Texas farmers say sewage-based fertilizer tainted with “forever chemicals” poisoned their land and killed their livestock

“The reason we’re not hearing about it all over the country, in all 50 states, is because nobody’s looking for this problem,” Bennett added.

According to EPA data analyzed by the nonprofit Environmental Working Group in 2022, an estimated 5% of all crop fields in the U.S. — up to 20 million acres — could have used fertilizer made with biosolids. In Texas, more than 157,000 dry metric tons of biosolids-based fertilizer were applied to agricultural lands in 2018.

While the EPA recently set limits for a handful of the chemicals in drinking water, those rules do not cover biosolids.

“The evidence is out there” that PFAS are a health hazard, Bennett said. “We shouldn’t have to wait [for the EPA to act].”

Without federal regulations, some states have taken action, requiring wastewater treatment plants to test their biosolids for PFAS or setting their own limits for PFAS in biosolids. Texas is not among them. State environmental regulators said in a statement they’re not required to by law.

Coleman and other Johnson County farmers who know their land is contaminated are now faced with an existential dilemma: Do they sell their cattle and their crops, knowing they’re likely laced with PFAS, or face financial ruin?

Coleman and Farmer have both decided not to sell any cattle. That means the men now run zombie farms. They pay to feed animals and harvest hay that they won’t sell — a single 900-pound steer could sell for $4,800, Coleman said.

“Everything we plant here is just sucking this [PFAS] stuff up,” Coleman said. “The cows drink the water and eat the grass. For them there is no escaping.”

Anxiety in Johnson County

In February, Johnson County residents packed the courthouse and listened intently as Dana Ames, an environmental crime investigator for the county, and other local officials explained the findings from the nine-month investigation into the noxious smells and dead livestock.

Ames, who spent $35,000 of the county’s money on the investigation and sent samples to a lab in Pennsylvania, told residents that the liver of the Coleman’s stillborn calf contained 610,000 parts per trillion of perfluorooctane sulfonic acid, or PFOS, one of the many types of forever chemicals.

The tissue from a calf belonging to Farmer that died a week after being born tested at 320 ppt of PFOS.

Currently, there are no federal food safety standards for PFAS. In Maine, which in 2016 became the first state to detect PFAS contamination at a farm, state officials issued limits for beef containing PFOS at 3.4 parts per billion and milk containing PFOS at 210 parts per trillion — meaning that beef or milk exceeding these levels should be considered unsafe for consumption. Maine, which has discovered 78 contaminated farms and shut five of them down, has been the only state to set its own PFAS limits for food.

Samples of the pond water where the ranching families’ livestock drink from ranged from 84 ppt to 1,333 ppt of PFAS.

The county also tested the fertilizer their neighbor spread on his farm and found 27 types of PFAS chemicals, including four out of the five the EPA has set limits for in drinking water.

“These people were led to believe this was safe and a cheap fertilizer,” County Commissioner Larry Woolley said at the meeting. “And this isn’t just isolated to this one incident or multiple counties. This is going on all over.”

“The amount of beef and milk that’s gone into the food chain, who knows what their PFAS levels are? The level of victimization is widespread,” he added.

The Colemans, Farmer and four other local farmers have sued Synagro, the Maryland-based company that produced the biosolids-based fertilizer applied on their neighbor’s fields, and Renda Environmental, a Texas-based fertilizer company that sold to the neighbor before Synagro. The lawsuit claims the companies knew about the contaminants in the fertilizer and failed to provide adequate warnings to its customers.

Synagro denies the allegations. The company said it did its own testing on the farmland where the fertilizer was applied, analyzing 36 surface soil samples, 104 groundwater samples and 122 samples from corn and pasture grass.

Released in March 2025, the independent study by the environmental engineering firm Parsons Corporation and Purdue University professor Linda Lee, who researches PFAS and biosolids’ impacts on agriculture, concluded that while some soil samples had some level of PFAS concentrations, all were below levels determined by researchers as typical in farmland.

Researchers also concluded that a single application of the fertilizer, like the one applied at the neighboring farm, could not have caused the elevated PFAS levels reported at the Johnson County farms.

“There’s no evidence that it’s [fertilizer] causing a problem. We land apply several million tons a year of biosolids and on million acres of farmland, and our farmers are the ones most directly using it, and they have not had issues with crop failure or livestock deaths,” said Pam Racey, chief commercial officer for Synagro.

Racey argued that attention should focus on reducing industrial PFAS use: “that’s where we need to focus our efforts.”

Renda Environmental told the Tribune the company does not comment on pending litigation.

In a separate lawsuit filed against the EPA in June by Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility on behalf of the farmers, the group claimed the agency failed to implement restrictions on PFAS in biosolids despite knowing the health risks posed by the chemicals. Johnson County later joined the suit.

“My heart breaks [for the farmers],” said Bennett, the group’s science policy director. “It could be years until the EPA sets biosolids regulations. Somebody needs to hold their feet to the fire … farmers are losing their livelihoods.”

The biosolids used to create the fertilizer that allegedly contaminated the Colemans’ and Farmers’ farms came from Fort Worth’s Village Creek Water Reclamation Facility, which treats sewage from 1 million people, many industries and 23 communities in North Texas. It generates between 27,000 to 31,000 tons of biosolids per year.

Mary Gugliuzza, spokesperson for Fort Worth Water, said the fertilizer pellets produced by Synagro meet EPA and Texas Commission on Environmental Quality requirements.

Gugliuzza added the city had tested some of its biosolids for PFAS even though it’s not required. Those results showed PFAS in the biosolids, but Gugliuzza said that’s the case at wastewater facilities across the country.

Synagro has contracts with more than 1,000 municipal wastewater plants, industrial, and agricultural customers in North America — including Fort Worth — to turn biosolids, which one employee described as resembling chocolate milk, into fertilizer that it markets as nutrient rich and environmentally friendly.

In 2022 Synagro processed 6.5 million tons of biosolids nationwide.

“The [EPA] has not suggested that any changes in biosolids management is required because of the presence of trace amounts of PFAS,” Cleverly, the company spokesperson, said.

In September, the EPA responded to the lawsuit saying it has complete discretion over which pollutants to regulate under federal law — so it can’t be sued.

But the agency is now studying the presence of PFAS in wastewater and sewage sludge nationally and conducting a risk assessment on the use of biosolids and sewage sludge containing the two most widely used and studied forever chemicals — PFOA and PFOS — focusing on health risks through exposure to soil, water, crops, meat and dairy. It expects to publish the results by the end of this year, which will determine whether new federal rules are necessary.

Who should be responsible for removing forever chemicals?

In Texas, most biosolids end up in a landfill. But the rest is diverted for agricultural use in Texas.

At San Antonio’s wastewater treatment plant, water is removed from sewage sludge by using a machine that squeezes it between two tensioned belts or by spreading it in drying beds so the sun evaporates the moisture. Once it’s dried to a crumb-like texture, the biosolids are piled into black mountains then transported to other facilities where two Texas compost companies turn it into fertilizer.

Pitched as a cost-effective way to improve soil fertility, biosolids have been applied to land in the U.S. since the 1970s. Scientists say they contain nitrogen, phosphorus and potassium that helps plants grow.

The EPA only requires wastewater treatment plants to test biosolids for heavy metals and pathogens that can be harmful to health.

If the EPA issues new restrictions on PFAS in biosolids, utilities fear they are likely to bear the responsibility for removing the chemicals from wastewater.

“If we are required to treat a particular chemical that is not covered in the way you already treat, you have to design a whole new system,” said Ed Guzman, the senior vice president and chief legal and ethics officer at the San Antonio Water System. “You have to put it in place and that all takes time. It takes money.”

The cost of removal is significant: A 2023 report by the Minnesota Pollution Control Agency found that it would cost between $2.7 million and $18 million per pound to remove and destroy PFAS from municipal wastewater, depending on facility size, and between $1 million and $2.7 million per pound of PFAS removed from biosolids.

Adam Krantz, the CEO of the National Association of Clean Water Agencies, a group representing municipal wastewater treatment agencies, said the cost of remediation could be passed down to water utility customers, but argues that “polluters should pay.”“It really is the corporate polluter that needs to foot the bill for this as the wrongdoer,” he said.

Others, like Janine Burke-Wells, executive director for the North East Biosolids & Residuals Association, which represents wastewater treatment facilities and biosolids producers, said that the responsibility to curb PFAS should fall on everyone.

“Unless we really eliminate all the sources of PFAS there’s always going to be a background level because [PFAS] is in everything,” Burke-Wells said.

One county doing what it can

In Johnson County, Woolley drives his silver pickup down rural roads, pointing out hay bales and miles of milo grain, corn and wheat — crops the county commissioner says have been blessed by heavy rainfall earlier this year.

Woolley, a former agriculture teacher who moved to Grandivew in 1982, says he’s spent sleepless nights worrying about PFAS’ impacts on ranching families in this county of 180,000 residents.

“I lay awake at night thinking of the magnitude of this whole deal. It’s just crazy,” Woolley said. “This is just the tip of the iceberg. I think there’s gonna be so much public outcry on this … it’s gonna be hard for our state officials to ignore that.”

Following the county’s investigation, Woolley led the charge to pass a local resolution urging farmers to stop using biosolids on their land.

The resolution called for Fort Worth to stop sending its biosolids to fertilizer companies until the TCEQ tests them for the presence of PFAS and asked the EPA to set limits on PFAS in biosolids. The resolution also called on state lawmakers to regulate the application of biosolids-based fertilizer on farmland or give power to counties to do so.

“That’s the hard part,” Woolley said. “We don’t have authority to ban biosolids.”

In July, neighboring Ellis County passed a similar resolution calling for regulation and legislation to restrict the application of biosolids on farms and ranches until further testing is done. Since then, Kaufman, Henderson, Somervell and Wise counties have done the same.

Woolley has traveled around the state to sound the alarm about PFAS at conferences for county officials. He said he and his staff are preparing to go to Austin to meet with state lawmakers during the next legislative session. He hopes they will introduce new bills that will address PFAS contamination in biosolids, including giving counties money to test for the contaminants, and require TCEQ to test biosolids statewide for forever chemicals.

So far, there have been no bills filed by state lawmakers regarding PFAS contamination in biosolids ahead of the legislative session that begins in January.

In 2021, Michigan began requiring all municipal wastewater treatment plants to test their biosolids for PFAS before spreading them on agricultural land. The state also began prohibiting the application of biosolids containing more than 150 parts per billion of PFOS on agricultural land. Since then, the state has lowered that threshold to 100 ppb and added another type of PFAS to the list, PFOA.

What experts refer to as the “Michigan model” has now been embraced by other states including California, Wisconsin and Washington. Connecticut and Maine have banned the use of biosolids on agricultural fields.

Ellen Mallory, a professor of sustainable agriculture at The University of Maine, said state response has been crucial given the lack of standards at the federal level.

“The important part here is it’s really hard to have any response to PFAS contamination if we don’t have any standards. So a state like Texas that has no standards, what do you do? How do you help farmers determine if their food is safe or not?” she said.

Meanwhile, Tony Coleman and his wife are still watching their livestock die. They pack dead cattle in a big cooler, load them onto a trailer and drive 140 miles to a laboratory at College Station where vet technicians perform a necropsy and remove tissue to be tested for PFAS.

The couple both work two jobs and are looking for a third. They’re worried they have lost the ability to make a living off their own land.

“We can’t consciously sell you a side of beef and then you eat it and you get sick. What kind of people does that make us?” Coleman said.