Rural Routes/Margot Ford McMillen

You Want Big Pigs Across From Your Back Yard?

“NIMBY.” nnChances are, if you’ve stood up for your neighborhood against a waste dump, an irresponsible mining company or a Concentrated Animal Feeding Operation (CAFO), somebody from the other side has called you NIMBY. Meaning “Not In My Back Yard,” it’s supposed to be a slur against people who fight facilities coming into their own neighborhood, such as a hazardous waste dump, a landfill, an industrial mining site. These people, supposedly, don’t object to the facilities that go into other neighborhoods — it’s just their own that they worry about.

In my neighborhood, the problem is a CAFO, a giant one that is permitted to house 10,000 mother pigs and their babies, an estimated 250,000 of them a year, on a 20-acre lot. And if you’re wondering what they’ll do with all the poo, it will be “exported” to farm fields all over the county. In other words, every neighborhood could be impacted.

Remember that there’s no treatment for this hog waste. It’s just pumped out of the pits and applied to fields. Good bye, sweet smells of spring!

So, as the CAFOs creep into mid-Missouri, we have a new rejoinder to the NIMBY slur: Next It Might Be You.

And if there’s a weather event, a tornado, a 100-year flood? Check out the pictures of hog barns in North Carolina after Hurricane Florence. North Carolina, by the way, was one of the first states impacted by the incursion of Big Pigs and once had a moratorium on new CAFOs. The biggest pork producer in that state is Smithfield, the same corporation that took over northwest Missouri. Smithfield today is owned by a company from China.

Right now, a Big Pig CAFO is being built about a mile behind my farm. The builders, managed by the owner from Iowa, started by digging a pit the length of two football fields to hold the hog waste. It’s been lined with concrete — 30 truckloads a day for more than a week — have you ever seen concrete that didn’t crack? Me neither.

These crews—the diggers, concrete pourers, steel erectors—aren’t from our community. If the CAFO developers sold anyone on the great number of jobs they’d be providing, it was to the most gullible of our county commissioners and lawmakers. Or the most paid-off.

Our neighborhood held the CAFO at bay for four years. Lawsuit after lawsuit, and we feel pretty good about that. It cost plenty, yeah, but pennies compared to the losses in property values after the CAFO goes in. Urban news writers often remark that areas around CAFOs are mostly uninhabited. Some of us think that’s the big prize for the CAFO guys—not the pigs, but the devalued land that Big Pig can pick up for pennies on the dollar as folks abandon our community.

So we paid out to an excellent, quick-thinking lawyer. And, thanks to him, we won time after time. But every time we won, the Big Pigs got a law passed to make our points illegal for the next community. Twenty years ago, Missouri had excellent laws against foreign ownership of land and nuisance polluters. Today, the Department of Natural Resources is underfunded, and a first act of Republican Gov. Eric Greitens was to change the Clean Water Commission to include six (out of seven) pro-CAFO members. Yep, that’s the same Gov. Greitens who resigned in the midst of scandals over his sex life and the misuse of funds donated to a nonprofit he founded to help veterans. The next guy in line, our governor now, isn’t as sexy or conniving, but he still acts like the Big Pigs are buttering his bread.

The solution for NIMBYs is obvious: Find people to run for office who will pass regulations and make things right for communities. And then publicize the good guys. Elect them. And protect them by making sure that their elected office—whether local, state or federal—always has the power to protect your community. When industry is involved, local control is always threatened. The state can pass laws to destroy county control and the Feds can pass laws to destroy the state’s. Big Pig, Big Oil, Big Chem, Big Mining, Big Utilities—all have their fingers in every branch of government.

But, truthfully, the other side isn’t really any smarter than we are. They can be beat. Their taunts are juvenile. One memorable line came from a member of the Clean Water Commission a few years ago, when he switched his vote to vote against us: “I really like bacon,” he said, “and I just don’t know any other way we’ll have it.”

Well, I like bacon also. But I’m not going to buy it from the Big Pigs that raise hogs to obesity, using antibiotics and hormones to help the pathetic oinkers narrowly miss death by disease long enough for the ride to the abbatoir. I have neighbors raising hogs in small batches and they’re the ones that get my NIMBY business.

Margot Ford McMillen farms near Fulton, Mo., and co-hosts “Farm and Fiddle” on sustainable ag issues on KOPN 89.5 FM in Columbia, Mo. Her latest book is The Golden Lane: How Missouri Women Gained the Vote and Changed History. Email: margotmcmillen@gmail.com.

From The Progressive Populist, November 15, 2018

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