Noxious Neighbors

By Harold Henderson
Copyright by the author

This summer's Republican gubernatorial primary in Kansas took negative campaigning to a new low. A television ad sponsored by challenger David Miller showed someone who looked suspiciously like incumbent Gov. Bill Graves getting into bed with a hog. The message was clear. Graves was too easy on large hog farms.

The governor survived the primary, and the pork industry is likely to prosper as well. The real question now is what the burgeoning growth of large-scale corporate-style confinement hog farming will do to family farms, rural communities, and local planning.

In 1950, according to the National Pork Producers Council, hogs were raised on three million U.S. farms (most of them family farms with fewer than 100 hogs each). That number is now down to 150,000 — a 95 percent drop. The remaining pork producers are far bigger and more specialized. According to the Center for Rural Affairs, a family farm advocacy group in Nebraska, just 50 producers now farrow over 40 percent of the nation's hogs. Some specialize in one part of the animal's life cycle.

Specialization and growth have been facts of life in U.S. agriculture for decades. In 1950, farmers typically raised swine along with corn, wheat, and cows; the hogs roamed and rooted in pastures, sheltering (if at all) in minimal A-frame sheds.

Today, most of the diversified farms have disappeared. Increasing numbers of hogs are raised inside specially constructed buildings where temperature, humidity, and feed are controlled. Manure is collected either in deep pits beneath the buildings or in earth lagoons outside, until it can be applied to fields.

Bringing the hogs inside may save money; it definitely saves land and labor. The same number of hogs can be produced in a smaller area with fewer people than in the past — important considerations when farm labor is hard to find and land conservation is a priority. Confinement can also help prevent some diseases (ever try hosing down a pasture?) and make it easier to produce lean, standardized pork, since the animals no longer need to grow layers of fat to protect themselves from winter weather.

But indoor operations also require a sizable up-front investment, something that comes easier to a big corporation than to a family farmer working 200 acres, perhaps with a town job on the side.

In the early 1990s, for instance, the Seaboard Corporation, originally a grain-milling company, decided to go into the hog business. Today, according to Successful Farming magazine, the company, headquartered in Shawnee Mission, Kansas, is the fifth largest pork producer in the U.S., with over 100,000 sows. It is also among the top 10 pork producers.

This upward pattern holds across the board. In Illinois, the average hog farm has 540 hogs, a figure that has been rising steadily for decades. According to a tabulation by the Illinois Stewardship Alliance, a sustainable farming advocacy group in Rochester, Illinois, new operations in the state are projected soon to average 2,900 hogs. In other words, corporate confinements are accelerating a long-standing trend.

Phooey, phooey

Bringing the hogs inside does not necessarily make them better neighbors, and this is where farm issues become planning issues. In fact, large hog confinements introduce to the countryside a number of problems more familiar in urban and industrial areas.

Odor tops the list. "These are ultra-heavy uses," says John Keller, AICP, who teaches planning at Kansas State University in Manhattan. "Odor zones around here can stretch to five miles some days. There is nothing like a hundred thousand head of hogs in a containment facility on a hot July day. It'll bring you to your knees and put tears in your eyes."

Nor can smells be dismissed as merely subjective. Susan Schiffman, a medical psychologist at Duke University Medical Center in North Carolina, published a paper in the Brain Research Bulletin in 1995 showing that people exposed to swine odors suffered from "significantly more tension, more depression, more anger, less vigor, more fatigue, and more confusion than control subjects."

Keller notes another problem, the strain on local roads caused by continuous truck travel. The road deterioration is most evident in remote parts of the Great Plains where many confinement operations have set up shop, he says.

Hog concentrations also seem to affect water quality more than smaller feedlots do, although this is not certain. Lagoons can leak. In June, Illinois Issues magazine reported that the state's geological survey had tracked bacteria, ammonia, chloride, and sodium leaking from a single hog-waste lagoon at an undisclosed location in Illinois.

Lagoon walls can also break outright, creating catastrophic spills. In August 1997, a U.S. district judge imposed the largest civil fine ever under the Clean Water Act against Smithfield Foods, the nation's second largest hog producer. Smithfield was fined $12.6 million for more than 5,000 violations of the Clean Water Act over a period of more than five years, as well as for falsifying documents and destroying water quality records. The judgment has been appealed.

Not neighborly

The objectors are a diverse lot. One thing is clear: They don't fit the convenient stereotype of nouvelle exurbanites who are surprised to discover that farms sometimes smell bad.

Farmers themselves are split on the issue. In Knox County, Illinois, a family feud erupted when a nephew announced that he planned to raise hogs in confinement on contract to North Carolina-based Murphy Family Farms, the nation's largest hog producer. Many farmers feel that public officials have abandoned them in favor of large corporations. Typical is the Iowa farmer quoted by the Associated Press last year: "It doesn't seem like we can get the legislature to represent us any more."

Other objectors are long-time rural residents like the Trappist monks at the New Melleray Abbey in northeastern Iowa, who face the prospect of a nearby operation with 220 sows being replaced by one with 1,300.

Political conservatives can find themselves in the anticorporate camp, too, which is not altogether surprising since large livestock operations can seriously impinge on the use and value of private property. "I've never met a person in Kansas who is for any type of governmental regulation," says John Keller. "But they all want 'em out of here."

A major complaint against the huge hog operations is that they are owned and operated by "outsiders," who don't have to live with their mistakes. "Family farmers at least have personal incentives to be stewards of the environment and good neighbors," contends University of Missouri agricultural economist John Ikerd. "Public corporations have no such incentives."

Another complaint is that outsiders may put less into the local economy. Like a factory that builds cars on an assembly line instead of by hand, large hog confinement operations require less human labor per hog raised and their managers can buy farm supplies outside the local community.

Who's out there?

The typical noxious neighbor in these scenarios is a large confinement operation, often, but not always, owned by a corporation. Some large operations are family-run, and some corporations are family farm corporations or joint ventures by local farmers and veterinarians. Exactly what makes some operations noxious? Which ones should be subject to more careful planning and zoning scrutiny than farms normally receive?

Size is one measure. But what's the magic number? When does a family farm become a factory farm for purposes of regulation? In the past, the Kansas Department of Health and Environment has considered any operation with more than 1,000 "animal units" — 2,500 full-size hogs — subject to its health and safety requirements.

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, which is now in the process of revamping its regulations for confined animal feeding operations (CAFOs), has used similar thresholds. EPA's draft strategy, announced in March, calls for aggressive enforcement of Clean Water Act permit requirements and an increase in the number of CAFOs required to have permits. The Environmental Defense Fund has criticized the strategy because some CAFOs might not have to change their practices until 2005.

Ownership structure is another measure. But how can planners fairly distinguish between a family farm corporation, a cooperative arrangement among local farmers, and an out-of-state corporate owner? Some corporations, including Murphy Family Farms, contract with local farmers to raise hogs exclusively for them. Should those local farmers then be regulated as corporate farms?

And will regulation have a counterproductive effect? Like other industrial corporations and unlike traditional farms, absentee owners can choose where to site their operations. This brings another urban controversy — the runaway shop — onto the farm scene for the first time.

If a given state or county or township regulates hog confinement operations strictly enough, their owners can credibly threaten to go elsewhere. Actual examples are hard to find, but movement is certainly occurring, with Midwest heartland states like Illinois and Iowa losing market share, while relative newcomers like Kansas and North Carolina pick it up.

Pork is already a $30 billion-plus industry in the U.S. at the retail level, and David Juday of the Indianapolis-based Hudson Institute (an outspoken advocate of industrial hog farming) foresees that this popularity may require a quadrupling of supply. In theory, those extra hogs could wind up being grown in Argentina, just as shoes now come from Indonesia.

Regulatory tools

All these issues would be hard to deal with in any case. But many jurisdictions don't even have the tools to try. In legal terms, confinement operations — no matter how factorylike — are generally considered farms and are usually protected by right-to-farm laws, zoning exemptions, and other special treatment.

This potential mismatch between on-the-ground reality and government capability has helped make hog confinements a high-profile political issue.

Meanwhile, planning commissions, which often lack state authorization to plan or zone for agriculture, find it hard even to get the issue on the agenda. Do the big hog operations hold out promise for local economic development? How can they be properly separated from incompatible uses? Such questions could be planning questions, but they remain in the realm of politics so long as there is no power to plan or zone what is considered an agricultural use.

Some localities have stepped in and acted anyhow. In Kansas, for instance, long-standing state law and supreme court precedent have exempted farming from local zoning regulations, according to David Yearout, principal planner for the Wichita-Sedgwick County Metropolitan Area Planning District. But some question remains as to whether large confinement operations qualify as "farming." Thus, within the last few years three predominantly rural counties in the southwestern part of the state have adopted their first zoning codes, largely in response to the advent of hog confinement operations. "They never saw the need for it before," says Yearout, who consulted with them.

One of those counties is Stevens County, which decided to require a conditional use permit for corporate-owned operations, including the Seaboard Corporation. The company retaliated by threatening a lawsuit. This last spring, the state legislature passed a bill that imposed some environmental requirements on very large operations. The bill also sought to prevent local governments from increasing the statutory "separation distances" between confinements and such uses as homes and schools. It is not clear yet whether the law succeeded in doing that.

It also should be noted that, in the 22 Kansas counties where local option referendums have been held on corporate farming in the last four years, 21 counties voted against it.

Leniency

Illinois remains near the lenient end of the scale. Its laws have been drawn up with an eye to maintaining the state's substantial share of U.S. hog production. Thus, no siting permits are required for new large confinement operations and local residents have no chance for substantive input on siting decisions.

But in January, Lt. Gov. Robert Kustra (who has retired from politics and left the state) spoke out against hog confinement operations for helping to craft "sham laws that look good but are full of loopholes" — a reference to the state law.

In Nebraska, the state legislature this spring defeated a bill that would have given counties more local control over the siting of livestock operations. In March, however, the state supreme court ruled in the case of Hall v. Progress Pig, upholding Nebraska's constitutional prohibition against corporate farming. The justices unanimously affirmed that citizens can sue to enforce the prohibition if state officials do not. In other words, notes the Center for Rural Affairs, "if the attorney general has sufficient evidence to support 'an objective belief' that an operation violates the law, but fails to bring enforcement action, citizens have the right to do so."

In South Dakota, a binding referendum will appear on this month's ballot. It would amend the state constitution to bar farmers from going into business with big corporations and forbid non-family farm corporations from farming in the state.

North Carolina — the state where the corporate confinement trend began and where a number of serious spills of hog manure from lagoons have occurred — enacted a moratorium on corporate hog farms in August 1997. It's set to expire next March. A vote on extending the moratorium has been stalled in the state legislature. The Raleigh News & Observer has editorialized that an extension is necessary for research on hog confinement operations to be completed.

Neighboring South Carolina has shown that not all states will race to the bottom in search of footloose corporations. In 1995, lawmakers there drew back from preempting local controls and offering incentives to hog processors. Since then the state's relatively tough environmental requirements have apparently discouraged big livestock producers.

Finally, in Kentucky, attorney general Albert Chandler held in an August 1997 opinion that large hog operations are not protected by that state's right-to-farm law. The state's legal definition of "agricultural operation" requires that it involve raising crops or livestock "in a reasonable and prudent manner customary among farm operators."

The opinion concludes that large hog-confinement operations are neither reasonable nor prudent: "The placement on a former strip mine of an industrial-scale hog operation with its obligatory lagoon does not qualify in our view as an agricultural resource," writes Chandler. "It is rather an industrial operation producing industrial waste." For the time being, at any rate, Kentucky counties have the option of planning and zoning such operations.

Minnesota nice

One state has taken the lead in allowing counties to grapple with the planning questions themselves. That's Minnesota, where in 1996 the state agriculture department published two handbooks addressed to local governments, one on agricultural land preservation and the other on planning and zoning for animal agriculture.

"We saw these two issues in the context of any farming use that may create incompatibility with neighbors," says Robert Patton, AICP, the department's local outreach coordinator. Recognizing that local governments might be tempted simply to write a feedlot ordinance in reaction to current concerns, his agency seeks a broader view, Patton says. "We encourage localities to think how animal agriculture fits into their county's land use and its economic base in the future — to ask some comprehensive planning questions."

Thus, the department recommends that local ordinances don't simply try to establish a separation distance between a livestock operation and nearby residences, as has been done in zoning ordinances in the past. Often, distances vary wildly in those ordinances, Patton notes. "We think it's more workable to establish one or more zoning districts where nonfarm development is limited and animal agriculture is encouraged, rather than rely on separation distances," he says.

To get a handle on how much distance is needed, University of Minnesota researchers have undertaken an odor rating system and an odor dispersion measurement project. Now in its preliminary stages, the research may eventually result in detailed specifications for locating confinement buildings, according to extension service engineer Larry Jacobson.

Some Minnesota localities have imposed absolute caps on the number of animals that can be confined in one location — in at least one case as low as 2,000 "animal units," which works out to be 5,000 hogs. Others have imposed moratoriums while they think about the question.

Other communities have required conditional use permits for operations above a given size threshold. "We caution against that in the handbook," says Patton, because it can create unrealistic expectations. "Citizens often think that a conditional use permit gives the planning commission a lot more discretion than it really does." Such permits also involve public hearings, which can further polarize an already bitterly divisive issue.

Spinoffs doubted

Supporters of large confinement operations contend that they can rejuvenate faltering rural economies. Big livestock operations "target counties that have been declining since 1900," says Kansas State's John Keller. "Friends out there tell me, 'Smelling hogs is better than a slow death.'"

Do the big guys bring in the promised jobs and revenue? To a considerable extent, information is lacking. Illinois farmers sold just over $1 billion worth of hogs in 1996, reports Illinois Issues, but agricultural statisticians in Springfield say there is no way to tell how much of that money stayed in the state.

In one central Illinois county, the facts seem to point in the other direction. Last May, the DeWitt County Board of Review visited neighbors of a 7,400-sow confinement operation and then — in an action apparently without precedent in the country — reduced the assessed property values of homes within one and a half miles by 30 percent. Homes within two miles got a 10 percent reduction.

Critics tend to view corporate hog farms as the Nike factories of the 1990s — a quick fix that may soon leave. And if they don't, that is seen as bad, too. University of Missouri sociologist William Heffernan compares the relatively prosperous Midwest, where most farmers are owner-operators, to the persistent poverty of Appalachian mining areas, where most workers are employees of absentee corporations that export their profits.

Heffernan contends that the U.S. has reaped most of the benefits that can be had from industrializing agriculture. Even if bigger, more specialized, more standardized hog operations are more efficient — a debatable proposition in itself, he says — the savings are small in relation to the total cost of food. "The farmer gets about 10 cents of every dollar spent on food — and gets to keep only one cent of that. That suggests to me that we've gone about as far down that road as we can," he says.

Meanwhile, the careless practices of previous decades are returning to haunt today's farmers. David Yearout notes that a monitoring well drilled for a new cattle operation near Dodge City, Kansas, revealed high levels of nitrates and other chemicals. "It turns out that site had been a hog CAFO 20 years ago. It got down to the groundwater and sat there, and it's still bad," he exclaims.

Harold Henderson is Planning's book reviewer and a staff writer for the Chicago Reader. He regularly covers rural issues.

Resources

Reading. Planning and Zoning for Animal Agriculture in Minnesota: A Handbook for Local Government was prepared for the Minnesota Department of Agriculture by James Duncan and Associates in association with Iowa State University's Department of Community and Regional Planning. The writers were Eric Damian Kelly, AICP, Kirk Bishop, and Stuart Huntington, AICP. For a copy, contact Becky Balk at 612-215-0369.

Contacts. Contact the Center for Rural Affairs in Walthill, Nebraska, by phone at 402-846-5428, or e-mail: info@cfra.org. Its web address is www.cfra.org. The National Pork Producers Council's website address is www.nppc.org.

November 1998