BY NORTON SANDLER
DES MOINES, Iowa - Two hundred fifty farmers and their supporters crowded into the rotunda of the Iowa state capitol here for a protest rally January 9. Carrying signs and wearing stickers that said "Family farms yes, factory farms no," they were protesting the rapid spread of large- scale hog confinement operations across the state.
The rally took place minutes after Iowa governor Terry Branstad delivered his "Condition of the State" speech opening the current session of the state legislature.
The action was sponsored by Iowa Citizens for Community Improvement, PraireFire Rural Action, and the Iowa Farm Unity Coalition. A sprinkling of trade unionists joined the protest, including three rubber workers who are members of the United Steelworkers of America Local 310.
The owners of hog-confinement operations seek to produce hogs under factory-like conditions where they regulate the genetics and the feeding of the animals to achieve uniform weight and quality. This is what the packinghouse bosses are pushing for. It is difficult for small producers to compete against the factory-farm owners and many working farmers are throwing in the towel as far as hog production is concerned.
These large operations also build lagoons to store tens of thousands of gallons of waste produced by the hogs. The odor from the confinement operations can be smelled for miles by those downwind of them.
In May 1995, the Iowa legislature passed a bill giving the state Department of Natural Resources, as opposed to local governments, control over licensing and approving the waste plans for confinement operations. This same law also made it difficult for working farmers and other local residents to go to court to stop the spread of these hog confinement operations.
Working farmers across the state have intensified their protests against the confinement operations since the passage of that bill.
There have also been several lagoon spills in Iowa over the last six months spewing voluminous amounts of manure into rivers and streams and killing tens of thousands of fish. On Dec. 26, 1995, a cracked sewage pipe at the giant operation of Premium Standard Farms (PSF), just below the Iowa border in Missouri, leaked some 40,000 gallons of liquefied hog manure over the frozen ground into Blackbird Creek. There were six previous spills attributed to PSF in 1995 alone.
The protesters at the state capitol were demanding new legislation that again gives counties the power to regulate the growth of hog confinements. They also demanded repeal of the law prohibiting lawsuits against the factory-farm owners, tight regulation of lagoon construction, and an investigation of the monopoly pricing policies on the purchase of livestock on the part of the handful of companies that control the meat-packing industry.
"When 10,000 gallons of manure spills into the watershed, it's time to stand up," said Jim Sullivan, a farmer from Park County at the capitol rally.
Matt Gehling, a Carroll County farmer added, "They [the confinements] are shell corporations, if they fail they can file bankruptcy and we'll be left to clean up the mess."
"This is a non-partisan issue," Scott County farmer Dean Wiesenberg stated. He decried the fact that farmers are being forced off the land and compelled to "join an unstable job market where they are told they are overqualified, that is, too old to work."
Referring to Branstad's speech, which had concluded a few minutes earlier, Marshall County farmer Larry Ginter told the crowd, "You [Branstad] want to pass a death penalty bill, what about the death of family farms? You want to get tough on crime, but what about the corporate criminals?"
After the rally, several dozen participants crowded into the anteroom of the governor's office to request that Branstad meet with the group sometime in the next three weeks.
The rally received considerable media coverage, with camera crews from across the state filming the event.