Farmers against CAFOS

Why factory farms are worth fighting against, and how to win

First green dill harvest of the year, over 200 for CSA

There are things that, once lost, cannot be restored. Not within our lifetimes. Not ever.

Drinking water. Neighborhoods and communities that took generations to form. Homes that people have spent their lives to make. Our health, and that of our children, and future generations. Our time on this planet. Our dignity.

The many threats to the people, places, and parts of life that we hold dear make it easy to look for one thing, one person, one party to blame. For a loud minority in our country, it’s immigrants. For others, it’s billionaires and their wars. Regardless, the reptilian part of our brains all think a like. That part is in charge when our cortisol is up, our parasympathetic nervous system is on hold, and the frontal cortex is out to lunch. It makes it hard to think, to grasp the relationship of one thing to another, and to recognize patterns. It reminds me of a scene in Hayao Miyazaki’s film, PRINCESS MONONOKE (1997):

San, The Princess Mononoke: [seeing the humans cutting down trees] Why chop the trees down?

Moro: [about the boars] To make them angry. Which makes them stupid.

Dealing with anger, then, is a necessary superpower in this world. Greeting it when it comes. Welcoming its reminder that we are still alive and connected to other living things. Dealing with it in a way that doesn’t defeat us, make us more vulnerable, or make mistakes is only going to become more valuable as time goes on. I don’t have any special “how to’s” when it comes to that, just what works for me (therapy, deleting apps, motherwort, skullcap, movement, etc).

Dealing with anger does not mean removing it. It serves a purpose. It’s helped us survive and evolve throughout our history as a species. But rather than grinding against it until we turn ourselves to dust, it’s meant to propel you into positive action. Easier said than done when there are so very many fights calling to us at all angles. Easier said than done, consistently and efficiently, when what little power we have is squandered in isolation and disorganization of our hyper-individualized lives.

It helps to get specific and local with your focus. Work with what you know to make a greatest impact that you can. For me, that includes (but is not limited to) agriculture. That’s what you’re here for. That, and my hot sweaty mug:

But we aren’t going to talk about agriculture without talking about exploitation. And while we may see more machinery and immigrant workers than enslaved people on farms today, the legacies of power built by chattel slavery in this country still operate intact. We can’t ignore the fact that more Black men are currently incarcerated now than were enslaved in 1845. Millions of incarcerated people being forced to do dangerous and grueling work for pennies (including agriculture, fighting wildfires, construction, fuel extraction, and logging, depending on location), while for-profit prisons make shareholders rich. This is how an economy based on stealing labor continues to steal labor, all thanks to a sneaky loophole in the 13th Amendment which allowed slavery as a punishment for a crime.

We also have the crisis of migrant farmworkers, already one of the most vulnerable communities, being criminalized, stalked, and seized by the state. Overwhelmed yet? Of course we are. The antidote to overwhelm, however, is within reach. The cure to the freeze/flight/fight response is movement.

Photo by Sovereign, 6/25: FROGS ARE GOBLINS!!

With all these convergent emergencies, the daily trail of just being human, and heat illness from the most recent record-breaking heat wave, what is making me write about some random CAFO? Well, because it’s something specific to me and local to the farm. Because I know that the majority of my readers believe that a better world is possible, and that food accessibility and sustainability is part of that. I’m doing it because I can, and I’m writing to let you and everyone we love know that there is something you can do, too.

As a farmer, I have spent the last decade plus reaching out to other people in my region who see that CAFOs are not an acceptable answer to the question of farming. We can do better than trading off clean air, water, and soil. We can do better than forced labor from the most vulnerable classes of people. We can do better than hundreds of millions of pounds of antibiotics being released into the environment via manure lagoons and holding tanks, with antibiotic resistant bacteria in tow. Are independent family farms a perfect, or even accessible, solution? No, not with land and housing priced like it is. But we don’t have to wait for the federal grants to come back, for loans to go through, or to be a farmer at all to protect the future of local production for local consumption.

Let me bring back the things I listed in the introduction up top. These are exactly the things at risk when a CAFO takes hold: everything worth anything for people relying on the same watershed.

Public officials love saying they don’t have to listen to the public, but don’t believe them. They want us to believe that it’s always been this way, and will always be. They want to convince us that this is what farming is, just industrial stockyards of sickly animals packed indoors, fed antibiotics to stay alive and gain weight, and massive manure lagoons to store waste and empty on a field next to your house.

Some of my picks for the month from the WIC-approved items: based on the Dirty Dozen and Clean 15 guidelines

This is about the CAFO farming model in general, because the risks of harm are consistent there. It is also about this specific farm, and how they have been able to bend the local zoning laws to their favor. How over 800 Town of Trenton residents signed a petition to stop the expansion, in “Animal Units” (A.U.), of Rob-N-Cin Farms. This is about how every guide I can find (linked below) on the subject suggest steps that have already been taken and ignored to defend the residents against pollution. They were brushed aside, in a straw man’s argument that this is a conflict between residents and farming. As if any other kind of farming that doesn’t pollute the land, air, and water doesn’t exist.

It does exist. We’re right here.

Many farmers in my community are conservationists, too. I know an entomologist who raises cattle on rotated pasture. I know a college professor who measured the depth of his topsoil from season to season, in inches. I know direct-to-consumer farmers with dozens, hundreds, even over a thousand connections with each of their members. I know people who have been doing this for decades. It’s not a perfect system when you’re swimming upstream of what the farm bill is written for, who and what qualifies for subsidies, and how much funding conservation practices get. But it doesn’t stop us from honoring the many generations-old practices of composting, cover-cropping, rotational grazing, and tree cropping. We protect pollinators. We don’t have manure lagoons to hold millions of gallons of toxic waste. We strive to be good neighbors who actually care about our community being able to enjoy their own backyard, and eat good food.

We’ve made it through a pandemic without much waste or interruption of food deliveries. It was factory farms and their corporate owners who ended up culling hundreds of thousands of fully fed hogs due to the processing bottleneck of sick slaughterhouse workers. The factory farm nightmare would be over tomorrow without federal subsidies, lobbyists, and an Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) with teeth.

Contrary to what Big Ag would have us believe, we’re not fighting something that is in any way an inevitablity. CAFOs came in the 80’s and 90’s, and they will go before long. We’re just trying to preserve as much as we can until then.

Two years ago, when my farm mates and I heard about the CAFO expansion down the road, we started paying attention. The first public hearing was packed with hundreds of people, a long line of whom took the mic and spoke for their alotted 3 minutes in opposition to more A.U.’s, more pollution, and more factory farms. It was effective, for a while.

Recently, after a quiet public hearing in a tiny conference room at the town hall, I heard a lot of fear from the residents. Fear that their wells, too, will become too contaminated with nitrates to drink, as many others in the Newburg area already have. Fear that the horrible stench coming from their neighbors, Rob-N-Cin Farms, will continue to ruin the air quality. Shame, also, for how the town board has treated them when they bring their concerns forward.

It seems that, if this zoning change goes through, and instead of consequences for over stocking animals for two years, the farm gets what they want - then it will not end there. Perhaps more factory farms like this will expand in the area. Maybe some will be built specifically because the ordinances aren’t protecting the residents.

The good news is that we are in good company. This is just one example of many struggles over the last 4 decades to stop CAFOs from tanking rural economies, ruining property values, and risking the health of those nearby.

One of the new pullets, Miss Helga G. Pataki

This conflict in the Town of Trenton needs oversight. Mike Lipscomb, the chair of the board, tries to save face by shirking his role in this extremely unpopular decision. If you call him on it, like one resident did at the last public hearing, he’ll shit a brick if someone names him directly instead of addressing the board in general.

But we see you, Mike. We see you, Bob Roden, owner of Rob-N-Cin. We’re not afraid of you. What we’re afraid of is our drinking water turning our babies blue, or being born prematurely. We’re afraid of antibiotic resistant bacterial hospitalizing us and our loved ones. We’re afraid of what will become of that land, and the Cedarburg Bog, the largest intact bog in Wisconsin, when you both are long gone.

We’re fighting to prevent what has happened all over Iowa and other places in the Midwest. Our customers know about how harmful CAFOs are, and care enough to seek us out. I’m willing to bet that they care enough to help us stop the expansion of CAFOs in Washington county. We have thus far never had an outbreak of E. coli or salmonella from irrigating with water polluted by factory farms. We don’t want to start now.

There will be calls to action on this. We are organizing with other members of the community, including farmers, legal advocates, and conservationists. This might not be the biggest fight there is, but is actionable.

If you have felt disillusioned, hopeless, or even embarrassed when trying to challenge the Town of Trenton Board and/or the Mike Lipscombs of the world, don’t. That’s what they want. They wanted that public hearing as small and quiet as possible. They didn’t like it when we packed the house two years ago with hundreds of people in opposition to this.

We’re preparing for the next phase of this fight, and any to come after this. CAFOs can pop up anywhere in the rural Midwest. Especially as the wildfires out west burn, and the country’s domestic food supply shifts.

This week’s large share spread

I would love nothing more than to keep our heads down and keep doing what we do, which is growing food that the local community wants. It’s seriously unfun to try to build power where it feels like there is none. We try to be FOR things, like organic agriculture, agroforestry, and empathetic farming in general for people and animals.

We unfortunately don’t have the privilege of just being good farmers, though. It’s not enough. We can’t afford to ignore when something like this happens, because none of us are immune to its far-reaching effects.

Here are some resources to level up your understanding of the movement against factory farms:

How to Stop a A CAFO in Your Community - Sustain Rural Wisconsin

How to Fight a Factory Farm podcast - Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy\

How to Avoid Supporting CAFOs - The Sierra Club

Please subscribe to this substack to stay in touch, get updates, and receive calls to action. Thank you to all the incredible individuals who are brave enough to speak up in a timely manner, and to the organizations who are looking to get involved in this fight.

********Please keep in mind that these words are my own. The thoughts and opinions expressed here do not represent Winterspring Farm, members, staff, and volunteers.*******