Texas farm and ranch land is at risk.
It’s not the Chinese, although lawmakers have introduced a suite of bills to fight against foreign adversaries gobbling up precious land.
Something else is destroying the soil itself and livestock that graze on it.
PFAs (perfluoroalkyl and polyfluoroalkyl substances, colloquially called “forever chemicals”) are an imperishable poison that is seeping into the waterways and lands of Texas farmers with destructive force.
A case in Johnson County, Texas, set off alarm bells across the state. Environmental crimes investigator Dana Ames had tests conducted in late December of 2022 on a stillborn calf from a Texas ranch at a Texas A&M lab. The test results came back; this calf, that had never breathed contaminated air or ingested poisoned water, had PFAs totaling 610,000 parts per trillion in its liver.
For context, this is 152,500 times what the EPA considers a safe amount in drinking water. On February 11, Johnson County issued a disaster declaration because of the contamination.
How are these forever chemicals seeping into farmlands across Texas?
Decades ago, biosolids were introduced as an environmentally sustainable way of recycling human waste during the treatment process, to convert it into a nutrient-dense fertilizer. Cities jumped at this opportunity, with many seeing ecological and agricultural improvements as a result. And while some producers and suppliers of these biosolids can be classified as good-faith actors delivering a high-quality, safety-tested product, others — like Goldman Sachs-owned Synagro — are under massive scrutiny stemming from lawsuits and reports that their product is abounding in these toxic forever chemicals.
This has great significance for the Lone Star State. Synagro serves numerous large Texas cities, including Austin, Houston, and Johnson County-adjacent Fort Worth. Initially, when the city of Austin signed a 10-year biosolids removal contract with Synagro in 2018, representatives of companies in competition during the bidding process alleged a conspiracy between city of Austin staff and Synagro. Specifically, there were peculiar delays engineered during the bidding process and an “accidental” publication of a bid from a competing firm that gave a strategic advantage to Synagro’s bidding strategy. Synagro was accused of shady practices that priced out all competitors.
Similar accusations have been levied in other cities where Synagro steamrolled competition, raising questions about the firm cutting corners and compromising the safety of its product.
Is this company knowingly cutting corners and supplying a product it knows to be riddled with poisonous forever chemicals? When a farmer who is not even using the product still ends up incurring the costs — dead livestock, toxic soil and a rancid smell described by Dana Ames as “worse than death” — it’s clear that opting to not use the product doesn’t solve the problem. However, there is an elegant, simple solution to answer this question and deliver Texas farmers from their plight.
Rep. Helen Kerwin filed House Bill 1674 and Sen. Kevin Sparks filed Senate Bill 886 to prevent biosolids manufacturers from pumping toxic sludge into Texas farmlands. Simply, these bills require companies to test their product monthly and bars them from distributing biosolids if they contain toxic levels of forever chemicals. Synagro claims to do this voluntarily in a case study — so any protest from Synagro should be recognized as an automatic admission that it knows it is peddling a poisonous product.
Texas farmers have had enough, and Rep. Kerwin, Sen. Sparks, and a coalition of state and local elected officials and advocates have made clear they won’t back down until Gov. Greg Abott signs the dotted lines on this bill.