Honorable Representatives, Senators, and concerned citizens, we thank you for your consideration of our comments regarding structured and funded support for farmers and the agricultural community as we begin to grasp the legacy of PFAS contamination on agricultural land. These comments are submitted respectfully by the Protect Our Soil Coalition (POSC), an interest group formed to protect our shared resource of healthy, living soil, and our farms from passive receipt of irremediable chemical contaminants such as PFAS (aka “Forever Chemicals”) and micro-plastics. Furthermore, this group seeks to protect farms from continued contamination with PFAS. The detection of accumulated PFAS contaminants in farm products and fields threatens farm businesses, the food supply chain, and human health.
The Protect Our Soil Coalition supports the Relief for Farmers Hit with PFAS Act (S.747). This legislation, as drafted, provides critical financial and technical assistance to farm businesses that have been negatively impacted by PFAS. In addition to building capacity for adequate PFAS testing, the bill creates a program for financial assistance to farm operations whose revenues are seriously reduced or halted entirely due to PFAS contamination.
Farms are uniquely vulnerable businesses and community assets. Agricultural businesses have highly seasonal revenue streams; the purchase, preparation of land, and labor necessary to reach a harvest date require upfront investment and sustained operations expenses. Harvests and products are perishable and subject to global commodity market prices. This aid will also increase the retention of highly skilled farmers and professionals in a sector already dealing with significant labor shortages. By providing emergency funding for farms impacted by PFAS, this legislation will stabilize farms, the rural agricultural communities that depend on farms, and our food systems.
In addition to the provisions outlined in S. 747, there are further steps needed to adequately protect farms and the food system. POSC recommends that PFAS be regulated at the source of generation. Industrial operations and manufacturing facilities often expose their employees and surrounding communities to unacceptably high levels of PFAS. Inadequate treatment at the source of pollution, as well as failure to notify public waste management systems when upstream mitigation fails, has resulted in the high toxicity of resulting biosolids. To increase compliance by manufacturers and other source producers of PFAS and industrial chemicals, regulating agencies and municipalities need targeted information on these issues, adequate staffing, and funding for enforcement.
POSC recommends the adoption of regulations for public and private waste and wastewater treatment facilities that prevent further direct contamination of agricultural land. Organic farming standards have banned the spreading of biosolids since the codification of the Organic Standards in the 1990s. POSC recommends banning the spread of biosolids untested for PFAS on any agricultural land and to address and prevent the bioaccumulation of microplastics including PFAS in agricultural soils more broadly in a strategic way.
With the above in mind, the signatories of this letter endorse the Relief for Farmers Hit with PFAS Act (S.747) as a vital step towards protecting farm businesses, the food supply chain, food producing agricultural soils and the natural environment. In addition to this first step, we demand legislation that fully addresses the root causes of PFAS contamination on agricultural lands.
