BY BILL KALMAN
DES MOINES, Iowa - The volatile issue of hog waste
lagoons hit the front pages here as spills polluted rivers
and streams across Iowa recently.
In mid-July some 1.5 million gallons of hog manure leaked out of a storage lagoon near Blairsburg, killing thousands of fish along a 30-mile stretch of the Iowa River. Five days later, the state Department of Natural Resources (DNR) had not yet notified people in the area of the spill.
Two spills in northeast Iowa killed nearly 40,000 fish a week earlier. Responding to criticism, DNR deputy director Don Paulin said, "We're not supposed to be a watchdog."
Large-scale factory hog production has been steadily expanding throughout the Midwest. Major U.S. pork producers are developing these confinement facilities, which use assembly-line techniques to breed hogs, to drive down the costs of pork raising, slaughtering, and processing and be more competitive on the world market. These operations often have adverse effects on the air, water, and land, as well as on human health.
"It's high time we demand environmental, economic, and social justice," said hog farmer Larry Ginter, who is active in Iowa Citizens for Community Improvement (ICCI), at a well- attended press conference here June 29.
Iowa farmers and other rural residents are waging a fight against the rapid expansion of confinement operations, which threaten many small farmers with financial ruin.
A Rural Protection Committee was formed in Cass Township to protest plans for a 3,300-head hog confinement facility there. In Spirit Lake, close to the Minnesota border, a petition to build a large-scale hog feed lot was withdrawn after opposition on both sides of the state line.
In Merrill, Iowa, a town meeting was called to protest plans for a 5,000-head facility to be built by Supersweet Feeds.
Austin DeCoster, a capitalist farmer from Maine, has proposed a waste storage lagoon measuring 650 foot by 500 foot by 25 feet deep that could hold 1.5 years' worth of hog manure. DeCoster was fined $8,500 by the Iowa Department of Natural Resources in 1994 for four environmental violations.
In April, another DeCoster facility near Dows, Iowa, spilled untreated waste products into the Iowa River.
As a result of the negative publicity generated by manure spills, the National Pork Producers Council (NPPC) organized a special two-day seminar in Washington, D.C., for more than two dozen of the country's largest hog producers.
"We are very concerned that many key legislators believe living next to a hog farm is bad," NPPC executive vice president Larry Graham said, explaining the purpose of the meeting. "We've retained a heavyweight media consulting firm to work with us in trying to change this perception."
Bill Kalman is a member of United Transportation Union Local 867 in Des Moines, Iowa.