A volunteer fire department has no waiver to apply for. Twenty-six states now restrict PFAS foam, according to researchers at the University of Arizona's Udall Center, and the pressure does not come only from statehouses. Karolin Jappe, the emergency manager for McKenzie County, in North Dakota's oil patch, told the North Dakota Monitor that when volunteers turn out for a fire at an oil facility, the company will sometimes ask whether there is PFAS in their foam.
For the people holding the hose it is also a health question. A federal study of nearly 30,000 career firefighters in three big cities found 9 percent more cancer diagnoses and 14 percent more cancer deaths than in the general population, an increase the researchers called modest. In 2022 the World Health Organization's cancer agency concluded that working as a firefighter causes cancer.
The next year it classified PFOA, a PFAS chemical associated with firefighting foams, as carcinogenic to humans, and PFOS, the main fluorinated ingredient of the older 3M foams, as possibly so. No study ties any one firefighter's illness to foam, and chiefs are not waiting for one. In Boone County, Missouri, the fire protection district put a soybean-based foam on one engine in the summer of 2025 and planned to switch entirely once its old stock ran out.
The point, Assistant Chief Gale Blomenkamp told KOMU-TV, was to do "whatever we can do to protect our firefighters, our volunteers, our paid staff."
The product is SoyFoam, from a Georgia company called Cross Plains Solutions, developed with money from the United Soybean Board, the farmer-funded group that promotes the crop. Most soy products use the oil. This one uses flour milled from the protein-rich meal, the same part of the bean Julian's plant was built to work with. The Agriculture Department's BioPreferred program certifies it as 84 percent biobased.
In the GreenScreen registry, which screens a product's ingredients for hazards such as cancer and persistence in the environment, it is the only firefighting foam rated Gold. Every other foam listed is Silver.
John Hejl would like it to work. He is the chief of the Casselton Volunteer Fire Department, west of Fargo, and he farms soybeans; he has also appeared in the North Dakota Soybean Council's promotion of the foam. He told the Monitor he had been looking for an alternative to PFAS foams and was impressed with this one. His case for foam of any kind is practical. Fight a burning railcar of diesel with water alone, he said, and it takes hundreds of thousands of gallons.
"So by the time you put it out, it's flowed into every ditch and stream and waterway for miles. If we can cover it with a blanket of foam and keep it in the ditch, then we've protected the lake and the river and the stream."
He had a farmer's reason, too. "We have more meal than we know what to do with," he said.
