The following letter was mailed anonymously to Marian Kuper, whom we featured in last week’s “A Tale of Two Counties.”
She shared it with Tom Philpott so we could give readers a sense of the
frustrations brewing in CAFO country. We welcome responses from other
perspectives.

I know that others still believe the United States and Iowa are sound
democracies. I cannot be one of those. For about a dozen years I have
fought for what I thought were my rights to a life without health
hazards from vertically integrated confined-animal feeding operations
(CAFOs), a life where my property rights were respected, a life where I
knew my neighbors who talked to me and shared their ongoing decisions
with me, or a life where I felt safe and secure. I have none of that —
I am a second-class citizen who is constantly being told there is
nothing anyone can do to help me. There can be no democracy when no
politician will act in your interests. Meanwhile, 80 percent of the
pork raised in the United States comes from just 10 percent of the
producers — the CAFO hog owners, whoever they be.

It starts at the construction phase — you might get informed now with
a permit application notice. In the past, you got informed when the
bulldozer started tearing apart what was a crop field — possibly with
the seedling crop still there. There was no warning that some unknown
entity was moving in down the road. No one knows who it is. A trip to
the county courthouse might provide a name — some limited liability
corporation from who knows where representing who knows what investors.
There might be some rumors that it was one of the big producers — but
nowhere on the application does it ask who will own the hogs at that
site. No one stops at your door to explain what is happening.

There is a process involving the county supervisors and the state
Department of Natural Resources. It seems, though, that they rubber
stamp everything, because only one application in a hundred ever seems
to become controversial, and less than that are ever denied. Some
people have spent money and time fighting this — only to lose. (If you
know of anyone who won, I’d love to know that story.)

Most of us who tried to do something have come away disheartened,
disillusioned, and downright angry. We learn we have no rights — the
state gave these unknown corporate entities the right to foul our air,
our water, and our lives. We have no legal means of redress. Oh, maybe
you could sue as a nuisance — but it has to be up and running and
causing problems; it takes money and the consent of all your neighbors;
and so much energy to organize all that. Meanwhile so many of the
people around you keep chanting that there is nothing you can do, that
you are wasting your time and their time. No one helps you. There is no
rural community spirit. There is little compassion for your plight as
so many others have gone before and hit this brick wall and stopped and
thus believe no one is capable of going further. Many just physically
move elsewhere. So much for century farms or lifelong living space.
There are other states that seem to actually protect their people but
Iowa is not one of those.

Once in operation, the reality of the CAFOs hits. The most obvious are
the putrid smells on some summer evenings. Plumes of air from these
sites holding several thousand hogs and their accumulated wastes for
the past year fan out across the countryside. They enter open windows,
affect outside work, and may invade indoor areas. They also come in the
fall when the pits are emptied onto fields at rates far above crop
needs but allowed by a state who knows the wastes have to go somewhere.
The CAFO is kept operating by the state regardless of its misdeeds or
the consequences to surrounding people or to future water needs. The
DNR requires useless paperwork which is impossible to monitor by
neighbors who have no access to it nor no means to actually measure
whatever numbers might be on that useless paper trail called a manure
management plan.

The other consequences of CAFOs may be more insidious. You no longer
know who your neighbor is — there is no one to ask about electrical
outages, to consult about fencelines, to ask to a community meeting.
You no longer have a legal system to turn to when problems arise — the
sheriff refers you to DNR who may or may not at their discretion
investigate your claim, and has no duty to tell you what they find. If
money corrupts our political process, the CAFOs have contributed far
beyond your means and the actual name of the hog owner of each CAFO is
kept secret from the public. You listen to paid commercials on your
television or radio daily touting livestock farmers but again the
identity of who are those livestock farmers is kept secret. You have no
social network as so many of your neighbors are living with their own
scenarios that they do not care about yours. You are left alone and in
trouble where you develop a deep distrust of all government which seems
never to be there for you while always protecting these corporate
vertically integrated CAFOs owned by who knows whom, with who knows
whose pigs in them. These secret hog owners win and you lose.

So enjoy your CAFO pork while numerous unwilling neighbors are
consigned to permanent second-class citizenry. These neighbors are
prone to dropping out of all civic activities as none of those have
ever helped them. I do not call this a democracy worth forcing on the
rest of the planet.

A helpless, hopeless resigned Iowa citizen

October 2007