NMPF president and CEO Gregg Doud said farmers had participated in good faith, but measurements from a small number of farms should not set expectations for thousands of others.

NMPF said farms differ and change over time, and will continue working with the EPA, USDA, land-grant universities and member cooperatives on practical, science-based environmental approaches.

The EPA said the decision does not alter its Clean Air Act implementation or commitment to clean air, and that it will keep working with USDA, land-grant universities and producers to understand and reduce farm emissions.

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency will end its obligations under a 2005 animal-farm emissions agreement and will not develop emissions estimates from its study data, which it says are too old and limited to support reliable methods.

The voluntary agreement and National Air Emissions Monitoring Study began in 2005 after a National Academy of Sciences report called for better ways to estimate emissions from animal feeding operations; about 2,600 operations representing nearly 14,000 farms joined.

The study was meant to help farms estimate emissions and determine whether permitting or reporting requirements might apply, leaving participating producers waiting nearly two decades for an outcome.

The EPA released updated draft estimating methods for public comment in November 2024, but after comments closed in August 2025, it concluded that old data and changes in farm technology and practices left limitations it could not resolve.

The agency said many participating farms have since closed, changed ownership or modernized their barns and manure systems, making the original data unrepresentative of current operations.

The National Milk Producers Federation said the draft dairy models drew on monitoring at only five dairies and produced unstable estimates, while failing to reflect advances in feed, genetics, manure management and emissions controls.

EPA assistant administrator Jeffrey Hall said ending the obsolete obligations gives farmers regulatory certainty instead of leaving them facing possible emissions requirements and permits.

The EPA plans to notify the roughly 2,600 participating operations and their associated farms before terminating the agreement.

The National Pork Producers Council also welcomed the decision, saying farms vary in location, practices, animals and people, so a single model cannot be applied uniformly and could otherwise invite increased regulation.