There was a letter in my hometown Strawberry Point Press Journal newspaper Wednesday July 1, 2026 from the President of the Iowa Pork Producers Association, Dean Frazer. In that letter Frazer was bemoaning his belief that California’s Proposition 12 was hurting confinement pig farmers by forcing them to change sow structures in confinements to give the sows room to turn around. Frazer seems to want the federal government to eliminate Proposition 12 through legislation in the “Save Our Bacon Act.” In other words, Frazer seems to want the federal government to force Californians to eat food they don’t want to eat.
Frazer’s argument is both strange and revealing in that Iowa law actually forces Iowans to breathe toxic human health-harming air pollution from hog confinements, other animal confinements, and feedlots. That air must be blown out of hog confinements 24/7 in order for the pigs, and workers, inside to stay healthy and alive. Iowans get to breathe that pollution. Frazer never mentions that fact.
Larry Stone, Dick Janson, and I sued the Iowa DNR asking them to regulate the air pollution coming out of hog confinements. We lost that case. In his ruling the judge said there was state code already on the books that provided the EPC the authority to regulate that pollution in Iowa Code section 459.207.
Larry, Dick, and I then wrote the book, “Hog Confinements and Human Health: the intersection of science, morals, and law.” In that book the human health-harming pollutants are named, and the health effects are listed. There are also 867 peer-reviewed journal studies that justify our positions. Go to www.civandinc.com and click on the title to read the book.
Unlike the political arguments about the scientific understanding of what nitrates do to people, the hog confinement air pollution science has been around long enough that there can be no doubting the science’s correctness. That is because we have dealt with these pollutants for decades in the wastewater industry. Hog confinements have anaerobic digestion taking place in the waste storage pit below the pigs cooking up those pollutants which must be blown out into the environment for the pigs’ and workers’ safety. We get to breathe those pollutants.
Our book also contains a 3 month study that Dick did, in part, on whether Iowa law actually protects Iowans from these hog confinement toxic air pollutants. It doesn’t.
Starting with Appendix B on page 44, Dick’s study shows the adoption of ambient air standards for hydrogen-sulfide and ammonia by the DNR’s governing body the Environmental Protection Commission (EPC). Dick then goes on to show that just days later the Legislature, through a legislative procedure which needed no Governor’s signature, repealed that administrative rule which would have regulated hydrogen-sulfide and ammonia coming from hog confinements. So the Iowa code is still on the books, but the attempt to regulate those gases was negated by the Iowa Legislature. That hydrogen-sulfide and ammonia are not regulated in Iowa was confirmed at a recent EPC meeting held in Decorah.
In other words, the state of Iowa is forcing Iowans to breathe human health-harming toxic air pollution from hog and other animal confinements, and feedlots. And, Iowans seem to have no legal recourse to change this situation.
That leaves me to wonder what the Iowa Pork Producers Association members think about the state of Iowa forcing Iowans to breathe human health-harming toxic and deadly air pollutants coming from their confinements.
Concerns about California’s Proposition 12 pale in relation to all the health issues forced upon Iowans by confinement and feedlot toxic air pollution. The Iowa Pork Producers Association members might want to clean up their own house.
Bob Watson
Decorah