It took the Greene County board of supervisors 16 minutes Monday morning to vote to recommend to the Iowa Department of Natural Resources the approval of a construction permit for a 1,300-head expansion of an existing CAFO (confined animal feeding operation) in Cedar Township. The expansion will make total capacity at the site 4,600-head.
Five persons were the public hearing on the permit Monday; two of them spoke. Patti Edwardson, who lives in Highland Township, opposed the expansion, saying that CAFOs have changed agriculture since she grew up on a Guthrie County farm. She said she knew the pleasure of seeing animals at pasture or in a barnyard, and she knew the smell of manure. With CAFOs, she said, “the manure has been changed to a putrid stew with a smell that at times is sickening, especially when it is applied to surrounding farm fields.”
“My concern isn’t about nostalgia, nor about farmers, but about control and ownership of our livestock system, and what that’s doing to our rural communities,” Edwardson said.
George Naylor, who also lives in Highland Township, addressed the supervisors. He said that the CAFO system has taken free enterprise out of farming, with large international corporations having major holdings in the U.S. pork industry.
New Fashion Pork owns the Cedar Township site and is proposing the expansion. Naylor mentioned New Fashion Pork’s holding company, BWT, which owns farm ground on which corn and soybeans are raised to feed NFP hogs. “Where does the farmer fit in on that? Is that the wave of the future, that we have totally vertically integrated agriculture where they own the pigs, they raise the feed, they process the pork and they send it wherever around the world they want?” Naylor said. “There’s no room for farmers left. We all have to settle for handling manure, if we’re even farming…. They always say, ‘when life gives you lemons, make lemonade.’ Well, I’m sorry, but you can’t make lemonade out of corporate hog manure.”
Jay Moore, NFP director of environmental services, was at the hearing. The company had added a closure plan as requested by the supervisors last week as they reviewed the master matrix. NFP did not add trees around the new building, as requested by the supervisors. According to Moore, the distances were too tight. The manure management plan had also not been amended to call for injecting manure, as the supervisors had requested. Moore again said the manure would be injected, but the company does not want to be locked in to that method of manure application.
Moore also defended CAFOs, saying they’re more humane than the system in place in the 1940s because the buildings are climate controlled, while traditional barns weren’t. He also said that manure applied as “natural fertilizer” increases yields up to 15 bushels an acre.
The expansion scored 555 on the master matrix with the added points for the closure plan; 440 points are needed for approval of the construction permit. Under the current Code, a county has very limited options for opposing an application that scores above the minimum on the master matrix.
After the public hearing, the supervisors voted three to one to recommend approval of the construction permit to the DNR. Supervisors John Muir, Mick Burkett and Guy Richardson voted in favor. Supervisor Dawn Rudolph was absent.
Supervisor Tom Contner voted against the motion to approve, saying after the vote that he has mixed emotions on the subject. “I don’t like big corporations,” he said. “If it was an individual farmer that wanted to build a hog confinement, I have no qualms with that at all. I’d support them all the way. But a big corporation like that, being out-of-state, I just don’t think that’s right. There’s a lot of people around here that are feeding pigs for big corporations, but they own the houses, they have some pride in their buildings and they take care of them.”
