Today I wanted to write about the transparently psychotic Trump. His revenge-filled speech at the Department of Justice last Friday really set me off. But finally, this was a fool’s errand because my blog readers already know most of the evidence. Just repeating this does nothing to keep us from cowering to a wannabe dictator. There is so much more behind the Trump phenomenon.
As a country we often don’t realize what we have bought into. One of these things is corporatism. I just got a long email from friend John Velie in Minnesota describing one sickening aspect of rural farming. His take is an eye-opener. God save our pigs.
The book is: Dodge County, Inc. Big Ag and the Undoing of Rural America by Sonja Trom Eayrs. The author grew up on an actual family farm near a tiny Minnesota town called Blooming Prairie. Up through her twenties into the ‘90s the town was prosperous with multiple grocery stores, hardware stores, banks, bars, restaurants, a movie theater. I know the town well. I drive through it sometimes on my way to the Driftless Area, that intersection of MN, WI, IA along the Mississippi that is so grand and gorgeous. For some reason, the Ice Age glaciers spared this area, leaving it un-flattened, hilly and twisty with rivers. I wish I could show it to you.
Blooming Prairie doesn’t share in that glory. It’s now a dried up dumpy place with nothing going on. The book is the author’s lived experience as to how her town died. It’s the story of how the pork processing giants (Hormel, JBS, etc.) convinced family farmers to give up on farming and become CAFO owners. A CAFO (concentrated animal feeding operation) is a pig birthing and pig weight gaining facility. You see CAFO buildings all over Minnesota and Iowa. They are big long metal buildings where the animals are kept. Actually, you smell them before you see them. But get this: The “farmers” don’t own the pigs inside those buildings! The farmers don’t make a dime when those fattened pigs are sold off for slaughter, not a dime.
The pigs are owned by a group of middleman companies known as integrators. The integrators loan money to farm land owners to build the CAFO. Then they pay the farm landowner rent on the CAFO. At the outset it seems like a good deal. You’re gonna give me a low-interest loan AND pay me guaranteed rent? In reality, it’s a sucker’s deal. Why? Because the land owners are on the hook for managing the operation and for the high costs of dealing with the pig shit. The result: Farmers slowly grow broke, they sell off their land to huge absentee landowners (who hire facility managers on the cheap), and the farm towns dry up and disappear. It’s depressing as hell.
Not only are these little towns disappearing, but the people still living in them are too frightened to speak out against this madness. Those low profit CAFO building rental contracts are often the only income they have. They don’t want to upset the integrators with demands for better contracts, otherwise they’ll have to sell off their land that much sooner. So why don’t the farmers just bypass the integrators, raise their own hogs and sell them to the big pork processors? Two reasons. First, building a CAFO requires a huge initial capital investment, money the small farmer can’t get access to. Second, the pork processors won’t buy the small farmer’s pigs. Why? Because the small farmer shows up with too few pigs. The big pig processors want hundreds of animals to show up each day for processing. It’s more efficient. They’re not interested in a truck filled with ten.
The only way out is environmental laws that outlaw giant pig growing operations. Instead of allowing operations with thousands of pigs and oceans of pig shit lagoons, only allow pig raising in a spread out low impact manner (like the way the author’s family used to do). That’s the battle that’s happening right now. We’ll see how it unfolds.
JohnG, thanks for sharing. JohnV, really good piece about something most of us know nothing about.