PFAS 'Forever Chemical' Contamination of U.S. Farmland from Unregulated Sewage Sludge Biosolids

Approximately 70 million acres of U.S. farmland may be contaminated with per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) because the EPA has no national requirement to test sewage sludge for PFAS before it is spread on agricultural fields as fertilizer. As of April 2025, only 10 states have issued guidance for even one PFAS chemical in sewage sludge. Farmers in Texas, Maine, Pennsylvania, and Michigan have discovered their land and water are contaminated only after livestock sickened or blood tests revealed elevated PFAS levels. Why it matters: Farmers unknowingly apply PFAS-laden biosolids to their fields, so their crops and livestock accumulate toxic forever chemicals that do not break down in soil, so contaminated food enters the human supply chain causing immune suppression, cancer, and thyroid disease in consumers, so public health costs escalate and farms face economic ruin when contamination is discovered because remediation of PFAS in soil is prohibitively expensive or impossible, so entire farming operations are abandoned and rural communities lose their economic base with no legal recourse since a federal court dismissed the PEER lawsuit against the EPA in October 2025 for lack of jurisdiction. The structural root cause is that the EPA's biosolids regulations under 40 CFR Part 503 were last substantively updated in 1993 and only regulate 9 heavy metals, while PFAS compounds number over 14,000 and were not commercially widespread when the rules were written. The EPA has consistently denied it has a duty to regulate PFAS in biosolids, and there is no federal testing mandate, leaving farmers as unwitting recipients of contaminated material with no way to detect it before application.