Indiana CAFO Watch Conference held Saturday

By Robyn Rogers

NT Managing Editor

newstimes@comcast.net

The corporate agriculture movement is not sustainable and not good for rural communities, according to a bevy of speakers at the Indiana CAFO Watch Conference held this weekend at Lake Placid Conference Center.

One speaker after another recounted their experiences with Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations. Speakers from Missouri, Iowa, Illinois and Arkansas shared insiders' perspectives on the fight against corporate agriculture and outsider's points of view on where Indiana stands in the mix.

Several local people attended the conference, including CAFO remonstrator Elizabeth Thomas and County Commissioner Harry Pearson, who is a former state president of Farm Bureau. Farm Bureau and CAFO opponents have frequently been at odds.

Pearson said he found much of the talk at the conference "intriguing" but added there was quite a bit of misleading information, especially in regards to "nutrient management" and manure waste handling. He also questioned the absence of any presenters from Purdue University.

"But there's a lot to be learned," Pearson said.

Over the past 20 years there are fewer and fewer hog farms, while the average number of hogs per farm has increased substantially. Most production occurs under contracts with processors such as Cargill. Under those arrangements, processors supply feed, feeder pigs, and veterinary services to growers who receive a fee for providing the capital, utilities, and labor used to grow the hogs to market weight. Production contracts encourage individual producers to specialize in a single phase of production rather than combining all phases on one hog farm, like in the traditional farrow-to-finish approach.

The past 15 years have also seen substantial geographical movement of production into states outside of the Corn Belt, especially North Carolina, Oklahoma, and Utah. Today, because of abundant water and lax oversight and enforcement, more CAFOs are set to come to Indiana, according to Ken Midkiff, former director of the Sierra Club's Clean Water Campaign and author of "The Meat You Eat." (St. Martin's Press, 2004)

"If you let them in you're dealing with dinosaurs," said Chris Petersen, a hog farmer from Iowa. Petersen raises "sustainable" Berkshire hogs and produces about 700 pigs a year, all sold individually or through niche markets.

"I've farmed fulltime 37 years. I got involved in this 12-15 years ago because I seen the handwriting on the wall," Petersen said at a non-traditional press conference before the full conference began. The press conference was non-traditional because only Community Media, Inc. representatives were present as the roundtable of speakers gave capsules of their conference presentations. He spoke of the good times for hog farmers in the 1970s and '80s, when each hog made the farmer $30-60. Now that margin is $10, Petersen said.

"We had open farm markets. Everybody knew pigs were mortgage lifters. But now corporate America has taken notice with contract growing. They said 'Let's use the farmer to make money.' Basically, (contract hog farmers) are captured by the industry," Petersen said.

In the contract system, the farmer sells under contract to a large company and those are becoming fewer and fewer. Under contract, the farmer has to take has to take the contract price. Petersen likened contract hog farming to a Wal-Mart job on the farm, only the farmer has to own the building and shoulder the liability.

"In Iowa, we've lost 75,000 independent hog producers over the last 15-20 years," said Petersen, who is president of the Iowa Farmer's Union. "The fat cats are getting fatter and the farmers are being farmed. It's not sustainable."

Dr. William Weida later told the full conference of more than 150 attendees, "You in this state have been a topic of conversation across the nation, the way you've come together. Indiana is ground zero for what's going on.

"You have some unfortunate assets. You have a lot of water, and people are moving out of the Southwest looking for abundant water.

"You have another quasi-asset, a governor who deals in ignorance."

Weida was speaking of Gov. Mitch Daniels' 2006 proposal to double hog production in Indiana. Weida and Petersen agreed a better strategy for economic development would be to set a goal of doubling the number of producers.

CAFOs have only been around a generation, according to Weida.

"It's an attempt to get economies of scale but yet we know you cannot get economies of scale in biological processes. There's no such thing as an economy of scale in this. The only way you can try to do it is with a liquid manure system," he said.

Weida said CAFOs internalize profits and externalize costs. He cited a Ball State University study that said CAFOs are not compatible with human occupation around them. The report that came out last year was followed, he said, by a "period of massive and, I might add, very amusing backpedaling."

In academic and research circles, he said, "One's job is based on not saying to people what other people don't want to hear."

Weida, an economist, said that for hogs, economies of scale disappear around 2,500 to 3,000 head. For dairy, farmers can achieve economies of scale up to about 600 head.

"CAFOs are not a capitalistic situation. They are much closer to a socialized version of ag in terms of government support and in terms of government regulation," Weida said.

He said traditional farmers are set up to weather all kinds of change. They have their own pasture, they know people they can call, they are very frugal, and they are very adaptable, he said. With large factory-type farming, you get higher fixed costs and lower variable costs like labor and fuel.

"But, of course, you still gotta feed things, right? Meaningful reductions in cost for the industrial famrer can only be realized if they increase the number of animals. Smithfield was dumping hogs as fast as they could last week. We have a symbiotic system.

"As the price of animals goes down, the conventional farmer continues to give up animals and industrial operators pick them up. As they keep adding animals, that continues to drive prices down.

"This system is not stable. If we had doubt, we have no more doubt after the last six months. Smithfield's profits dropped 98 percent," Weida said.

Terry Spence, a farmer who spoke animatedly on Manure Nutrients and Application, said rural communities have become so abused they're inclined to just sit and take it.

"Every individual on this planet has the right to protect his health. We are on the right page and we are going to dissolve this corporate welfare system," he said.

He drew a partial standing ovation with his closing remarks. "It's up to you folks because no one else is going to do it for you," he said.

Later this week the News Times will look at the input from the final three presenters, Karen Hudson, John Ikerd and Jay P. Graham. Hudson, a fifth-generation farmer, is president of Families Against Rural Messes. Ikerd is professor emeritus of agricultural economics at the University of Missouri-Columbia College of Agriculture, and Graham is a research fellow for the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health and a consultant to the Pew Commission on Industrial Farm Animal Production, which recently published "Putting Meat on the Table: Industrial Farm Animal Production in America."