Genoa Township >> Jason Grostic’s cows quit jostling for hay when he approaches the barn. They lean toward him and croon instead, angling for an affectionate nuzzle. The Livingston County farmer introduced a few: Rockin’ Robin, Firefly, Vernon. And Toby, too personable to shy away from newcomers. The cattle aren’t really livestock anymore, Grostic said, more like big pets. State health and agricultural officials shut down Grostic Cattle Company in January 2022, warning customers that tests showed its beef contained PFOS, a manmade chemical in the PFAS family. The farm unknowingly had been applying contaminated biosolids from a wastewater treatment plant on its field, spreading pollution to the soil, feed and a herd of cows once destined for the dinner table.

The following two years were marked with financial and emotional turmoil, Grostic said during a frigid February morning on his Genoa Township farm north of Brighton. The government directed him not to sell his cattle. The feed mills stopped accepting his grain.

With no state or federal guidelines dictating how he or regulators should deal with PFAS-contaminated fields, the 49-year-old farmer’s plans to pass on the family farm are effectively kaput. He remains furious about how the state health and agricultural authorities handled his situation.

“As long as there’s PFAS in this soil, there will always be a seizure notice here,” Grostic said. “I’ll never be in agriculture again. The farming history here is done. At 110 years of age, this farm got shut down over something that we didn’t do wrong. The state failed, and I’m the guy that loses.”

State officials said Grostic’s farm is a unique situation since the cattle grazed on contaminated land and the beef would be sold mostly to local consumers, posing a health threat.

A recent agreement Grostic made with researchers at Michigan State University promises to make 2024 a better year.

Grostic is partnering with MSU’s Center for PFAS Research. He said the university will use the farm to study how PFAS compounds move through soil, crops and livestock, transforming the pollution that devastated his family business into an opportunity to research solutions that someday could allow farmers to reclaim their land from PFAS pollution.

“In my early life, no, I never thought I’d be a research farm by any means,” Grostic said. “But when this thing came up and the seizure notice happened, within the first month, all I talked about was ‘let’s become a research farm, let’s become a research farm. Somebody will pay us to research us.’ And it went nowhere.”

MSU seeks farmland solutions

PFAS stands for per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances, a class of manmade chemicals that have been used for decades in fire-resistant and waterproof products such as firefighting foam, food packaging, non-stick cookware, clothing and more. There are thousands of individual compounds in the PFAS group, such as perfluorooctane sulfonic acid, or PFOS, and perfluorooctanoic acid, or PFOA.

PFAS chemicals don’t break down as they move through the environment. They build up in animals and people who are exposed to contaminated water and food. Exposure is widespread and linked to immunity issues, reproductive issues, cancers and other health problems.

Michigan has primarily tackled PFAS pollution in surface water and has identified hundreds of polluted sites, sued PFAS polluters and set water quality standards for PFAS levels in drinking and surface water. The food system is the next step, said Cheryl Murphy, director of MSU’s Center for PFAS Research.

“Unless you live close to a contaminated site and are getting PFAS from your drinking water, the vast majority of us get it through our food,” Murphy said. “There are biosolids that have been applied to farmland across the country that probably have PFAS in them. We need to understand how all of that is being transferred into the food products that we’re consuming.”

There is a lot to learn, she said, including how best to clear PFAS from livestock, how to measure PFAS in livestock without killing animals and which crops take up more or less PFAS from contaminated soils.

Grostic said he negotiated for a higher price per pound of cattle and recently sold his cows to the state, which transferred them to MSU. The university will lease the farm and pay him to manage it as long as it can find the funding.

Scientists will periodically take blood samples or euthanize cows to measure changes in PFAS concentrations in various cuts of meat as the cows continue to eat clean feed, Grostic said.

“The amount of research and kind of research, it’s endless, it’s an open opportunity,” he said. “So where it goes, I don’t know, but that’s my understanding of what’s going to happen here when we start going forward on this research.”

The State of Michigan is funding the research. Michigan Department of Environment, Great Lakes and Energy spokesperson Scott Dean declined to comment on the arrangement and said the state is still working to finalize the agreement.

MSU’s PFAS research center is applying for other funding opportunities, Murphy said, including a U.S. Environmental Protection Agency grant that would put roughly $8 million toward five projects that research PFAS uptake in plants and animals.

MSU’s primary goal at Grostic’s farm is to figure out how to clean PFAS from the farmland, she said.

“It is doable,” Murphy said. “We can figure out ways to work on farms, figure out what to do with farms that are contaminated and minimize exposure. I think it’s going to be like five to 10 years of work before we get our food supply safe from PFAS.”

How PFAS contaminated Grostic’s farm

Grostic’s farm is Michigan’s ground zero for PFAS on farmland.

The source of his contamination is biosolids delivered by a wastewater treatment plant in neighboring Oakland County.

It’s common for farmers to apply leftover organic waste from wastewater treatment plants on their fields, but the biosolids Grostic applied came from a wastewater treatment plant in Wixom that received PFOS-laden waste from Tribar Technologies, a metal plating business in Wixom. Grostic didn’t know about that when he applied the biosolids to his fields.

“(Biosolids) have a nutrient value for growing crops, and a lot of farmers take them,” Grostic said from a high point on his farm, looking over hundreds of acres he can’t use to grow crops. “And we took it here. They bring it in on semis; they transfer it over to a spreader. … They knife it into the top foot of the soil for you. We did it for years.”

Grostic and his family sued Tribar a few months after the state shut down his farm, alleging the family farm “has been ruined by Tribar’s manufacturing operations and toxic contamination.” He and the company settled in February, but settlement details are not included in Livingston County Circuit Court records, and Grostic said he can’t discuss them. Tribar did not respond to a request for comment.

The Michigan PFAS Action Response Team started investigating PFAS at wastewater treatment plants in 2018. It determined municipal wastewater treatment plants that have industrial customers that used firefighting foam or PFOS in their operations were likely to contain high levels of PFOS. EGLE required plants with industrial users to launch their own evaluations of PFOS and identified four facilities that had significantly elevated levels.

As part of the work, the

Michigan PFAS Action Response Team’s contractor surveyed sites where industrially impacted biosolids had been applied to the land. PFAS was “frequently” detected where those biosolids had been applied, including Grostic’s farm.

The Wixom plant’s biosolids contained concentrated levels of PFAS, specifically PFOS, reaching as high as 2,150 parts per billion, according to EGLE. State officials descended on the farm in eastern Livingston County to collect samples in late 2021. The state issued Grostic a seizure notice in January 2022.

The state’s testing showed PFOS levels of 1.84 to 3.41 parts per billion in haylage — dry grasses fed to cattle — with lower PFOS levels in the sorghum and corn silage, according to EGLE.

The cattle themselves had PFOS levels ranging from 1.24 to 3.58 parts per billion, according to state data. The EPA says almost no amount of toxic PFOS compounds are safe in the human body.

Grostic’s farm was a unique situation, EGLE’s Dean said. It received biosolids with high concentrations, raised crops on that impacted soil, grazed cattle on those crops and returned the cows’ manure to the fields. It also sold meat mostly to local customers who might buy a lot of beef from the farm.

In other cases, Dean said, crops grown on PFAS-contaminated soil might be sold to make ethanol for gasoline or be sold to a wholesale buyer, where the pollution would be diluted and not pose the same risk to a customer.

“That one case made perfect sense for us to make that hard decision, which impacted that farm quite dramatically,” Dean said. “But in most cases, agriculture is widely distributed. There’s a global food basket. Things from Michigan go all over the place.”

Unlike Maine, another state investigating PFAS pollution in its environment, Michigan has not conducted widespread sampling of farm fields to identify PFAS contamination.

Michigan strengthened its interim strategy for managing PFAS in biosolids and farms in January by adding PFOA to the standard, requiring every biosolid generator to sample biosolids at least once annually before applying biosolids to land, lowering the threshold for mitigation and investigation from 50 parts per billion to 20 for PFOS and PFOA, and other measures.

The EPA also is working on a risk assessment for PFOS and PFOA in biosolids, Dean said.

The state hasn’t developed a standard for shutting down farms impacted by PFAS, said Abigail Hendershott, executive director of the Michigan PFAS Action Response Team (MPART), and likely won’t. MPART instead will consider each farm individually, weighing the risks posed by PFAS concentrations in soil and food and the end use of the products.

“For one, we’re not finding a similar type of situation as we found at that farm at any of the other farms or areas that we are evaluating,” Hendershott said. “Plus, we have to get the data. We have to be able to have good data to go with these in order to make good decisions. These aren’t done in a light manner.

“This is very serious. We’re affecting somebody’s livelihood as well as trying to make protection around public health.”

Grostic said the state should not treated him so harshly and should have allowed him to sell his cows to wholesale markets or give him other avenues to continue making a living.

“I’m not saying PFAS is good, but I am saying if you don’t have a standard, you don’t get to single me out,” Grostic said. “I didn’t bring this on to myself. You brought it on to me. The EPA is the one that said sludge should be applied to farmland. You’re the one that gives all these corporate industries permits to do what they do.

“To single me out and shut me down was a bunch of sh—. They don’t care.”