Something smells with the feedlot trend, and it’s more than just the manure

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A mention of farm country beckons images of quaint houses, big red barns, grazing cattle and sun-soaked crops. That’s how I recall farmsteads of my youth in west-central Minnesota, and how Sonja Trom Eayrs sees her family’s farm in Dodge County, west of Rochester, Minn.

That was then, and then sure ain’t now.

In three decades, much of southern and central Minnesota’s farmland has been transformed, mostly out of sight and little noticed, with look-alike, elongated buildings where tens of millions of hogs, cattle and poultry live short lives in crowded crud, guzzling feed for fattening in prep for a one-way trip to slaughter.

The Environmental Working Group, a research and advocacy organization, says that more than 23,000 feedlots now dot Minnesota’s farm country, annually producing 49 million tons of manure — a waste-equivalent 17 times the state’s entire population. On-site pits store the accumulated slurry that, when pumped out and spread onto nearby fields, fills the air with stench so strong that downwind, outdoor activities are impossible, even unsafe.

Folks living near feedlots have objected to the odor and water filth, but are overwhelmed by well-organized Big Ag interests.

Feedlots are the corporate, single-purpose model to reliably and efficiently produce product for meatpacking giants like Hormel, Cargill, Tyson and Smithfield. Food and Water Watch, of Washington, D.C., says feedlots “treat farms as animal warehouses, farmworkers [many are migrants] as expendable, and the air and water as a dumping ground.”

Feedlots are “efficient,” as in rapidly growing animals for slaughterhouses (with processing lines of mostly low-paid migrant workers, standing elbow to elbow, crowded as once were the animals they’re carving). Efficient as in cost-effectively pushing product to market to pad shareholder profit.

But there’s “collateral damage,” those external costs borne by the public, not shareholders. Manure fills the air with rancid gases, and it floods ground and surface waters with nitrates, phosphorus and residue of animal-growth agents and antibiotics, adding to ongoing runoff from excessive nitrogen fertilizer applied to crops.

Factory farms drive down property values, and they pit neighbor against neighbor in often-heated debates about the worth of it all.

Many who could afford to have moved out. Their loss, coupled with far fewer farms, has hollowed out rural America, emptying schools and shuttering small-town storefronts.

Growing up on her family’s farm, which she now co-owns near Blooming Prairie, Minn., Eayrs has smelled it, fought it and written about it, including now in “Dodge County Incorporated: Big Ag and the Undoing of Rural America.” A Minneapolis attorney, Eayrs has packed her new book with experience-driven despair over the effects of what she calls a broad-scale corporate takeover.

As Eayrs describes what’s going on, there’s more than manure that smells.

Much more, actually.

The messy mix includes protective ag carve-outs in federal laws, and complicity of state regulators in spotty enforcement of environment and safety rules. Minnesota defers permitting authority to counties and townships, leaving them at the mercy of well-heeled groups of corn and feed growers and animal producers. It’s all driven by the meatpacking industry and coordinated by the American Farm Bureau Federation, which holds sway in Congress and state capitols, with support-tentacles in every farm county.

One critic said the power of combined Big Ag interests makes other national lobby giants “look like Little Sisters of the Poor.”

The Big Ag carve-out came in 1970 when national water pollution legislation exempted “non-point sources” (industry discharge pipes are point sources; animal waste and farm runoff are “non-point”), resulting in buildup of nitrates in ground and surface waters due to excess nitrogen fertilizer use.

In the 1990s, Minnesota and other states genuflected to farmer interests, timidly suggesting “voluntary” compliance that was largely (predictably) ignored, resulting in expanding lists of impaired streams and lakes, especially in western and southern farm country. Local governments and individuals have spent millions to remove harmful nitrates from drinking water.

The Minnesota Center for Environmental Advocacy, Trout Unlimited and others recently sued the Minnesota Pollution Control Agency and Department of Natural Resources to correct yearslong indifference to the nitrate “crisis,” especially in southeastern Minnesota’s vulnerable limestone subsurface.

Since the 1950s, land consolidations led to vastly fewer farms, with ever-larger operations specializing in producing grain feeds (corn and soybeans, mostly) and animals (poultry, dairy, beef and, more recently, hogs). The 1970s mantra, “Get big or get out,” was in full force, profoundly changing farm practices while depopulating the countryside and leaving the small family farm to fading memory.

In “Dodge County, Incorporated,” Eayrs tells how the rural social and political order has hardened, with intimidation directed at those demanding feedlot accountability: Garbage dumped along driveways, antagonistic late-night phone calls, bullet-peppered road signs, and pickups parked outside homes at dusk before slowly moving on.

Calls to state regulators result in tepid response. Feedlot proponents, mostly outsiders, regularly outnumber opposing local voices at public hearings. Eayrs says Big Ag interests have captured seats on permitting boards, and she shows a Farm Bureau brochure advising folks on how to confront “activists” (usually locals) demanding remedies from unwanted feedlot effects.

Big Ag’s power is impressive. In the 1970s, when a nascent Minnesota Pollution Control Agency sought to regulate much smaller feedlots, revolting farmers demanded, and got, a farmer on the MPCA’s policy-setting citizens board. The state soon softened farmland regulations to voluntary compliance and shielded farmers against “nuisance” actions with a “right to farm” law.

In 2014, the MPCA Board required an environmental impact study for a proposed dairy operation. Farm legislators joined others with gripes and in a late-session ambush eliminated the nine-member citizens board.

Eayrs, in her book, actively pushes legitimate public concerns on feedlot farm issues. Meantime, more and more feedlots are planned, with the next big push in North Dakota, further jeopardizing that state’s longstanding ban on corporate-owned farms.

So, can Big Ag and factory farms continue to dominate America’s farmland?

The answer, my friend, is blowin’ in the wind — and the smell isn’t pretty.

Ron Way lives in Minneapolis and is a former assistant director of the Minnesota Pollution Control Agency. He’s at ron-way@comcast.net.