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U.S. EPA’s nine-year effort to document air pollution at livestock operations is likely still many years from completion and unlikely to be as useful as industry and environmental groups had hoped.

Still incomplete is what EPA promised to do under a 2005 deal cut with livestock producers to identify air emissions for different types of concentrated animal feeding operations, or CAFOs. The agency has said little about when the work will be done or when it will start three related regulatory tasks, according to sources outside EPA who track the issue closely.

The long wait for results is excruciating and frustrating for stakeholders.

“We just want them to come up with something,” said Michael Formica, environmental counsel at the National Pork Producers Council.

CAFOs for dairy cattle, swine, poultry and other food animals hold thousands of large animals or hundreds of thousands of smaller animals.

Most of the regulatory focus has been on CAFOs’ water pollution. But the CAFOs’ barns, feedlots and manure storage areas also foul the air with ammonia, hydrogen sulfide, particulate matter, volatile organic compounds and other contaminants.

Animal waste accounts for about half of total natural and man-made ammonia in the United States, according to a 2003 National Research Council report. Those emissions are associated with health effects that range from throat irritation to major cardiovascular diseases and increased rates of morbidity. Many are also precursors to other air quality problems, such as smog and acid rain.