Rural Routes/Margot Ford McMillen

What Happens When a Hog Lot Moves in Near You?

We’ve had quite a winter here in mid-Missouri, and I bet you have, too. OK until the first week in January and then … well, hard to express in PG language.

But the conference-creators marched on and most of the usual winter gatherings have come off with somewhat smaller crowds than usual, but just as much food for thought.

In thinking over the content of one excellent conference, billed the CAFO Summit, or Concentrated Animal Feeding Operation Summit, hosted by Missouri Rural Crisis Center, I realized how many areas of life are affected: Workers are beginning to organize as the most helpless individuals in our community, sometimes undocumented immigrants. Panels also talked about neighborhood relationships, like broken friendships with CAFO owners and lost years of mutual support with neighbors who have moved away when a CAFO comes in. And, of course, we covered problems with disease and antibiotic-resistant bacteria getting loose from the cesspools under the buildings in the facilities. Hog diseases are said to be the main reason CAFOs are moving to Missouri, because Iowa’s 10,000-plus CAFOs are starting to infect each other with pig viruses that kill the babies.

Yet, despite all these concerns, discussions have shied away from one of the big problems of CAFOs in the community and that’s the devastation of property values. It’s funny that, in an era when money has become a major obsession and we’re all watching the stock market like we have a dog in that game, the loss of property values has been virtually ignored by the socially responsible CAFO fighters.

It’s part of a pattern in all American society: We don’t like to talk about money losses. Maybe we’re embarrassed, thinking everyone else has lots more. Or maybe, and this is certainly true in my neighborhood, we think that if we don’t talk about it, the problems will go away. And we worry that we might offend someone, like the neighbor who really needs to sell and retire to town. Or the neighbor who just wants to sell because she has a new grandbaby in another county, with parents that work and need help. We don’t talk about the impact of the big CAFO being built behind our houses because we don’t want to feel the anger, or to deal with someone else’s heartbreak.

So, at the end of the conference, when everyone was committing themselves to plans of action, I committed to investigate property values, hoping that I could find one or two studies that summed up the impact of CAFOs coming into a rural neighborhood. I sent e-mails to several of my pals in different states, to see if they had any leads.

And guess what! There’s a TON of data. Studies going back to 1997 … and they’re still coming in. Every one of them (so far) has shown that CAFOs depress home values, with less impact on farmland. Which makes sense, because farmland, especially row crops, only require human contact a couple of times a year and that, increasingly, can be done by airplanes or by robo-tractors guided with computers from miles away. So there’s no day-to-day contact with the unpleasant smells, noises and sights of a CAFO.

Studies on land values have been done by the University of Missouri, Illinois State, Iowa State, University of Nebraska-Lincoln, Pennsylvania and Purdue in Indiana. Some evaluated prices within a mile and some went out three miles, but all found declines. “Only landfills have a worse effect on adjacent property values,” and “a sewage treatment plant has a less depressing effect on nearby housing prices,” said the Pennsylvania authors. And, of course, these studies only cover properties that have sold. Properties that were abandoned without a sale or where the owners decided to stay — willingly or unwillingly — do not show up because there’s no sale to report.

Only one study — from the Indiana Soybean Alliance — said that small CAFOs, with less than 1,000 pigs, do not have an impact on property values. That study, made in 2008, said that residences lose value but land prices may go up. Soybeans are, of course, among the main foods of animals in confinement.

I haven’t seen studies by the realtors, or by the bankers, or by construction developers, or by the county collectors, or by the school districts, but those are some folks that need to weigh in on this question. If property values tank when a CAFO come into the neighborhood, it affects more than the neighbors, whether within one mile, two miles, three miles or 1/10 of a mile. The price declines affect everyone. Realtors will make less per sale, bankers run the risk of loaning to people that get upside down on their mortgages, owing more than their place is worth. Developers lose acres where they might build and the county and school districts, of course, lose tax income when property owners demand re-evaluation.

From what I’ve seen so far, CAFOs in your community are a lose-lose situation. Time for a moratorium and a chance to re-evaluate their value in our society.

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, March 15, 2019

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