The conflict over confined animal feeding operations (CAFOs) was played out again Monday at a public hearing at the Greene County supervisors’ meeting.
The public hearing was preliminary to the obligatory recommendation by the supervisors to the Iowa Department of Natural Resources that a construction permit be approved for MLB 170th St, to be operated by Mike and Lucas Bravard in Section 5 of Hardin Township.
Lucas Bravard will graduate from Iowa State University this coming Saturday with a degree in agriculture, and that’s what prompted Mike and Kathy Bravard to move forward with expanding their hog operation by building a second site. The wean-to-finish facility will have two buildings connected by a hallway. Total capacity will be 4,960.
Neighbor Jessica Arnold addressed the board. She said there are two CAFOs nine-tenths of a mile east of her home, three northwest a little more than a mile, one northeast of her a little more than a mile, and a “double” straight south a mile and three-quarters. “I have only a few days a year when I don’t have stench. I feel a little ill right now,” she said.
Arnold said she moved to her country home 25 years ago to have space for gardens, and there are many days now she must spend indoors. “I understand it’s a farming community and it’s your land and you should be able to do what you want, but it seems rather one-sided to me. Where is everybody else’s quality of life?” she said.
Supervisor Guy Richardson gave what he referred to as a “canned speech” about the need for local control. “I believe there’s a point, and I don’t think we’re anywhere near that point yet in Greene County, but there’s a point of saturation,” he said. He said there should be more control by local boards of supervisors. “We’re the ones who are here dealing with not only the people who want to put up these confinements, but with the rest of the people around them. We should have control over that.”
Board chair John Muir said he thinks the current master matrix system for scoring CAFO site plans does “a pretty good job” of accomplishing a balance between producers and neighbors, but that there isn’t a tool to limit the number of CAFOs within a specific area.
Muir said he prefers state control to the 99 counties possibly having 99 different sets of rules, and at some time producers will find a saturation point.
Arnold said that according to the IDNR, there can be a CAFO every half-mile. “What quality of life would anybody have if that happened?” she asked.
Supervisor Dawn Rudolph mentioned the conundrum of siting CAFOs. With the declining rural population, the vacant farmhouses at farmsteads are easy to raze and create more sites for CAFOs. As Arnold said, though, with the increasing number of CAFOs, people are less likely to move to the country.
Richardson suggested that with technological advances there will come a time that odor isn’t an issue, but he admitted that may be a long time in the future.
Becky Sexton of Twin Lakes Environmental Services, the company that wrote the Bravards’ plan, spoke on behalf of the Bravards and all CAFO operators.
She invited Arnold to contact the Bravards if there are odor or other problems coming from their site. She said the Bravards are known as being environmentally friendly and that they plan to plant trees at the site once the ground settles. “They want to be good neighbors. They don’t want to cause you any further issues. They understand. They live in the country, too. They want to be part of the community. We don’t want you to feel like we’re trying to do this to hurt anybody. If you have issues, call us,” she said.
“We want to stay in rural America,” Sexton continued. “We want to be the ones that are growing the bacon you buy in the grocery store. We want to be the ones who grow the ham for your Easter dinner. We understand your frustration, but on the other side, if Lucas wanted to come back to Greene County, what’s he going to do? There aren’t a lot of jobs available for Iowa State graduates unless he comes back and finds a job to supplement farming with his dad. A young farmer can’t just go out and start renting ground or buying ground, and then go out and buy equipment and do it on his own. It doesn’t work that way anymore. If we want people to come back to our community, and that’s what we’re all looking at right now.”
Sexton went on to say that farmers are doing a better job now than in the 1970s. Open feedlots then allowed run-off of manure, but CAFOs contain 100 percent of their manure, Sexton said. “We didn’t have the environmental stewardship that we have today. People say they want to go back to how it was done in the 1970s, but they don’t care about water quality. It doesn’t make any sense, because if everybody has 50 hogs on their site and they’re letting the manure run off, they don’t understand how much we’ve brought environmental agriculture forward,” Sexton said.
Arnold answered, “You can’t stop the wind and poop stinks. You can’t change that.”
The supervisors voted unanimously to recommend to the IDNR that the construction permit for MLB 170th St be approved.
