SAN FRANCISCO — The US Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit in San Francisco rejected a lawsuit brought by activist groups to overhaul the Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) current concentrated animal feeding operation (CAFO) regulations.

The lawsuit, led by Food & Water Watch, sought to remove the CAFO rules’ current exclusion of stormwater discharges and instead requiring all CAFOs to either obtain Clean Water Act permits or provide evidence that they are not discharging into Waters of the United States (WOTUS).

The court approved of EPA’s current approach to regulating livestock production through water quality studies along with its formation of the Animal Agriculture Water Quality Subcommittee that includes representatives from the pork industry.

Instead of forsaking the decades-old established law, the court sided with EPA, noting that the agency “deemed it prudent to first seek information about how best to tackle the problem before directing resources towards” new regulations. The court added that the process is “reasonable and hardly at odds with the Clean Water Act’s requirements.”

The National Pork Producers Council (NPPC) lauded this decision. Last month, the group had participated in oral arguments before the Ninth Circuit in defense of the current law. NPPC pointed out that courts in 2005 and 2010 found that CAFOs do not have a duty to apply for a discharge permit because the Clean Water Act covers only actual discharges, not potential discharges.

“For decades, the pork industry has demonstrated leadership in addressing environmental challenges and has maintained successful working relationships with federal, state and local regulators to ensure their farms are constructed and maintained as zero-discharge operations,” NPPC said in its latest capital update. “Major changes to long-standing federal laws can only come from congressional action, and it is inappropriate for these activist groups to seek to rewrite federal law through the courts when Congress has consistently rejected their outlandish demands.”