Poster #57 - Feedlots in the Schoolyard: The Educational Impacts of Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations

• In Event: Saturday Poster Luncheon

Abstract

North Carolina hosts one of the nation’s densest concentrations of industrial animal agriculture, with more than 2,100 permitted concentrated animal feeding operations (CAFOs) clustered disproportionately in rural, lower-income, and majority-minority communities. A large public-health literature links proximity to CAFOs with respiratory illness, elevated stress biomarkers, and contaminated drinking water, yet the spillover onto children’s learning through proximity to schools has yet to be credibly estimated. Exploiting the staggered opening of CAFOs across the state, we show that a new CAFO near a school reduces math achievement for nearby students by approximately 0.08 standard deviations, with no detectable effect on reading.We construct an original panel of CAFO construction years by combining North Carolina Division of Water Resources permit records with satellite imagery: the Montefiore et al. (2022) Landsat-derived record of swine waste lagoons, and a custom Google Earth Engine pipeline that applies near-infrared reflectance changepoint detection at each permit-reported coordinate for poultry and cattle operations. We link this facility panel to student-level end-of-grade math and reading scores for grades 3–8 from the North Carolina Education Research Data Center over school years 1993 through 2003.We estimate event-study coefficients using the efficient estimator of Borusyak, Jaravel, and Spiess (2024) with student and school-by-grade fixed effects, defining treatment as a new CAFO opening within 1-, 2-, and 3-mile buffers. Pre-trend coefficients are statistically indistinguishable from zero. Post-opening, math achievement declines steadily: point estimates average roughly 0.08 standard deviations and reach approximately 0.10 standard deviations four years out at the 2-mile buffer. Reading scores show no corresponding pattern—an asymmetry consistent with the ambient-pollution literature (Ebenstein, Lavy, and Roth 2016; Persico and Venator 2021; Heissel, Persico, and Simon 2022), in which cognitively demanding quantitative tasks appear more sensitive to environmental stressors than literacy.CAFO siting, setback, and waste-management standards are state regulatory choices currently under active litigation and legislative debate in North Carolina. Our estimates imply that the cognitive burden of industrial animal agriculture is non-trivial and falls most heavily on children in already-disadvantaged communities—considerations state policymakers should weigh when considering permits related to these facilities in North Carolina and elsewhere.

Author

• Lucas Kaplan, Syracuse University
  Presenting Author