There's a certain air to Byrl and Marjory Hardy's backyard
near Perryton, Texas, and it isn't the smell of roses. It's
the fragrance of pig manure stored in nearby lagoons at the
confinement houses of Texas Farm Inc., owned by Nippon Meat
Packers of Tokyo, Japan.
Hog integrators and some community members, mostly those
living several miles away in town, say it's the smell of
money. But to the Hardys and many of their neighbors, it
just smells like you-know-what.
"We try to stay inside when it's real strong," says Byrl, a
wheat grower and retired equipment dealer. "Those lagoons
put out gas that makes my wife sick."
The Hardys live in the northern reaches of the Texas
panhandle, where four corporations and their contractors
either have already built or have permission from the state
to build giant confinement houses with a combined capacity
of millions of pigs. Just across the state line, the area
around Guymon, Okla., is already full of these types of
facilities, as are several other rural spots in the U.S.
These confined animal feeding operations (CAFOs) have often
torn communities apart.
To be heard by state lawmakers and to learn what's next for
the neighborhood, the Hardys have joined Active Citizens
Concerned Over Resource Development, a group of residents
who have organized to bring attention to the problems caused
by CAFOs.
ACCORD, which has branches in Perryton and in Pampa, Texas,
is made up of about 150 concerned citizens-including
longtime area farmers and ranchers-who can't stand the smell
and are worried about groundwater contamination. There are
several similar groups in the region and around the U.S.
"We're small compared with the chambers of commerce and
economic development groups that welcome the CAFOs," says
Donnie Dendy, who farms at Waka and is one of the founders
of ACCORD.
Even people who live some distance from these facilities
have concerns about them. "Smell doesn't generally affect
people in town," notes Louis Haydon, a retired chiropractor
who lives in Pampa. "There's a proposed site 11 miles east
of us. People have beautiful homes out there, and all of a
sudden their value is dropping."
CAFOs may indeed hurt rural home values, say appraisers. As
for farmland, the influence may be positive or
negative-often positive at first when a CAFOis buying, then
negative later when it's the only game in town.
But the smell is just one problem that concerns residents;
many are worried about water contamination that could be
caused by CAFOs. In fact, two notable cases have occurred in
Oklahoma.
In one instance, monitor wells showed alarmingly high levels
of contaminated water near a hog facility in Logan County,
north of Oklahoma City, in 2001. The CAFO was shut down, and
its owners have been cooperating for two years with the EPA
and the Oklahoma Department of Agriculture, Food and
Forestry to clean it up.
"The facility was 10 years old, and the lagoon's clay liner
just failed at some point," says Teena Gunter, an attorney
in the water-quality division with the state ag
department.
The other case occurred in Kingfisher County, where the EPA
recently discovered nitrates in drinking water around five
sites. "Monitor wells were showing incredible hits," says
Gunter.
Seaboard had purchased these and other units in the area
from Pig Improvement Co., which built them around 1994. As a
result of this incident, the EPA is forcing Seaboard to
provide drinking water to nearby residents.
ACCORD and other groups, including the Panhandle Alliance,
have been active in Austin, Texas, and have gotten
legislators to close a loophole here and there. But they
want more local control. Hog CAFO officials say the
remoteness of the panhandle, specifically its distance from
the state capital, is one reason for building there.
Right across the state line, in the Oklahoma panhandle,
CAFOs began moving in several years earlier. This riled the
neighbors and led to more restrictive legislation. The Safe
Oklahoma Resource Development group worked to bring about
some of those restrictions.
The efforts of concerned citizens in this organization and
of other residents resulted in a state moratorium on new hog
CAFOs for awhile. In addition, Oklahoma has developed much
stricter rules for these facilities.
"SORD was the first to organize, write letters to
legislators, get involved," says Gunter. "Some days they had
rallies of close to 1,000 people at the Capitol. They were
the catalyst. Later, groups like the Sierra Club became
involved."
But movements such as these haven't been totally successful.
"Odor is the issue that gets people excited first," Gunter
notes. "We enacted stricter rules for odor abatement two
years ago, but then the (Oklahoma) Pork Council sued us and
had them struck down."
Some states have a hearing process for landowners if they
own property within certain distances of proposed sites. Not
true for Texas, where "permit by rule" grants permits to
CAFOs that meet certain qualifications.
This spring, Iowa enacted a new "matrix law" that lets
counties rate proposed CAFOs on how they'll affect the
neighbors before they're given the go-ahead.
"Large producers say they'll have to look harder to find
their sites," says John Lawrence, Iowa State University
livestock economist. "But some pro-livestock areas can say,
'We want the livestock, and they've got the minimums.' "
Public outcry had plenty to do with the matrix law, although
Kurt Kelsey believes the law needs to be much tougher. His
group, the Iowa Citizens for Community Improvement, and
other residents have had some success in their stand against
CAFOs.
"Here in Iowa Falls, we were able to stop a packing plant
from coming in four years ago," says this farmer and state
vice president of the group. "They would have hurt the
environment and overwhelmed our town."
Another chapter of the ICCI in Adair stopped a
several-thousand-head farrowing facility from being
built.
"Stand up, speak out, fight back," Kelsey says. "If you
don't, corporate greed will run over you."
Across the U.S. such outcry is beginning to lead to a
tightening of environmental rules. In fact, North Carolina
has extended a moratorium on new CAFO construction,
following public protest over hog lagoons overflowing into
rivers on the Coastal Plain during storms.
Some Texas locals say stricter environmental standards
elsewhere have led to the increase of megafarms in the Lone
Star State. But reps for those companies point out that
they're being recruited and given incentives to come by
rural towns that don't have many options left.
Indeed, town merchants in many states are happy to have the
extra commerce. Even school officials and some water
districts speak well for them. And grain markets may
improve. But it's a mixed blessing.
"Certainly this issue divides churches, families and nearly
every other aspect of a community," says Jim Horne, who
heads the Kerr Center for Sustainable Agriculture in Poteau,
Okla. His organization studied how CAFOs were affecting
Guymon a few years ago.
"We think Guymon mortgaged its future to the hog industry,"
says Horne. "This limits the kind of development that will
occur there in the future."
"Go from fresh air to this, and you can smell how things
have changed," says Hardy, the Perryton, Texas, farmer. "We
don't like the air here, but if they contaminate the water,
we're gone."