The Farm as Natural Habitat 203corn and soybeans. Each year an increasing number of poultry and hogs raised in
the Corn Belt are not dispersed across the countryside on independent farms but
are instead concentrated in large operations. Hundreds of thousands of chickens
and tens of thousands of hogs are confined in buildings, creating huge quantities
of manure that pose serious environmental risks to ground and surface water.
Hydrogen sulfide fumes in the stench emitted from the operations have sickened
neighbours. People do not want to live close to these hog factories or visit relatives
close to hog factories. The once rich prairies that became bucolic communities are
now industrial zones, suitable for ‘neither man nor beast’.
Dairy farmers also feed the bounteous harvest of the Corn Belt to cattle con-
fined in barns and milked three times a day. Dairy operations with 1000 to 2000
cows are replacing traditional family-sized farms with 100 or fewer cows. They
manage large quantities of manure the same way as hog factories do and present
the same risks to water quality. Travellers through Wisconsin’s wooded hill lands
graced with small dairy farms in the valleys may be unaware of how this landscape
will change if consolidation continues in the dairy industry and four dairy farmers
go out of business each day in the state as they did between 1992 and 1997 (USDA,
1997). Where large-scale dairies replace small ones, the scenes of black-and-white
cows grazing on green pastures and moving in line to and from red barns are being
replaced by fields of corn and soybeans with nary a cow in sight.
Factory livestock operations have popped up like mushrooms across the entire
Midwest and Great Plains. They have also grown rapidly in southern states and are
emerging everywhere state laws are weak and local communities naively believe the
industry’s forecasts for economic development. California led the way with its
1000 cow dairies and became the leading milk producer in the country; as a result,
departments of agriculture in traditional dairy states are promoting California-style
dairying. Agricultural economists encourage farmers to expand their operations to be
efficient and convince them that all dairy cows and pigs, like poultry, are going to be
raised in large-scale confinement operations in the future. It is inevitable.
This mantra of ‘it’s inevitable’ is happily chanted by the corporate processors
of pork that benefit from large supplies of cheap hogs, and, sadly, this mantra is
repeated by many farmers. Some of them borrowed heavily to expand and build
hog confinement buildings, and when pork prices plunged to an historic low in
the 1990s, they went bankrupt. The huge packing plants that encouraged indus-
trial production prospered and consolidated into even larger corporations through
mergers (Heffernan, 1999).
We are seeing rural landscapes all across the US changing for the worse because
farmers believe that further industrialization in livestock agriculture is inevitable
and that they must ‘get big or get out’. Some farmers incur staggering debt to
increase the size of their operations, some form family corporations to share the
costs of expansion, others invest in new buildings and technology to become con-
tract producers for corporations, and some just leave farming and sell out to neigh-
bours who want to expand. A house in the country isn’t so romantic any more,
because it might very well be within odour range of one of these hog expansions.