The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit reversed a lower court ruling and agreed National Pork Producers Council (NPPC), the Ohio Pork Council, and several other agricultural associations are allowed to intervene as full parties in a case challenging Ohio’s regulation of nutrients in the Maumee River Watershed and western Lake Erie basin.
“This decision matters because it ensures agriculture can stand up and tell its own story,” says Cheryl Day, executive vice president of the Ohio Pork Council. “Our producers who raise livestock and grow crops are in the best position to defend agriculture and explain how these policies affect real farms — not federal regulators or government lawyers who don’t have any connection to agriculture.”
The Case Background
The Ohio Environmental Protection Agency developed and the U.S. EPA approved a total maximum daily load (TMDL) – the amount of pollutants, including otherwise unregulated farm and agricultural storm water runoff, that can be in a water body and still meet federal water quality standards – for the river in northwest Ohio, NPPC shares in Capital Update.
The Environmental Law & Policy Center, among others, sued EPA in U.S. District Court in 2023, arguing that its approval of the Ohio EPA’s Maumee River TMDL “was arbitrary and capricious and the TMDL is not stringent enough.”
Even though the District Court allowed environmental activists, including Food & Water Watch and the Waterkeeper Alliance, to intervene in the case, the U.S. Department of Justice opposed the agricultural organizations’ request to enter the case, arguing that it would represent EPA and farm group interests.
The Right to Intervene
In granting NPPC and the other agriculture organizations the right to intervene, the Sixth Circuit unanimously found that while the EPA’s argument that “approval of the Maumee TMDL is consistent with its regulations interpreting and implementing the CWA” – a position supported by the farm groups – the agricultural associations have a different view of the regulations from EPA. NPPC explains the groups further argue that some of the regulatory requirements are inconsistent with or otherwise not required by the CWA and not applicable to farmers.
“With the case back at the U.S. District Court, the farm organizations will be able to argue that while EPA’s reasons for approving the Maumee River TMDL were adequate to support its decision, the legal threshold for such approval is lower than the environmental groups and even EPA contend,” NPPC says.
Although NPPC and the agricultural associations could have filed friend-of-the-court briefs in the case, being intervenors allows them to raise and prosecute their own arguments, argue at trial, weigh in on possible settlements, and appeal an adverse outcome.
“Overall, NPPC will have a much stronger platform for defending agriculture from baseless attacks by activist groups, both in this case and in future challenges,” the organization says.
