A quarter of America’s “farms” aren’t really farms

The meat and dairy industries — along with the farms that grow corn and soy for animal feed — are some of the biggest polluters in the US. Yet they’re largely exempt from environmental regulations. An argument that industry lobbyists and allied politicians often make is that there are simply too many farms to regulate.

In 2022, when asked why farmers aren’t required to reduce their pollution, then-Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack told reporters that farms aren’t as straightforward to regulate pollution as, say, factories. The US has “millions of farms,” Vilsack claimed. “So as you think about regulation, the reality is, it’s not as easy as you might think to enforce.”

Around that same time, as the Supreme Court prepared to argue a highly consequential case concerning the Clean Water Act