Communities Fight Back
Despite the well-documented harms to the environment and rural economies, the CAFO system continues to expand. But its growth is not inevitable. In South Dakota, Iowa and all across factory farm country, everyday people are stepping up and organizing their neighbors to prevent factory farms from being built in their communities. How to fight a factory farm? People power.
In this episode, hear from Vanessa Namken and Frank James of Dakota Rural Action and Barb Kalbach and Hugh Espey of Iowa CCI on how they successfully stopped CAFOs from being built near their homes.
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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
Transcript
00:00:00 Hugh Espey
I think the key on that was just lots of local engagement by people and that's what really did it in terms of, I mean, in terms of getting the supervisors on our side, that's because the people were on our side. And getting the EPC, which is the DNR Citizen Oversight Board, on our side was because the people were on our side. Lots of people volunteered. They put in time because they knew that this was a critical fight to improving the quality of life in their neighborhood, and they weren't about to let this bully come into their community and just do what he wanted to do for the sake of making a lot of money and making, you know, life hell for them.
00:00:40 Barb Kalbach
For everybody else, yeah.
00:00:42 Hugh
For everybody else. People power is — people power is how we win.
00:01:02 Lilly Richard
From the Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy, I'm Lilly Richard, and this is episode three of “How to Fight a Factory Farm.”
00:01:12 Lilly
As we learned in the first two episodes, over the past few decades, concentrated animal feeding operations have helped create a water pollution crisis and other major problems in the Midwest and downstream, as the vertically integrated and corporate controlled factory farm system scaled up and drove independent farmers out of business.
00:01:34 Lilly
Opposition to factory farms is widespread not just from those concerned about the treatment of animals, but also from farmers, rural communities, environmentalists and consumers who want to buy meat raised more sustainably, humanely and safely. But the number of CAFOs in the U.S. keeps growing.
In just the last 10 years, approximately 3,000 new large CAFOs have been built and many existing CAFOs have expanded, adding more buildings, more animals and more manure. Increasingly, this includes what are sometimes called “mega-dairies,” where cows are raised by the tens of thousands.
And every one of these facilities has to be put somewhere. Many of them are being built in Midwest states that are already crowded with factory farms.
00:02:24 Lilly
The legal landscape for factory farms varies from state to state. Some states, like Iowa, are especially permissive toward factory farms and challenging for the citizens organizing against them.
Some states require an environmental review process before a new CAFO facility can be built, or have rules around setbacks from roads and homes. But for the most part, U.S. policy is very friendly toward CAFOs. State and federal agencies, whose job is to protect the environment, tend to exempt factory farm pollution.
In fact, several members of the Campaign for Family Farms and the Environment, including IATP and led by Food and Water Watch, recently sued the EPA over their failure to uphold the Clean Water Act and regulate water pollution from large CAFOs. The judge sided with the EPA against clean water.
00:03:20 Lilly
While the regulatory and policy levers to block factory farms are few, that hasn't stopped rural advocates from organizing at the state and national level and working to stop factory farms as they pop up. A lot needs to change at the policy level, but in the meantime, it's up to communities to fight back.
00:03:50 Lilly
Vanessa Namken never expected to become an anti-CAFO organizer. She and her husband live just outside a tiny town in Hamlin County, South Dakota.
For a period of time, she even worked for a company that built manure digesters for factory farm operations.
00:04:08 Vanessa Namken
When I worked for the company, I had no idea. Nobody stayed in their lane more than me. And so, I worked for this company, and I had no idea the effects that these dairies would have on the community, and I had no idea what these biodigesters were. I mean, they were just really starting to pop up.
00:04:28 Lilly
But in 2023, a neighbor approached her about a new 12,500 head dairy CAFO they were planning to have built less than three-quarters of a mile from the Namken’s home. The neighbor invited Vanessa and her husband to tour another nearby dairy that was operated by the same company, Riverview, that they plan to sell their land to.
The dairy operators were hoping that the Namkens, as some of the proposed facilities closest neighbors, would quietly sign off on the project, but Vanessa soon realized that the mega dairy could have huge impacts on the town and surrounding community.
00:05:05 Vanessa
And so, if we said sure, we'll tour the dairy. And so, we did. We toured the dairy. And we're outside and I look around and there's this massive operation. And so, I asked them, “How many acres is this property?” And they said, “160.” And I said, “And how many cattle are here?” And I think they said like 9,000. And I just thought, and I said, “Well, how many are you going to have by Hazel?” And they said, “12,500.”
And so, I said, “Well, is land purchased? Is there permits done?” And so they said no land is purchased and they're in the process of working through permits. But we have this flyer informational meeting that's going to come up and so you could come to this meeting. And I said, well, this is like in 10 days.
And like, where do you have this posted? Nobody — I never heard about this. Is it in the newspaper? Is it on social media? And they're like, “No, we don't use social media?” “No, we didn’t put it in the newspaper.”
But we're going to hang it up in your cafe. Well, I'm touring on a Friday night, and our cafe isn't open on Saturday, so I say, “No, you're not going to do that, because our cafe is not open on Saturday.” And they said, “Well, we'll put it in your fire hall.” And I said, “No, you're not going to do that because it's not open to the public.” And they said, “Well, we'll put it in your gas station.” And I said, “Well, there's card readers outside, and most people don't go into the gas station. They just, you know, get gas outside.” And she said, “Well, that's what we'll do.”
00:06:23 Vanessa
Come Sunday night, I had a neighbor — it must have got out that this dairy was going to be coming through — and she was very upset. And I said, “Well, there's this informational meeting.” And she really was upset, and she started naming all my neighbors that didn't know about this informational meeting. And so, we were like, well, that's kind of odd. Like, how can you have an informational meeting if nobody knows about it?
Ultimately, they just, they didn't want people to know. They wanted it to fly under the radar before anybody knew what was happening. Land would be sold, permits would be done and the project would be rolling. And so, I said, well, I'll put it on my social media. And so, I did, and it blew up. And it became a very big thing, because the family that is putting this dairy up, or was going to, is the Governor’s family.
00:07:08 Vanessa
So, we had a big meeting, there was media there, there was a lot of people and it was kind of a big stink. Since I posted it on my social media, a lot of my neighbors just thought that I would take charge — and I did. Because I had a situation with my job and so God just said, “That's not your fight, this is your fight.”
So that's how I got involved in fighting CAFOs.
00:07:35 Lilly
Vanessa's story is like that of many other rural organizers fighting against factory farms. When the mega- dairy tried to move in next door, she got a crash course in what it could mean for her community, and in the type of civic engagement it would take to stop it.
00:07:52 Vanessa
I started going to county commissioner meetings, zoning board meetings, contacting our town, the town board members.
And then, through that, through talking to this person, that person, just, people just started dumping information into my lap. And so, within days, I was overwhelmed with the amount of information that I had.
So, our town is less than 100 people, or right at 100 people. So, we're a very rural community. We have a fire hall, we have a post office, a cafe that's not open all day — I think it closes at 2:00 — and then we have a gas station and an elevator. So those are the businesses that we have in town.
As far as our community, our rural community used to be a lot of dairy farmers.
00:08:38 Vanessa
And so, the Arnold family were never dairy farmers. And so that was another thing that was very upsetting to a lot of the community members because over the years, you know, they've pushed out small farmers, especially dairy farmers. And so, a lot of them were very upset by this. And we just did not believe that it would be for our community.
The main reasons, number one, our property values would be devalued; our roads would be damaged; our air quality, land quality and water would be damaged. It would not bring anything to the community. It would only take from the community. They would not be bringing any tax base at all to the community. They know they weren't going to be buying grain or anything through the elevator. The other thing is obviously your roads. We live on an oil road.
00:09:24 Vanessa
The road is not set up for the amount of trucks that would come through there. And so this particular company, Riverview, is getting millions of dollars in grants, tax exempt bonds, and they were telling us that they would work with our county to fix our roads. Well, they're getting our tax money for their project, and that's how it's going to fix our roads. So, either way, we're still going to pay for the road.
And so definitely a problem with roads and then land. The amount of acres that they would need for manure, and for the feed that they would need for their cattle.
00:10:04 Lilly
A 12,500 head operation would produce approximately 680 million lbs of manure a year, or 1.8 million lbs every single day. And Vanessa suspected that the dairy owners intended to grow the operation size well beyond the initial 12,500.
00:10:24 Vanessa
So that is a big problem and then of course the most important is water. Water is the biggest issue. You know, the town alone did not have enough pressure to sustain just filling their fire truck. When their fire truck would go out to go to a fire when they would come back and fill up their truck, most of the town wouldn't have water because of the pressure. And so of course, you know, they did not offer to help or fix or remedy anything. They didn't offer to do anything for our residents or for our community. They just wanted us to let them come, and whatever happened.
You can just look at Arizona, their largest dairy, Riverview, is in Arizona. So, if you look that up and how much water is a massive crisis there. They have drained and used so much water that it has dried up peoples’ wells. So, they're always, of course, out for their own best interest. And so, it just kept spiraling, spiraling. I've been on a spiral. But one of the people that was put in contact with me told me to reach out to Mr. Frank James with Dakota Rural Action. And that's how Mr. Frank James got involved.
00:11:40 Frank James
So, my name is Frank James. I'm the executive director of Dakota Rural Action, which is a grassroots group in South Dakota. It's been around since 1987.
00:11:51 Lilly
One thing that's key about fighting factory farms is that you can't do it on your own. And you don't have to. In many states where there are CAFOs, there are also grassroots organizations of every-day people fighting to stop them.
At this point, many of them have decades of experience which can help newcomers navigate the complicated landscape of local governance.
00:12:13 Frank
So, I'll start in South Dakota. And in South Dakota, unlike some other states, our counties have the right to zone for these facilities, and so the counties can actually set conditions on how they were going to be built.
And so a lot of what we do is organize people to hold the counties to those requirements, if they have them in place and they're strong enough, or to work with counties to improve them and strengthen them. And that is pretty effective.
The government that's the most local is usually the most responsive and here we have a county government, which you live within the county so you're within a fairly close distance of the seat of government, and it's fairly responsive.
00:12:58 Lilly
Groups like Dakota Rural Action and other members of CFFE also have experience with community organizing. A big piece of this is sharing information and talking. Organizing means lots and lots of conversations, to learn where people are coming from, what they're concerned about, and how they see themselves fitting into the fight.
After Vanessa contacted Frank at DRA, they got to work.
00:13:25 Vanessa
I called him and just said, you know, “How can you help?” And so he said, “You know, we can set up a meeting and we can canvas our town.” So, we had a meeting at my house, not a huge group, but enough that we were organized. And we went through a checklist of how we would canvas our town, create a fact sheet, our own fact sheet, and then each person that was there happened to have you know a certain role.
Like these ladies were in charge of creating the fact sheet. These people were in charge of getting the names. These people were in charge of actually being the ones to canvas the town. And so that's kind of how we work together. And anytime we had a meeting, I would type up, you know, just like a Word document and send it to everybody.
And that's kind of how we kept informed.
00:14:11 Vanessa
You know, just talking with your community, answering questions, going to meetings, going to the cafe, sharing all of the information that I was getting from, you know, the zoning board, the County Commissioning Board, the city meetings, and then in turn sharing that with the community. The people that were, even if they were, you know, for it, I still shared that information.
There was a few that flipped, which was good. But there was a few that wanted it, but I don't think that they necessarily understood the actual ramifications of it. They just thought, “Oh well, we'll haul gravel for them,” or “Oh, you know, we'll do their flat work for them,” or “Oh, we'll probably put in some of their windows.” Which is great, but the long-term effects, they were going to do more harm than good. I don't believe that it would have brought as many jobs as they claimed.
00:15:05 Lilly
I mean, does it seem like a lot of people you know are only getting one piece of information? Like, here's an opportunity to sell to a new business in town, or here's an opportunity to sell my land or something, and then, you know, not seeing the full picture of all the —
00:15:21 Vanessa
100%, that is exactly what is happening, and even through our legislature.
That is exactly what's happening. So, they're passing off only the part that they want you to know about. And that's the part that they keep pushing. And so people think that oh, this is what they say is the best thing that's going to happen. And so this is why we need to do this.
And it's like, no, wait a minute. Wait a minute. You need to look at all sides of it. And once you do, then they're like, yeah, no, that isn't good.
00:15:53 Frank
So, it's the people that are going to make money off of building them. That's who wants to see these things built. It's the lawyers, it's the consultants, it's, you know, the engineers, the precast concrete folks.
Anyone you can see within that, that kind of system that really has nothing to do with the milking the cows, because once they're built, they're gone. They don’t have anything to do with it.
And they only make money if we keep building more of them. So, they only make money if we actually make the system that we have in place obsolete and have to build the next, bigger, better way of doing it.
00:16:30 Lilly
But the people who live near the CAFOs are the ones who have to live with the long-term consequences. And in this case, local opposition to the project created a turning point. For facilities like CAFOs, Hamlin County requires setbacks of a certain distance unless the project acquires permission from the neighbors to waive the rule.
Zoning laws like these can be a useful tool for allowing neighbors to have a voice in the process. In this case, the proposed site was inside the setback limits, so the project needed a waiver.
00:17:03 Vanessa
So, our setbacks are two miles from a town and a half mile from any residence or well water source. Again, we were outside of those setbacks. So technically my husband and I did not have a say on what would happen.
The other people, obviously, their names were on it, so they were going to be selling out to the dairy. And then, we had one neighbor who was within the setback and she did not want to sign a waiver. And so eventually, you know, she denied a waiver. So that also made it better for us because then that pushed it closer to the town as well. And so, then our focus became knocking on doors in the in the town and just sharing all the information with them that we had. And once I showed them the conditional use permit and the variances, and we gave them our fact sheet, they all just said, “It's too close, it's going to stink. And we don't want our property values devalued.” So eventually the town or the board members sent out a survey and when they got the survey back, 70% of the people said they did not want the dairy. And so that's how the town voted to deny the waiver, was according to what the residents wanted.
And then Arnold said, “Well, if the town doesn't want it, then we won't push through.” And so they, the next day after the town voted, pulled their variances.
00:18:22 Lilly
The victory was bittersweet. Vanessa's relationship with the neighbors, who were originally going to sell their land to the dairy still hasn't recovered, but their town avoided becoming another victim of another extractive industry that leaves destruction in its wake, and that's worth celebrating.
Similar fights are happening all over factory farm country. Sometimes they involve legal battles, petitions, meetings with local oversight boards, letters to the editor, public hearings. They always involve outreach, conversation and sharing information with the community in any way possible.
The companies that build these facilities know that they're unpopular with the people who live near them, so they often try to sneak in with as little local engagement as possible. The first step to stopping them is raising awareness, and after that, building networks of people working together to fight factory farms wherever they pop up.
00:19:21 Lilly
Our friend Barb Kalbach, of Iowa Citizens for Community Improvement, has a similar story. She first got involved in the fight against factory farms when someone tried to build one next to her home. As we know, Iowa's laws are especially lenient toward factory farms, but Iowans are also very familiar with the impacts of these facilities.
So, the community stepped up and got creative.
00:19:46 Barb
The factory farm was going to have seven buildings in it, just under 2,000 feet from our house, and it would be 7,200 total hogs.
There would be 10 million gallons of liquid manure produced in those seven buildings every year that would be hauled up and down our gravel roads — drip, drip, drip — to fields in the surrounding communities to be spread on the fields. So that's what we were up against. Besides the odor, the ongoing odor from that factory farm.
And when I let the neighbors know that this was happening, they were willing to — they were all horrified, you know — and so I called Iowa CCI and they sent out a staff person right away. And we fought back. CCI, I had read about CCI in the paper, that they just stopped one over at Elkhorn. And so I just called and told my situation and they sent out an organizer just almost right away and we got a community meeting going, brought all the neighbors together, brought the guy from the Board of Supervisors for our area.
00:21:00 Barb
And we well, of course, we talked about what you could do to, you know, get rid of it. And basically nothing, there's basically nothing you can do. So, we thought of everything that we could possibly change that would impact that building site and they would choose not to build there more or less or to get it stopped.
We got the Board of Supervisors on our side, we held meetings everywhere, we had weekly meetings, we had meetings with our legislators and we got the supervisors on our side, but there was not a lot that they could do from a Board of Supervisors position. But they did what they could. And then one night my neighbor called. He's the guy that I still buy half a hog from.
Anyway, one night my neighbor called and I remember this like it was yesterday and he said, “Hey, Barb, I've got a great idea.” And I said, “Yeah, what is it?” He says, “Let's get a document drawn up and have all the farmers within a 10-mile radius sign it, saying that they will refuse to accept any manure —"
00:22:16 Hugh
Like a petition.
00:22:17 Barb
Yeah. “…to spread on their land.” And in my head, I go to myself, it'll never work. But I said to him, I said, “OK. We'll try that.” Brought up the next meeting, got it all organized and away we went.
Got all these signatures within a 10-mile radius that they would not accept this manure and it was one of the our strongest arguments when we went to the Environmental Protection Commission and we also had petitions that we put out in surrounding towns and counties.
So, there were people that came from surrounding areas to our meetings on this issue, also. We had like 6,000 signatures on the petitions that that we hung up on the Casey's stores and spread around to other neighborhoods and stuff.
00:23:05 Barb
So, we had that. We had a guy that lived in a trailer house that was less than 500 feet away from the nearest building. So that's illegal. That is one little law, you can't have that. So, but we did anyway. So, all these things was just a variety of things and still the DNR issues his permit to build.
So, then we could appeal this to the Environmental Protection Commission and we did. And we went to our meeting. There was nine of them up there. The perpetrator was there with his lawyers and his bankers in their little row. And then there was all of us and our county attorney. We were working with the county attorney too. And he was there to present our case.
And so we did. We presented our case and they presented theirs, which is fairly weak. They just wanted, and had it been approved, you know, and they were such good guys. He'd tell you what a great guy he was too. And then one of the issues was this house, or trailer, that was in 500 feet of the buildings.
00:24:14 Barb
And the perpetrator said, “That is not a real home. They just put that trailer there and put their hired men there so that we couldn’t build because he was too close. That’s not a real home,” he said. So, in the argument, when the EPC started debating it with each other, this one little gal that was on there said, “Well, when I was growing up, my dad was a hired man, and we lived in a trailer house on the farmer's land and and I thought it was a real home.”
And there was complete silence in that auditorium.
Everybody took a deep breath. And in the end they voted and 5-4 we won. So we were one of the first ones that had won that at the EPC level, you know.
00:25:00 Lilly
Here's ICCI’s Hugh Espey.
00:25:05 Hugh
I think the key on that was just lots of local engagement by people and that's what really did it in terms of, I mean, in terms of getting the supervisors on our side, that's because the people were on our side. And getting the EPC, which is the DNR Citizen Oversight Board, on our side was because the people were on our side. So that, that’s what really — and as Barb was saying, it's just like on this petition saying that you're not going to accept manure.
Barb didn't say, well, I'm going to go around. She's just like, so, who's going to help do this, you know. And so, lots of people volunteer. They put in time because they knew that this was a critical fight to improving the quality of life in their neighborhood, and they weren't about to let this bully come into their community and just do what he wanted to do, for the sake of making a lot of money and making, you know, life hell for them.
00:26:00 Barb
For everybody else, yeah.
00:26:03 Hugh
For everybody else. People power is — people power is how we win.
00:26:06 Barb
But it took like six months of hard work.
00:26:10 Lilly
And if you, if you hadn't organized all that, it would have just gone through.
00:26:15 Barb
Oh yeah, there was nothing to stop it legally and still there still isn't really.
00:26:22 Lilly
Here's Vanessa Namken again back in South Dakota.
00:26:25 Vanessa
I firmly believe we need environmental impact studies.
And I'm not for all these regulations. Again, I'm not. But they're expanding so fast, so close, in some of these communities. And we haven't even begun to see the impact that it would have because they're popping up like, almost overnight. We need to say, how is this actually going to impact the communities that these things are coming into. And we need better regulations because that's why they're coming, we don't have regulations, we don't have oversight, and we don't have enforcement, and that's why they're coming here. So, we need to say, you got to have a limit because our resources are very, very important. Water is important, land is important.
And then you know how you're affecting the environment because of that.
00:27:14 Lilly
It's not just the lack of local regulation that allows factory farms to expand at the expense of the environment and rural communities. U.S. policy incentivizes and subsidizes the CAFO system in many ways, and at almost every level.
And as awareness of the harms caused by factory farms spreads, new laws keep popping up to limit local control and democracy and undermine people's ability to organize against factory farms. Big meat and dairy companies are fighting, too, fighting to maintain a destructive status quo.
But it is possible to do things a different way, and everyone from Iowa and South Dakota to Washington, DC, deserves a food system that actually works for people and the planet. On the next and final episode of “How to Fight a Factory Farm,” we're taking on the system.
00:28:17 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 producing this series, and to Noah Earl for the use of his song “Fry an Egg” for our theme music. If you enjoy this podcast, please rate and subscribe on your preferred podcast platform and share the show with a friend.
Learn more about the Campaign for Family Farms and the Environment at fightfactoryfarms.org and support IATP's work at iatp.org/donate.
