By Lena Beck
The thing that Kendra Kimbirauskas hadn't expected were the trucks.
As a small farmer who formerly worked with communities to resist large corporate farms, she knew a lot about how industrial chicken operations could affect a community. She knew about the putrid smell of animal waste, she knew it wasn't safe to drink the local water. But, in April of 2023, as she visited a midwestern farmer whose home was surrounded by dozens of industrial chicken barns producing millions of chickens, it was the sight of the trucks hurtling down the narrow roads, one after the other, that was particularly jarring.
"If you can picture a dusty dirt road with semis barreling down, the amount of dust and dirt and God knows whatever else that comes off these trucks would literally blow into the front yard," says Kimbirauskas. "Thinking about putting your clothes on the line, or having your windows open, that's no longer an option because of these trucks."
Carrying feed, new birds, and finished flocks, these trucks served as a near-constant reminder of the other things these operations bring with them-smells that make it hard to stand outside, air pollution you can feel burning your throat, not being able to trust the water coming out of your tap-the list goes on.
Just three years earlier, Kimbirauskas had gotten wind that Foster Farms was planning to move into her own home of Linn County, Oregon and decided to fight back. After a bit of digging, what she found was staggering: Foster Farms was planning three sites in the county to build concentrated animal feeding operations (CAFOs), which would collectively raise 13 million chickens per year. This visit provided Kimbirauskas with a glimpse into what she was fighting against in her own home community.
"For me that was such an affirmation that [our] community is 100 percent going to be the target of chicken expansion," says Kimbirauskas. "It really made me dig in and stand in my own power and agency of knowing that this is not something that would be good and beneficial for Linn County."
CAFOs are defined by the EPA as intensive feeding operations where many animals are confined and fed for at least 45 days per year-though this is just a minimum-and where the waste from those animals poses a pollution threat to surface water.
There are small, medium and large CAFOs, with the largest of these-housing thousands to tens of thousands of animals-embodying the truest definition of a "factory farm." Many of the issues can be boiled down to the sheer concentration of manure they produce.
As of 2022, there were more than 21,000 large CAFOs in the US. One estimate, informed by USDA data, suggests that 99 percent of livestock grown in the US is raised in a CAFO. Some states have particularly dense concentrations, such as Iowa, North Carolina, and Nebraska. This industry presents itself as a way to produce a lot of food while keeping costs down. But any cost saved by the consumer is a cost borne by the CAFOs' neighboring communities, the environment, local economies, and even the contracted farmers themselves.
Large CAFOs cause myriad problems that are currently being experienced by communities across the country. These issues include environmental pollution, drinking water poisoning, air pollution, and plummeting property values. In drought-ridden states such as New Mexico, CAFOs add insult to injury by contaminating the water and using more water than the dwindling aquifers can handle. In Winona County, Minnesota, more than 1,300 people can't drink their water because of nitrate pollution.
There have been many instances of serious illnesses believed to be linked to living close to CAFOs, such as cancer and miscarriages, and respiratory issues such as asthma and sleep apnea are prolific in CAFO-adjacent communities. In North Carolina, living near a large CAFO has been associated with increased blood pressure. In Iowa, a study found that children raised on swine farms had increased odds of developing asthma.
Large CAFOs are often built in communities of color. This frequency with which polluting industries are built in these communities is evidence of ongoing environmental injustice.
While the industry often associates itself with the picturesque image of American farming, the fact is that industrial agriculture has created the immense consolidation of US farms, driving farmers all over the country out of business. CAFOs are often built in clusters near each other-when a CAFO is built, more will likely follow.
The factory farm industry is expanding all the time, but communities across the country have become advocates to stop this expansion-both at individual sites, and on a systemic level-in the hopes that, one day, no one has to pay the price of factory farming.
Foster Farms is coming to town
Linn County is tucked into the western part of Oregon and home to many family-run farms. But, in 2020, Foster Farms arrived in the county, planning to build CAFOs holding tens of thousands of birds at a time. Foster Farms is a poultry company that sells chicken and chicken products in chain grocery stores across the country.
In Linn County, there was no public announcement of Foster Farms' arrival.
"One of the stories that we hear time and again is people didn't realize or don't realize what's going on until it's too late," says Kimbirauskas. "That is a tactic of the industry because nobody wants to live next to one of these things. So, they're going to be trying to get in as quietly as possible."
It started in 2020, when a woman working at a local feed store noticed a customer come in with Foster Farms company branding on his coat. He was a land scout, and he was in the area to try and determine suitable land for chicken operations.
She asked him some specific questions about the locations they were considering. One, she learned, was right next to her house. The land scout told her they planned to put up a buffer between the site and one of the bigger houses in the area, so they wouldn't get complaints. But, she knew, there was also a smaller house on that road-her house. Would that house get a buffer?
Well, he told her, they don't have enough money to do anything about it.
Foster Farms' behavior aligns with larger trends-data shows that CAFOs are disproportionately built in low-income areas.
After this upsetting conversation, the woman reached out to Kimbirauskas. Kimbirauskas is a bit of an anomaly when it comes to fighting CAFOs, because she's seen similar situations play out all over the country. Growing up in Michigan, the rapid consolidation of dairy farms due to industrialized agriculture led her family to the very difficult decision to sell their dairy. Today, Kimbirauskas is the Senior Director of Agriculture and Food Systems at the State Innovation Exchange (SiX). Before that, as chief executive officer of the Socially Responsible Agriculture Project (SRAP), she had worked with communities across the country who were dealing with health and environmental issues as a result of living next to CAFOs.
Kimbirauskas and other concerned members of the community found that there was no information available at the state level about what was going on, so the first thing Kimbirauskas began doing was submitting public records requests.
"Through those public records requests, we found that there was not two but three sites that were being proposed, which would have totaled roughly 13 million chickens within a 10-mile radius, and that was per year," says Kimbirauskas.
Something had to be done.
Site fights
The battle against factory farms happens at multiple scales. Some of the big-picture advocacy happens at the state and federal level, where advocates are trying to make systemic changes. Other battles happen directly over individual proposed or existing CAFOs-these are known as "site fights."
Site fights aren't easy to win. But it is possible. Barb Kalbach, president of the board of Iowa Citizens for Community Improvement (CCI), has experienced it firsthand. In 2002, Kalbach lived on a small farm in Adair County, Iowa-a rural community that today has a population of less than 8,000. She heard through the grapevine that just 1,970 feet up the road from her property, a massive hog CAFO was being proposed. She called a realtor she knew who lived nearby who confirmed it. The operation would consist of 10 buildings holding 7,200 sows, producing 10 million gallons of liquid manure every year. Kalbach's farm had always been surrounded by other farms. But no regular farm produces that much manure.
Kalbach called the Iowa CCI, which had been fighting social justice issues affecting Iowans since the 1970s.
"I called the office. That was on a Friday, and they sent out on Sunday an organizer. And in that two-day period, I called all the neighbors, anybody I can think of in our community that probably wouldn't like it very well, this confinement, and we all met over at our little local country church."
When organizing against a CAFO, simply not wanting one near you isn't a good enough reason to keep one out. CCI didn't do the work for them, says Kalbach, but advised them on things they could do, such as looking for evidence in their plans that the facility wouldn't be able to meet the environmental regulation requirements. Proof of this kind is easier said than found.
Kalbach and her neighbors went to commissioner meetings, did research, wrote letters to the editor of the local newspaper, created petitions and sought signatures. The actual turning point came to Kalbach as a phone call in the early hours of the day.
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