Raising a Stink
What is a concentrated animal feeding operation (CAFO), and what does it mean that nearly all farm animals in the U.S. are now raised in them? Factory farms are a major change from how livestock was traditionally raised, and the billions of gallons of manure produced by these facilities are causing major problems for neighbors and anyone downstream. Independent family farmers and rural communities are facing the brunt of these consequences, but they're not going to take it lying down.
Listen and subscribe to the series on Spotify, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts.
How to Fight a Factory Farm is produced by the Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy, a member of the Campaign for Family Farms and the Environment. Thank you to our intern, Anna Karns, for her assistance producing this series, and to Noah Earle for the use of his song “Fry an Egg” for our theme music. Learn more about the Campaign for Family Farms and the Environment at fightfactoryfarms.org.
References and further reading
- The CAFO Next Door, REAMP Network, June 2024
- Barons: Money, Power, and the Corruption of America's Food Industry, Austin Frerick, 2024
- US Factory Farming Estimates, Sentience Institute, 2019
- Environmental Regulation of Hog Feeding Operations, Chen, C.-T. and G. Lade, Iowa State University, 2018
- Animal Feeding Operations (AFOs), EPA, 2024
Transcript
00:00:00 Barb Kalbach
Now, hardly anyone raises hogs or chickens unless it's in a CAFO-type system.
00:00:07 Lilly
Can you describe a CAFO; what they look like, smell like? What do they do with all the manure that they produce?
00:00:15 Barb
They put it on the field next door to your house!
00:00:23 Lilly
A concentrated animal feeding operation or CAFO, better known as a factory farm, is a facility where large numbers of animals are raised in confined, cramped conditions in specialized industrial barns, usually long metal buildings with powerful ventilation fans on the side. The model emerged in the 1920s with broiler chicken barns, but until just a few decades ago, raising livestock and CAFOs was very uncommon. Today, the vast majority of farm animals raised in the US, around 99% of hogs and poultry and 70% of cows, spend at least part of their lives in factory farms.
00:01:04 Lilly
In North Carolina, CAFOs are infamous sites of environmental racism, with the highly polluting facilities disproportionately located in historically black communities. In the Midwest, where the factory farm industry is still expanding, CAFOs are decimating rural economies, polluting the air and water, and driving small, independent farmers out of business.
00:01:27 Lilly
The rise of CAFOs as the dominant model for animal agriculture in the U.S. was rapid and devastating, and it didn't happen by accident. Over the course of this four-part series, we'll learn about how factory farms took over the American agriculture system, what effect they've had on rural communities in the Midwest, and we’ll meet some of the farmers, advocates and rural organizers fighting against them as part of the Campaign for Family Farms and the Environment. From the Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy, I'm Lilly Richard, and this is How to Fight a Factory Farm.
00:02:15 Rebecca
At any given moment in the U.S., there are 1.7 billion animals living on factory farms. In this strict confinement, which is a 47% increase in just the past two decades. So those animals living on 24,000 factory farms across the U.S., together are producing 940 billion pounds of manure each year, and that is twice as much the sewage produced by the entire U.S. population.
So again, as we're seeing more and more animals on factory farms, these operations are squeezing out family farmers' ability to stay in the market to treat animals well, to compete for a fair price to take care of the environment. And so you're really just seeing that those two inverse curves where the factory farms are going up and the number of farmers are going down – or the number of animals on factory farms is going up and the number of farmers is going down.
00:03:07 Lilly
That's Rebecca Wolf, a senior policy analyst at Food and Water Watch, talking about the findings of the latest U.S. Department of Agriculture, Census of Agriculture. The trend of farms consolidating, specializing and expanding while the total number of farmers drops has been happening for decades, aided by national farm policy that incentivizes large scale monoculture commodity production. Still, until the 1990s, most farms that raised livestock did so in smaller scale integrated systems – that is, both growing crops and raising livestock – where animals spent much of their time grazing in fields and were raised in small enough numbers that their manure could be used as fertilizer without overwhelming the carrying capacity of the land. The CAFO model is a different beast entirely.
00:03:59 Rebecca
Factory farms largely house hundreds-to-thousands of animals in industry dictated indoor operations. These places are industrial in nature. They release air, water, climate pollution into communities. And with certain industries, so chicken and hog right now, but increasingly others, you have a contract model where producers are required to sign a contract by integrators that dictate all sorts of ways in which these animals are raised. This industrial model is also complete with industrial scale waste, so in many of these industries, that's liquid waste and the liquid waste is spread on fields, basically to dispose of rather than actually grow anything.
00:04:41 Lilly
Rather than being able to graze or forage, animals in CAFOs are provided with a diet of animal feed, usually made up of corn or soybeans. It is also often supplemented with antibiotics because disease spreads easily through the overcrowded, overstressed animals. In swine and dairy cow operations, manure is collected in waste pits under the buildings, which are periodically cleared out into enormous manure lagoons. The waste may also be piped or trucked out and sprayed onto neighboring fields. Like other types of factories, CAFOs are highly specialized for each part of the production process, so animals are typically moved from facility to facility, even across state lines or country borders. For each stage of their lives.
There's no question that factory farms are bad for the animals, but it's also not accurate to say that the fight against CAFOs boils down to animal rights activists versus farmers. The truth is, some of the strongest resistance to factory farms comes from the rural communities where these facilities are located, including from other farmers, especially smaller, independent family farmers. Here's Barb Kalbach, a member of Iowa Citizens for Community Improvement, also a part of the Campaign for Family Farms and the Environment, or CFFE.
00:06:00 Barb
My name is Barb Kalbach. I'm from central Iowa. I grew up on farms and in farm country from a little kid until now. I'm fourth generation and I started – well, we used to raise livestock. We raised hogs and cattle, and I grew up with hogs, cattle, chicken and a few milk cows.
00:06:20 Lilly
I talked to Barb about what Iowa looked like before CAFOs became prevalent and how things have changed in the past 30 or so years.
00:06:28 Barb
The way it was before was, farmers mostly raised, of course, corn, soybeans, oats and hay. But for livestock, they raised chickens, hogs, beef cattle and a few milk cows. And all of those fed into our income. All of those different angles did. And the marketing, if you focus just on hogs, the way the marketing was done was at buying stations in small towns around the community. So, the two or three that we worked with when we raised hogs were about 15 miles away. And when your hogs are ready to go to market, you would call and ask what their bid was, and they’d tell you, and then you could choose where you want to sell them. And then the buying stations would sell those hogs onto processing plants. That's how that worked. But as CAFOs moved into the system – or as the vertical integration of livestock production moved in – there are no buying stations. There hasn't been since – well, the early 2000s anyway. In our community, there hasn't been buying stations, they just went out of business, yeah.
00:07:35 Lilly
Because the big guys undercut them.
00:07:37 Barb
Yeah.
00:07:38 Barb
Took over the market and not everyone wanted to raise hogs that way, by the thousands at a time. So, they got out of the business too. But now, hardly anyone raises hogs or chickens, unless it's in a CAFO type system.
00:07:56 Lilly
By the 1990s, CAFOs were already beginning to pop up in Iowa and around the Midwest, and many people were already raising the alarm about their expansion, warning of the damage they could cause to the environment, the rural landscape and the livelihoods of small family farmers.
00:08:12 Lilly
But in 1996, following major lobbying by Iowa Select Farms, the states leading pork and CAFO company, Iowa passed HF 519, which among other things, essentially made it easier for factory farms to get construction permits, established weak penalties for manure pollution and provided protection against nuisance lawsuits.
00:08:36 Lilly
Can you describe a CAFO? What do they look like? Smell like? What do they do with all the manure that they produce?
00:08:43 Barb
They put it on the field next door to your house.
00:08:47 Barb
At any rate, these buildings are a long, oblong building, and they can hold, some of them can hold like 4,000 head or more. Some of them hold as little as 1,200, but either way, that's a lot of hogs, you know.
00:09:05 Barb
That building is divided into pens, and there's a certain number in each pen, and they're built on top of a slatted floor so that the manure and urine will fall down through that slat into a pit. So, the pits hold all this liquid manure. Well, the water is piped in, they have little water nipple things that they drink from, and the feed is also piped into them.
00:09:34 Barb
Oh, they have a little building out in front of them where they put the dead pigs, because there’s pigs that die in that situation, or being raised that way. And so, they take the dead ones out and put them in there. And, you know, when the pigs have died, because when you drive by the buzzards are sitting on the overhang for lunch.
00:09:52 Barb
So, but that's what they look like. And then the manure has to be hauled out at least once a year. Well, when the pit gets full. So, when there's an argument about whether a field can have X-number of gallons of manure, the bottom line is that manure has to go somewhere. So, even if a guy has a manure management plan that says I'll put so many gallons on this particular field, other farmers also have their manure management plans for their buildings. And if, sometimes, their field is the same field that the other guy. So, you've got two guys bring manure in and putting it on that same field. So that's where that goes.
00:10:39 Barb
And Mother Nature can only take care of so much, you know? So, she sends it downstream sometimes.
00:10:46 Barb
I remember the legislature passing legislation that okay-ed that model of production, and at the time I'd read about it in the newspaper, you know, and they were wanting them in Northern Iowa, is where they were wanting them.
00:11:00 Barb
And the legislature passed the law that allowed it. Well, I'm going in my head – I'm going, well, that won't last very long because of all that manure. And up there in Northeast Iowa, they have egg drainage wells that are a straight shot to the aquifer, and I thought the legislature won't let that go by. Well, I was wrong. Yes, indeed they will.
00:11:26 Barb
And they'll let you pollute about everything else too, while you're at.
00:11:29 Barb
So.
00:11:30 Lilly
The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency defines a CAFO, or large CAFO, as a facility where 1,000 or more animal units are kept in confinement for 45 or more days of the year. The definition of animal unit varies by species. 1,000 animal units is equal to 1,000 beef cows, 2,500 hogs or 125,000 broiler chickens.
00:11:56 Lilly
Of course, this definition of CAFO only designates operations that are large enough to require pollution discharge permits under the Clean Water Act. Factory farms that follow the same confinement model but with slightly fewer animals are considered simply animal feeding operations or AFOs by the EPA.
00:12:16 Lilly
And are allowed to operate and dispose of waste essentially unregulated. Some of these smaller facilities are considered small or medium CAFOs by the EPA and are supposed to be permitted too.
00:12:30 Lilly
But the reality is, a lot of this oversight is left up to the states, and in a lot of cases that means it's not happening at all. By the EPA's definition, there are 21,237 CAFOs in the U.S. that should be regulated under the Clean Water Act permitting process.
00:12:51 Lilly
But most of them, especially in Iowa, are not.
00:12:52 Lilly
Here's Rebecca Wolf again.
00:12:55 Rebecca
Agriculture is actually both the leading contributor to pollution in America's waterways and the least regulated. So today, fewer than one-third of our country's 21,000 plus largest factory farms actually have Clean Water Act pollution permits. So those are seminal clean water legislation that is, you know, used to protect waterways across the U.S.
00:13:19 Rebecca
And less than one-third of those huge operations in the U.S. actually have these permits, so they're just not being permitted, not being regulated. And nowhere is the factory farm industry and its waste more tightly concentrated than in Iowa. It's home to more factory farms, over 4,300, than any other state.
00:13:39 Rebecca
It has a water pollution crisis to match. Half of the state's waterways are impaired and over 1,000 miles are contaminated by agricultural pollution.
00:13:48 Rebecca
Iowa's factory farms produce 109 billion pounds of waste annually, and that is a 78% increase over 20 years. Food and Water Watch has been working in coalition with allies like Iowa Citizens for Community Improvement and others in Iowa to rein in the industry's growth and pollution. And right now we work in coalition to push for a Clean Water Act for Iowa; introduced for the first time, actually this year, to require water pollution permits and monitoring at the state's largest CAFOs – less than 4% of which are currently regulated.
00:14:24 Barb
And, you know, there are people that want to swim in a clean lake, or go fishing, and take their kids out for the weekend and go camping. There's people that like to do that stuff. And when you have ruined the lakes around the state of Iowa, and the rivers, and the trout streams. People can't do that anymore.
00:14:44 Barb
And then there's the importance of clean drinking water that now, because it's impaired, all the little towns have to spend their money cleaning the water so their people have something to drink.
00:14:58 Lilly
Water pollution from factory farms, whether that's leaks from manure lagoons, or runoff from the fields where manure is over-applied, contains pathogens, like E coli. As well as antibiotics and lots of nitrates and phosphates, which cause algal blooms that kill off aquatic ecosystems, and which can cause blue baby syndrome and cancer in humans. Add that to even more runoff from the state's acres upon acres of input-heavy cornfields. And maybe it's not surprising that Iowa now has the second highest cancer rate in the country.
00:15:32 Lilly
But it's not just Iowa that has a CAFO problem. Their neighbors in South Dakota, Missouri and Minnesota, which recently overtook North Carolina as the state with the second most hog CAFOs after Iowa, have been facing similar fights for years against livestock industry consolidation, rampant pollution and the hollowing out of once vibrant rural economies.
00:15:58 Rebecca
So CFFE, Campaign for Family Farms and the Environment, is comprised of four state-based groups. We have the Land Stewardship Project, Iowa Citizens for Community Improvement, Missouri Rural Crisis Center and Dakota Rural Action, as well as Food and Water Watch and the Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy.
00:16:18 Rebecca
And the four Midwest groups represented within CFFE are really just in the epicenter of the factory farm system of agriculture, where these global meat industry companies – like JBS, Smithfield, Cargill – they all operate. It's also a region in the country that is directly experienced the economic and environmental harm of this system. And while the specifics are kind of different in each state, there's just a real critical shared experience in fighting factory farms that is stronger when we're coordinated and connected.
00:16:50 Lilly
I talked to Kathy Tyler, a member of Dakota Rural Action, who got involved in the fight against factory farms when a hog CAFO was built next door to her home in South Dakota. Like many of the organizers involved in CFFE, she's become a resource for neighbors trying to block the construction or expansion of new CAFOs in their communities.
00:17:11 Lilly
For Cathy, the fight is personal. After what happened to her home and family, she wants to prevent the same thing from happening to anyone else.
00:17:21 Kathy
I am Kathy Tyler. I'm a retired teacher and small business owner. My husband and I live in northeast South Dakota, about 9 miles northeast of Millbank. We've lived on our little acreage since 1974. We bought an abandoned farm site and have totally remodeled the house, the yard, the trees, the gardens, and everything.
00:17:43 Lilly
In 2012, Pipestone Pork began making arrangements with the county to build a 6,500 hog CAFO, a half-mile from the Tyler's home.
00:17:52 Kathy
How did we find out about it? My husband was actually at a gathering, and one of the neighbors came up to him and said, oh, I hear you having a pig farm. Pig farm, right? Factory built next to your house. And he came home and we were just livid. And so that's when the, you know, the publicity started. We gathered a bunch of people, there are a lot of people that did not want this factory here. And so we did a lot of gathering, at an organization, Grant County Concerned Citizens.
00:18:21 Kathy
We went to that. We did so much research and there wasn't a lot of research at the time, really. We'd contacted an attorney, got things going with that, and that's how we kind of got started. A lot, of course, letters to the editor; at the zoning hearing to approve the application. We filled the courthouse. You know, we really and truly did.
00:18:42 Kathy
And at that time was kind of interesting because they were going to limit us to five minutes each, and I got up there and said, “No, you can't stop me.” You know. And so, we talked and talked and talked and basically the zoning board was pretty much for the project already, they had their mind made-up by the time we got there. We did end up taking them to court a couple of times.
00:19:04 Kathy
So anyway, after two court cases and lots of money and that sort of thing, they did build their facility. It's a little over a half a mile from my house. I see it every day. It is three huge buildings. If you do a Google Maps, you can see it on Google Maps without a problem. So, they have 6,500 sows and that means they produce 125,000 baby pigs every year that are shipped out to growing barns. The smell is absolutely horrible. When it stinks, it stinks.
00:19:34 Lilly
Even since the hog barn was put in, the fight has been ongoing. County roads have been destroyed by constant traffic from the CAFOs heavy machinery, and manure pipes have been laid through waterways and private property. Still, there have been some victories. In addition to getting the facility to change manure haulers, install Biofilters – though Kathy says not good ones – and plant trees to partially obscure the barns, Kathy and her fellow South Dakota organizers managed to win a change in zoning law in the state that now requires mile setbacks for any new factory farms.
00:20:11 Lilly
And, in several cases, they've been able to help communities block new facilities from being built altogether.
00:20:18 Kathy
Basically, I'm at the end of the phone if somebody needs help. I have gone and visited with people, I went to Faulkton, we stopped that one. But people need to be aware of that. They need to know that they can win. You know that that's the whole thing here.
00:20:33 Kathy
I think in fighting this you have to have you have to have people. Not everybody needs to talk at a hearing. Not everybody needs to put their two cents in. Just the numbers sometimes help. Sometimes people are afraid of making a fuss in their neighborhood, but they also have to realize that once one of these things is there, it’s there forever.
00:20:54 Kathy
It will affect you for the rest of your life.
00:20:59 Kathy
Our pig farm is not a good neighbor, you know. There are times we can't sit on our porch. There are times I cannot go to my blueberry patch. There are times I cannot go see my horses because the smell is so bad. And then that's, you know, it's – I know that some places it's a whole lot worse than what it is at our house. I would not wish a CAFO in any neighborhood. None at all. It's just – well, our landscape is shot.
00:21:26 Lilly
Here's Barb Kalbach again, back in Iowa.
00:21:29 Barb
I would say that CAFOs have helped empty out the countryside. I mean, nobody's going to build their house next door to a CAFO, with the smell, the odor, the flies and that kind of thing. Plus some manure when it goes onto the field. So, nobody's going to intentionally do that.
00:21:49 Barb
If you are ready to retire and move to town and want to sell your acreage or sell – or you could sell your farm and they bulldoze the house down – but you could never sell your house as an acreage because who's going to buy it, you know, next to a CAFO because it stinks.
00:22:09 Lilly
Factory farms aren't just destructive to the environment, animal welfare, human health and the well-being of their immediate neighbors. They're also emblematic of a consolidated industrialized food system that has become organized around extraction and short-term corporate profit.
00:22:29 Lilly
On the next episode of “How to Fight a Factory Farm,” we'll learn more about what it means to empty out the countryside and what a community loses when a CAFO moves in.
00:22:38 Lilly
We'll learn about the powerful meat companies that are driving and profiting from the expansion of factory farms at the expense of farmers, the environment and American taxpayers. And we'll hear from more of the people who are still deeply rooted in rural communities fighting for clean water, healthy food and their livelihoods.
00:23:09 Lilly
“How to Fight a Factory Farm” is produced by the Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy, a member of the Campaign for Family Farms and the Environment. Thank you to our intern Anna Karns for her assistance in producing this series.
00:23:21 Lilly
And to Noah Earl for the use of his song “Fry an Egg” for our theme music. If you enjoyed this podcast, please rate and subscribe on your preferred podcast platform and share the show with a friend.
00:23:35 Lilly
Learn more about the campaign for family farms and the environment at fightfactoryfarms.org and support IATP's work at itp.org/donate.
