poorly regulated CAFOs can pollute surface water, as well as associated groundwater aquifers, the most important one is runoff of wastewater or solid manure applied to crop fields. Accordingly, we are starting with a bill for the current legislative session, that strengthens the existing statute (K.S.A. 65-1,182) that regulates the land application of swine wastewater. In particular, the revised bill would list situations requiring direct injection of wastewater into fields, or the use of low pressure drop nozzles from center pivots that would be required to release liquid waste three feet or less above the ground. This would greatly reduce runoff of waste to steams and reduce the risk of obnoxious spray drift onto neighboring properties, residences and roads.
A new section would be added to the statute to require KDHE to regularly inspect the borders of waste application fields to assess the condition of any required runoff barriers and to detect any channels toward streams that have formed from soil erosion. In such cases prompt repairs would be required. At present KDHE inspectors rarely, if ever, take a look at the crucial waste application fields. Instead, they only check the boxes relating to the condition of the wastewater storage ponds and the grounds immediately adjacent to the animal confinement barns. We think these are common sense improvements to the regulatory setting that would significantly reduce CAFO pollution of the state’s surface waters and alluvial aquifers.
February 4, 2026
Why The Chapter Works to Protect Kansas From Livestock Factories