Over the past several decades, the animal agriculture industry has consolidated, with fewer, larger farms producing meat, dairy, and eggs in the United States. This fact, coupled with population migration from urban areas into traditionally agricultural areas, has led to increased pressure for regulation of the animal agriculture industry – specifically for air quality regulation. Until very recently, research into the air emissions from these large farms has been sparse, leading some regulatory agencies to rely upon emission estimates from as far back as the 1930's. In the late 1990s and early 2000s, the U.S. EPA embarked on a limited campaign to collect emissions data through its traditional use of the authorities in the Clean Air Act. This effort resulted in numerous court cases and yielded only limited data. More recently, EPA has taken a different approach, developing a strategy for cooperating with the animal agricultural industry to collect emissions data on a broad scale. EPA will use these data in making regulatory and policy decisions, and the agricultural industry will use the data to make compliance determinations. With these monitoring studies and data analysis not anticipated to be completed sooner than 2009, a question lingers: Can the regulatory and policy determinations wait that long.? Given that the answer to this question is likely to be “no,” how will the Agency make sound policy decisions along the way on limited science?