MOVotes Conservation

CAFO Background Paper
Resources  Factory Farm Limits & Sustainable Agriculture

MVC Position on CAFOs

Background
Missouri Votes Conservation supports the right of local communities to regulate large-scale factory farms.  CAFOs (Confined Animal Feeding Operations) are large-scale animal feeding operations that have significant negative environmental and public health consequences, largely as a result of poor waste disposal practices.

In more traditional, smaller-scale forms of agriculture, the size of a farm -- even a livestock farm – was limited by the amount of land available to grow crops. The crops fed the livestock, and the livestock waste fertilized the crops.

In contrast, today’s CAFOs are usually not dependent on land to grow food crops for livestock, since the animal feed is routinely shipped in from outside sources. That’s fortunate, since a “normal-sized” CAFO might have 4,000 hogs, producing roughly the same volume of waste as a city of 10,000 people. (A typical hog produces 2.5 times the amount of waste as a human.) This waste is typically collected in large man-made lagoons, where anaerobic (oxygen-free) digestion is used to break down harmful pathogens in the waste. The degraded waste is usually applied to local farmland as fertilizer.

There are (at least) two environmental problems with this waste-disposal process:    

1. The potential for spills from the lagoons, which occurs regularly.
   
2. The application of the waste to area fields often results in the soil becoming saturated with chemicals such as phosphorus, nitrate and ammonia. Rainfall causes these chemicals to leech out of the soil and to seep into the underground water table, contaminating surrounding water sources.

In more personal terms, residents living near CAFOs have two common complaints about these large-scale farms:    

1. Neighbors worry about health issues involving water quality. The runoff from the manure produced by CAFOs has been shown to contribute to high levels of contaminants downstream.
2. Second, neighbors have long complained about odor emanating from these facilities, and recent advances in air quality monitoring are starting to back up these residents’ suspicions. Poor air quality in the vicinity of CAFOs has been linked to health concerns like upper respiratory disease. As a result, there is increasing evidence that resale values of neighboring properties fall considerably when CAFOs arrive in a community.

Public Policy Observations

1. Agriculture is exempt from most air- and water-quality standards and regulations that govern manufacturing and other heavy industry. This might have made sense 50 years ago when farms were owned and operated by local farmers using practices that were less intensive (and thus less harmful to neighbors.) As the agricultural industry has evolved, though, the regulatory environment in which the industry operates has not kept pace.
   
2. The corporate environment in which CAFOs operate is complicated. Often, a local farmer owns the land, and maybe the actual animal-holding facility, but a parent company owns the actual animals which are raised at the facility. This ownership structure shields the large corporations (e.g. Premium Standard Farms, Cargill, etc.) from liability in the event of a spill, and creates political cover for them in the form of the “small farmers” with whom they are contracting. Furthermore (although this is debated among economists), there is some suspicion that the vertical integration of the industry, and the long-term nature of the contracts between the corporate parents and the local CAFO operators, accounts for many of the “efficiencies” of the industry. That is to say, the trend toward large-scale farming is not necessarily driven by increasing efficiency in production, but rather by the profits accruing to anti-competitive actors and activities.
3. These anti-competitive activities are feasible because of the political power of the agricultural community, and in particular, the power of the Farm Bureau. However, it is increasingly apparent that the Farm Bureau represents only the corporate wing of the agricultural community, and not the small farmers. In Missouri, we have witnessed the rise of organizations (the Farmers Union, the Missouri Rural Crisis Center) which share the expressed purpose of representing farmers who are not engaged in large-scale agricultural practices. 
4. There are no meaningful national or Missouri-wide regulations of CAFOs. The MO General Assembly, under both Republican and Democratic control, has refused to pass any meaningful legislation that has been proposed in recent years. This has been a major victory for agribusiness interests.
5. Because of the absence of any meaningful statewide regulations, the only recourse available to members of communities where factory farms have been proposed has been to pass local health ordinances. Twenty Missouri counties have passed such ordinances.
6. The 2007 CAFO fight was over a proposal (SB 364, sponsored by Sen. Chris Koster and backed by the MO Farm Bureau) that would have eliminated the ability of counties to pass local health ordinances. 
7. As an example of the level of opposition to CAFOs in rural communities, note that freshman Senator Wes Shoemyer and freshman Representatives Tom Shively and Rebecca McClanahan -- all three from northern and northeastern Missouri -- all won their seats based at least in part on their opposition to CAFOs.

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For more information, contact:
Missouri Rural Crisis Center
573-449-1336

Socially Responsible Agricultural Project 
660-947-3873

Missouri Votes Conservation
314-725-9494

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