Oregon lawmakers won’t prohibit building large livestock operations in areas with heightened groundwater protections this year, but the idea may not be abandoned for long.

Though there isn’t enough agreement on this “explosive issue” for the proposal to pass in 2025, discussions about remedying aquifer pollution will be reprised after the legislative session, said Sen. Jeff Golden, D-Ashland, chair of the Senate Natural Resources Committee.

“We will not be moving this bill out of this committee,” he said during a recent legislative hearing.

Golden said he nonetheless held a public hearing on Senate Bill 80, which would ban the construction or expansion of “confined animal feeding operations” in the state’s “groundwater management areas,” to focus attention on the issue of nitrate contamination — particularly in the Umatilla basin.

“My intention at this point is to do some work in the interim that tries to get at the question of what actionable steps we can take to start improving that groundwater management area,” he said.

Oregon has three groundwater management areas — in the lower Umatilla basin, northern Malheur County and the southern Willamette Valley — where pollution levels are high enough to warrant “action plans” to rectify the problem.

Wrangling over CAFO restrictions is nothing new in the Oregon statehouse, where extensive regulations on such operations were approved in 2023.

That legislation, Senate Bill 85, started out as a moratorium on new CAFOs but was scaled back to limit groundwater withdrawals by such operations and impose land use restrictions on them, among other measures.

Many of the same arguments played out in the recent debate over SB 80, with opponents citing the previous bill as a major reason not to burden livestock operations with more regulations.

“SB 80 proposes to prohibit operations that are already under immense scrutiny and operate under a system of complex regulations updated as recently as last year,” said Katie Murray, executive director of the Oregonians for Food and Shelter agribusiness group.

The agricultural community is suffering from “regulation fatigue” and negotiated the previous CAFO rules with the understanding that lawmakers give them enough time to work before piling on additional restrictions, said Mike Freese, representative of the Beef Northwest and Three Mile Canyon farming operations.

“Senate Bill 80 goes against that agreement. We did not let it play out,” Freese said.

Dairy farmers and cattle feedlot owners who operate CAFOs are also rural residents and don’t want to pollute their own drinking water, but they’re subject to sufficient oversight under the federal Clean Water Act in addition to state regulations, said Rocky Dallum, a representative of several livestock and poultry groups.

“Under federal and state law, it is illegal to hold a permit and pollute,” he said.

Critics said the bill would unfairly preclude existing CAFOs, who are complying with the rules in good faith, from expanding to accommodate generational succession plans.

“Passage of this bill will continue to drive Oregon farmers out of business and increase our reliance on out-of-state production of our protein needs,” said Matt McElligott, president of the Oregon Cattlemen’s Association.

Warren Chamberlain, a dairyman from Vale, Ore., said he had to expand his CAFO upon taking over from his father and expects his son will have to do the same.

“Nowadays, you have to get bigger,” Chamberlain said, noting that SB 80 would rule out his son’s plans. “I don’t know how he will make a living in agriculture.”

Supporters argued SB 80 is a common sense approach to preventing further groundwater pollution, which has proven necessary because existing state and federal rules haven’t stopped nutrients from leaching into aquifers.

“The current laws are not strong enough and these operations are in compliance while contamination numbers continue to go up,” said Alice Morrison, co-director of policy and development of the Friends of Family Farmers nonprofit.

The economies of scale driving CAFOs to get larger are on a “collision course” with the health of aquifers in which nitrates are growing more concentrated, said Jeremy Beckham, a supporter of SB 80 from Lake Oswego, Ore.

This hazardous dynamic necessitates government intervention, he said. “This is a classic example of a market failure.”

The high volume of water used by CAFOs has been shown to exacerbate the problem of groundwater pollution, said Brian Posewitz, staff attorney for the Waterwatch of Oregon nonprofit.

“Large beef and dairy CAFOs use as much water as a medium-sized city,” he said.

The state government should not be permitting additional potential sources of nitrate leaching until it figures out why pollution has grown worse in groundwater management areas such the Lower Umatilla basin, said Kaleb Lay, policy and research director for the Oregon Rural Action nonprofit.

“We’ve met too many people to name who’ve had cancer, miscarriages, thyroid dysfunction, who have spent thousands of dollars of their own money on filtration systems, only to have them not work, and that list continues to grow to this day,” he said.

Aside from mitigating the health problems caused by nitrate contamination, restricting CAFOs would help curtail methane emissions and reduce the suffering of animals in “extreme confinement,” according to SB 80’s proponents.

“There is nothing natural or sustainable about the way of life on a large-scale CAFO,” said Lindsay Vierheilig, legislative affairs manager for the Animal Legal Defense Fund nonprofit. “These conditions are not reflective of Oregon values.”