Factory farming is a term I assume environmental types use to paint efficient agriculture production in a negative light. To feed the world and provide a safe, affordable and abundant food supply, farmers and ranchers have become able to grow significantly more food per acre while using fewer resources, including land, water and inputs. Scale isn’t bad when it comes to food, feed and fiber production. Insinuating that it is punishes the producers who were tasked with doing much more with much less. Not every agriculture operation is a multinational conglomerate. There are significant numbers of large agriculture operations in Colorado family-owned and family-operated.

One of the efficiencies that ensures families can put protein on the table are feedyards or Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations (CAFOs). These are not seedy operations churning black smog out of chimneys while creating meat. These are not factories where animals are raised in boxes and injected with copious amounts of antibiotics just to keep them alive. These are not torturous operations that let manure flow freely into rivers. These are not the boogeyman the anti-agriculture types would have you believe while you write them a check. That is all fiction. It’s the same story some groups peddle through snippets of video footage played to Sarah McLachlan songs, be it puppies or kitties or calves or piglets. It’s a convenient and effective narrative, but it’s false.

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A local journalist wrote about these “factory farms” last week and failed to include any sources from the agriculture industry, despite their continued cooperation with journalists. The crux of the story is how environmentalists battle against factory farms that have allegedly escaped water protections altogether.

In the article, the claims of environmental groups that CAFOs in Colorado produce 17 million tons of manure annually is cited. Zach Riley, chief executive of the Colorado Livestock Association, called the number salacious. Manure is handled all according to a nutrient management plan and much of it is composted and applied as fertilizer to crops or used at garden centers. It isn’t left in giant pools or in the pens for the cattle to be forced to stand in, or piled for perpetuity. It is repurposed and, in many cases, the feedyard purchases the feed from the local farmers who use the compost to grow feed.

Nutrient management is serious business for those who feed livestock. The Colorado Department of Public Health and environmental protection specialists conduct regular inspections to check for compliance. Every feedyard owner and operator is also intimately familiar with CDPHE’s Regulation 81, Animal Feeding Operations Control Regulation beneath the Water Quality Control Commission. Willy nilly, it ain’t.

The purpose of the regulation is to ensure discharges to ground water from permitted and non-permitted concentrated animal-feeding operations are controlled in a manner consistent with the performance standards set forth in this regulation; that non-permitted concentrated animal-feeding operations protect surface waters of the state; that non-permitted concentrated animal-feeding operations register with the division; that animal-feeding operations that are not defined as concentrated animal-feeding operations protect waters of the state through proper application of “best management practices” that consider existing physical conditions and constraints at the facility site.

Each permitted operation must have in place a facility management plan (FMP) that details structures, methods and procedures to control wastewater and those must all be designed with the capability of handling the flow expected from a 25-year, 24-hour or chronic storm. Manure, wastewater and soil is sampled and analyzed annually for nitrogen and phosphorus content. The wastewater management regulation continues for 58 pages and the majority of feeding operations hire third-party entities to ensure compliance, which costs each operation nearly a full-time salary in licenses and fees each year.

Each feeding operation essentially must have the capacity to handle near-Biblical flooding, far exceeding amounts that would leave urban cities covered in floodwaters. To suggest that feeding operations bleed wastewater, antibiotics, E. coli and chemicals into surrounding land and water is irresponsible and false.

Colorado designed and implemented the permitting and checking systems in place today in cooperation with all stakeholders and with the contracted assistance of environmental engineers. Environmental extremists, with the enthusiastic assistance of some mainstream media, are attempting murder by a thousand paper cuts, litigating and regulating their own will upon an industry that feeds the world. Surely they’re not attempting to end agriculture with their own mouths full.

Rachel Gabel writes about agriculture and rural issues. She is assistant editor of The Fence Post Magazine, the region’s preeminent agriculture publication. Gabel is a daughter of the state’s oil and gas industry and a member of one of the state’s 12,000 cattle-raising families, and she has authored children’s books used in hundreds of classrooms to teach students about agriculture.