DOSTIE FARM, an organic dairy in Fairfield, Maine, was thriving until one day in October 2020 when owner Egide Dostie Jr. got a call from Stonyfield, his exclusive buyer. Something was off with the farm's milk: Tests had found that it contained three times the state's allowable level of perfluorooctanesulfonic acid, one of the class of "forever chemicals" known as PFAS.
"We called bullshit," Dostie remembers. PFAS contamination had recently been found at two other Maine dairy farms. But those farms had used sewage sludge to fertilize their pastures-something Dostie had never done.
But, as Dostie later learned, his farm's previous owners, like many of their peers back in the 1980s and '90s, had spread the fields with sludge provided by a state program that promoted it as a safe, environmentally friendly fertilizer and delivered it to farmers for free. At the time, few people realized that chemicals in the sludge would eventually taint water, soils, milk, vegetables, and even farmers' bodies.
PFAS, which reliably repel water, grease, and heat, are used in everything from paper plates to rain jackets. The compounds, which don't break down in the environment, have ended up almost everywhere, including in living creatures. Decades of studies suggest links between some PFAS and increased risks of cancer, high cholesterol, immune system and reproductive problems, as well as fetal complications. While the EPA has proposed strict limits on six types of PFAS in drinking water and a ban from food packaging, the federal government has been silent on allowable levels in sewage sludge spread on farms or in the food they produce-much less a strategy to phase out the entire class of some 12,000 compounds.
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