CAFO Must Reads of the Day
Thanks to Marcia Oddi at the Indiana Law Blog, I was put on to a couple of links to good reading this week on Indiana’s move to become the new hog farm Mecca. First, Laura McPhee from Nuvo has a cover piece out this week on Mitch Daniels’s Possibilites Unbound: The Plan for 2025 (pdf) to double Indiana’s pork production over the course of 20 years, primarily through CAFO’s:
Daniels and the supporters of his goal to increase hog production in Indiana claim that the new trend will be of great economic benefit to the state. According to Brian Bergan, an “agribusiness development specialist” in Indiana, “Corporate farms, though often the scrutiny of some, provide a significant boost to economies through jobs, use of local vendors and property tax contributions. [Industrial farms] offer a safe, clean and humane environment for animals to prosper and grow.
“A snapshot of a farm that produces 18,000 pigs would employ about seven people with a payroll of $125,000, have $2 million invested in buildings and will pay over $23,000 in property taxes,” Bergan claims. “When last I checked I didn’t see those pigs using tax dollars for schools, libraries, sewers and safety services that we all enjoy.”
Sarcasm aside, promises of economic prosperity like those made by Daniels and Bergan are often not all they are cracked up to be. According to USDA statistics, every corporate factory farm replaces 10 family farmers; every 12,000 hogs produced at these corporate units costs 18 jobs; and corporate farms create just one job for every three created by independent hog producers. Even when jobs are created, they are seldom jobs that can sustain factory farm employees.
I got to Ms. McPhee’s piece through the second item of interest, a post over at Advance Indiana. The attorney who posts there relates his own experience with pig farms, having grown up on one, and the impact that changes in the hog industry had on his family. He has an interesting perspective on the issue, although I was really interested by the fact that he says he is Tom Easterly’s (IDEM Director) neighbor:
My point in recounting this is to help explain why I think Gov. Daniels’ push to expand hog production in Indiana is a very short-sighted aim. Unless the government is willing to subject these mega-hog farms to the requirement of treating their waste in the same manner we require municipalities to handle their human waste, we are inviting major ecological disaster. If anyone doubts that, please visit vast areas of North Carolina which have been ruined by too many hog production facilities. Many waterways are simply unfit for human or animal/plant habitation.
