In the nation's top livestock-producing states, people living next to large-scale livestock operations often complain of odors, asthma, and hordes of flies. These concentrated animal feeding operations, or CAFOs, produce more than 1.1 billion tons of manure a year, but are subject to limited federal oversight, so their neighbors have turned to nuisance lawsuits to fight back.

The Trump administration plans to let the pork industry take over inspections of meat from industrial-scale hog farms, including all tests for deadly pathogens that sicken half a million Americans a year, according to The Washington Post. As Esquire columnist Charles P. Pierce asks, “What could go wrong?”

An estimated 30 million gallons of cow manure awaited cleanup on the former site of Lost Valley farm, a mega-dairy in Boardman, Oregon, when it was sold in February. The mess was an apt symbol of the yearlong, beleaguered tenure of what had been the state’s second largest dairy.

A senior official at the Iowa Farm Bureau, the nation’s largest agricultural organization, recently told me that most rural communities will soon disappear. Even though the organization’s nominal mission is to help “farm families prosper and improve their quality of life,” the official seemed accepting of this fate, even a bit happy about it.