It's Farmers Who Don't Like CAFOs

by Natasha Chart

categories: Community Development, Corporate Kneebiters, Health, Livestock

Published June 04, 2009 @ 01:57PM PT

With a hat tip to FarmAid on Twitter, this Columbia Daily Tribune article busts the myth that it's mainly urban transplants that complain about confinement operations:

You know all of those claims by proponents of agribusinesses about how “urban move-ins” are filing the lawsuits against concentrated animal feeding operations because they aren’t accustomed to smelling fresh country air?

It is all made up, a total fabrication, stemming from the fertile imaginations of public relations people in the employ of agribusinesses such as Smithfield/Premium Standard Farms, Tyson, Seaboard and MOARK/Land O’ Lakes.

The lawsuits are being filed — and won — by longtime rural residents, most of them farmers[, ...] those who have lived in the area for a long, long time and know the country air isn’t supposed to smell like thousands of hogs or millions of chickens. ...

What a surprise. Corporate employees who lie for a living convincing the public that the only objections to their extremely unsanitary factory farming practices are transplants who don't like farmers.

How unsanitary?

Regular readers will remember that one of the current H1N1 swine flu virus' publicly identified ancestors came from a factory hog farm in North Carolina in 1998, "where it spread and mutated at an alarming rate. Experts warned then that a pocket of the virus would someday evolve to infect humans, perhaps setting off a global pandemic."

Success!

The World Health Organization is moving closer to classing the current H1N1 outbreak as a pandemic, with the virus circulating in all 50 states of the US and 63 other countries.

Meanwhile, Tom Philpott illustrates the likelihood that no links have been found between this current line of virus and a current factory farming operation because no one is looking, even if those pesky Europeans are demanding further investigation of a possible link:

... Meanwhile, no one with authority seems to be investigating obvious possible links with industrial-scale hog farming. As I reported a while back, the only scientists swarming around La Gloria, Mexico—where the flu evidently broke out in the shadow of massive Smithfield hog operations—are from the biotech industry, not the World Health Organization. And they’re training their testtubes on backyard hog farms, not Smithfield’s huge confinement facilities! ...

And if you don't find any evidence that factory farming is, right now, right this minute, responsible for dozens of deaths and thousands of illnesses in an evolving global pandemic, and if every resident of every rural community doesn't regard CAFOs as an absolute evil, all must be well.

All must, indeed, be perfectly safe and hunky dory. Says so on the label.

(Aerial photography of a typical confinement hog farm with attendant lagoons of pig manure courtesy of friendsoffamilyfarmers on Flickr.)