Heather Williams
Department of Politics, Pomona College
[email protected]

Draft only--Please do note cite without author’s permission

As many mayors and state senators saw it by the end of the 1980s, the principal crisis in rural America was population decline. While Sun Belt cities grew at an astounding pace, and governors from Massachusetts and California boasted new high-tech economies, vast swaths of the Midwest and rural South lost people year after year. Ten-year census figures for 1990 and 2000, for example, indicated that rural populations of the Great Plains states were aging as fast as retirement hubs in south Florida, and shrinking as fast as they had done in Dust Bowl years of the 1930s. With farms and traditional manufacturing offering little by way of income and a future, a new wave of young people had abandoned small towns and left aging communities limping toward obsolescence. Schools and hospitals closed, down towns died, and tax bases crashed. Many saw the rural America of the yeoman farmer as a sad but closed chapter of national history.

A solution to population decline, as many of the same officials saw it, was to face up to the end of an era of family farming and promote corporate investment in small towns. What ailing rural communities wanted from corporate America, however, and what they got were light years apart. "What we hoped for here in Sullivan County," remembers Missouri farmer Rolf Christen, "was something like Microsoft or Intel." What arrived, he notes with irony, was a little less glamorous and a lot dirtier. In 1993, Wall Street delivered corporate swine production to Christen’s neighborhood. With a slaughterhouse refurbished next door in Milan (pronounced MY-lun), serviced by massive complexes in the vicinity raising two million hogs a year, the Premium Standard Farms corporation promised jobs, revenue, and a reason for young people to stay in northern Missouri’s rolling hills. Not alone by any means, Sullivan County’s adventure with Big Pork was matched across the country in hundreds of other small towns from North Carolina to Utah, Idaho to Pennsylvania. With retail giants like Safeway and Walmart demanding lower cost suppliers and agribusiness giants like Smithfield Foods and Cargill vying for market share in a high-flying finance economy, livestock corporations raced to open new facilities of unprecedented size in a longer-running attempt to integrate production horizontally and vertically.¹

What corporations did not mention, however, was the cost of massive confined animal production and slaughter. In Sullivan County, Missouri, as in hundreds of rural counties across the country, concentrated and vertically-integrated swine production brought problems of unanticipated proportions. The "hog hotels," as people sometimes call them sarcastically, produce vast lakes of animal effluent and a literally sickening stench. Lakes around complexes collectively holding quantities of sewage the size produced by Cleveland’s or Detroit’s human population emit ammonia, methane, hydrogen sulfide, and bioaerosols, threatening the respiratory health of swine complex workers and residents downwind of the facilities.² Meanwhile, leakage of livestock sewage into neighbors’ wells and massive spills into surface waters threaten human populations with bacterial infections and destroy fish and wildlife along thousands of miles of streams and rivers.

Much as low-income urban communities or developing countries have been saddled with unwanted gifts of incinerators, refineries, toxic waste dumps, or dangerous assembly sectors, a great many rural communities have in the last decade and a half found themselves face to face with massive industrial livestock complexes. "Like a Third World country," notes Kansas farmer Jerold Hubbard, "[our officials] actually fought to get corporate swine production here."³ Viewed this way, rural communities have not been left behind in the global economy. Instead they are at its forefront. Similar to enterprise zones in Indonesia or Malaysia, or maquiladora blocs on the U.S.-Mexican border, rural communities offer corporations a tempting combination of low wage rates, favorable tax regimes, abundant land, preferential water and power schedules, and flexible regulatory environments.

Considering the limited options available to rural communities in an era of global outsourcing and fiscal retrenchment, it is worth examining why, how, and on what terms groups have opposed corporate livestock complexes or attempted to regulate them. Profit-enhancing measures recently undertaken by corporations in meat and dairy production have rested uneasily with members of the public expected to bear the costs externalized by industry through reduced incomes, tainted food, or polluted air and water. At various points, at least five different sectors, including labor, farmers, public health advocates, environmentalists, and animal rights groups, have attempted to call public attention to their particular grievances with the industry. Labor unions, for example, have denounced shocking injury rates in processing industries and have launched organizing drives in slaughterhouses. However, due to120 percent turnover rates and what is estimated to be an average of 40 percent undocumented workers, this has met with little success.⁴ At the same time, hog farmers have sought relief from industry expansion, calling on officials to enforce antitrust laws and on elected officials to legislate better price disclosure. Independent hog farmers in the 1990s also attempted to sever mandatory ties with the National Pork Producers’ Council who, they charged, colluded with large firms to eliminate family farms from markets.⁵ Alongside these campaigns, consumer and public health groups have lobbied public officials and regulatory agencies to tighten controls on packing houses. Critics argue that speedups on the assembly line and unskilled labor have increased incidence of food-borne pathogens such as fecal coliform. In addition, due to constant administration of antibiotics for growth purposes in livestock herds, researchers claim that new strains of pathogens such as E. Coli 0157, campylobacter, and salmonella display increasing antibiotic resistance.⁶ In this sector, physicians’ groups in particular have complained that such practices have reduced the effectiveness of antibiotic pharmaceuticals in the treatment of human disease.⁷ A fourth sector, environmentalists, is concerned with water quality and the impact of intensive livestock farming on wildlife habitat and rural drinking water. The Sierra Club, for example, currently charges that livestock runoff from factory farms has damaged over 35,000 miles of waterways in 22 states and has contaminated groundwater in 17 states.⁸ Finally, animal rights advocates have rallied vociferously against confinement technologies and routine cruelty in the transport and slaughter of animals.⁹

Increasingly in the late 1990s, groups from these sectors have sought means of pooling resources and presenting a coherent set of demands for reform of the swine industry. What is particularly notable about mobilization in the 1990s at both local and national levels is that it has included groups who previously worked separately or strongly at odds with one another, such as farmers’ groups and Washington D.C.-based environmental organizations. How and why certain groups mitigate long-standing differences over public policy and traditional party affiliation is worth examining because it suggests the circumstances under which broad-based coalitions opposing powerful corporate interests emerge, and what their collective efforts may or may not achieve.

In profiling political mobilization against the hog industry in three states -- Oklahoma, Kansas, and Missouri -- I make two arguments relevant to the scholarly conversation on social movements and democracy in an era of corporate globalization. First, I argue that campaigns challenging livestock corporations have measurably altered public attitudes toward these corporations and have also contributed to the formation of broad coalitions calling for reforms in the food system. While corporations have succeeded in rapidly supplanting a system of independent, small growers in livestock farming and eviscerating union power in the industry, they have inadvertently influenced many citizens’ perceptions of who their political allies and opponents are. Opening their doors in regions and states where a majority of voters self-identify as politically conservative, pro-business, and pro-agriculture, and generally opposed to federal regulation, swine corporations have often expanded so fast and carelessly as to make enemies of many of their erstwhile civic allies. Corporations’ rapid expansion, facilitated by a conspicuously close and moneyed relationship with elected officials and regulatory officers, has also frayed public confidence in agribusiness as well as local and state authorities. Stonewalled in legislative and regulatory offices, rural groups challenging swine corporations have gone beyond more routine forms of petition of state officials to use a combination of direct action, hard-knuckle lobbying of officials, and federal suits. Such endeavors, difficult if not impossible without the assistance of technical consultants, attorneys, expert witnesses, and progressive journalists, have prompted embattled residents of rural communities to work with groups they formerly held at arms’ length. Likewise, organizations with technical and legal resources but fewer contacts at the grass-roots level in rural areas, such as environmental and consumer groups, have altered what were once sweeping indictments of farmers as polluters and adopted more nuanced perspectives on the role of agriculturists in the conservation of natural resources.

My second argument pertains to the effectiveness of coalitions fighting corporate swine. I contend that despite raising public concern about the impact of factory farms on the environment and public health, grass-roots groups’ ability to regulate agribusiness remains severely constrained. Whereas the collaboration of groups across issues and the political spectrum has widened the scope of public awareness of the issue, and put unique pressures on lawmakers, a fragmented policy environment in agriculture has worked to the advantage of swine corporations. Utilizing flexible political networks of its own, as well as overwhelming financial and legal resources, the industry has successfully brought citizen groups to a virtual stalemate. As a result, campaigns have become local and fragmented over time. An overhaul of regulatory standards at the federal level -- once the hope of citizen groups as a means of controlling the industry and unifying local efforts -- appears unviable in the short to middle-term future. What appears in the end to determine the ability of groups to mobilize effectively and stop corporate swine expansion and/or achieve effective regulation of the industry has mostly to do with incidental differences in county-level powers (determined state by state) and grass-roots ability groups’ ability to raise the concern of urban and state government officials one by one in areas potentially threatened by waste streams. Paradoxically, the resources that scholars of social movement have paid most attention to in recent years -- groups’ connections to larger organizational networks or the national media -- appear to matter very little.

In the remaining article, I briefly discuss the political conditions that facilitated the rapid relocation and consolidation of pork production, and then profile the emergence of public opposition to the industry at local and national levels. Using evidence from similar anti-corporate campaigns three Great Plains states should serve to first to show how coalitions against corporate abuses may emerge in seemingly unlikely circumstances, but second, to illustrate my argument that scholarship on contentious politics lacks an adequate conceptual distinction between apparent and actual resources afforded social movements by coalition work. Whereas it is assumed that the size, breadth, and visibility of coalitions afford greater resources to grass-roots actors, this comparison demonstrates that these may be of negligible value in certain circumstances. In an era of optimism about the dissolution of space, virtual democracy, Teamsters-and-Turtles protests, or what Brecker et al deem "flexible networks drawing together people and practices from many marginal social spaces,"¹⁰ more sober realities set in. Even in an era of spacelessness, scholarship on social movements must still reckon with the state structures that determine the types of collective action people are likely to use at any given moment in time.

Understanding why people came to oppose swine complexes so vehemently and what that opposition has meant for corporations requires some analysis of how politics and markets have intersected in the meat production industry over time. Historically, the meat industry has been the target of periodical rounds of media coverage and reformist activism in response labor abuses, animal cruelty, and collusion in the marketplace.¹¹ In part, this has to do with the nature of what the industry does -- kill and butcher living beings on an assembly line. As Upton Sinclair wrote of in his novel of packinghouse life that set off one such round of public ire and government reaction, "there was a long line of hogs, with squeals and lifeblood ebbing away together; until at last each started again, and vanished with a splash into a huge vat of boiling water. ... It was like some horrible crime committed in a dungeon, all unseen and unheeded, buried out of sight and memory."¹² In this manner, even for those with no inclination toward vegetarianism, the industry may server to em-body the alienation and sterile cruelty of modern industrial production. From Sinclair onward, observers have never failed to be struck by the sublime efficiency of meat manufacture, in which truckloads of numbered animals -- muscle weight and bone meal calculable to the penny at every point of their lives -- are mechanically led to slaughter by underpaid migrant workers whose marginal cost per swing of the knife has similarly been determined. Though the killing floor may be awash in viscera, culverts and dumpsters around the factory full of dead animals, and trailers around the factory full of workers too sick to work at the plants anymore, the bloodless, cellophane-wrapped products on the grocery shelf bear no hint of their origin. Here, the obviously disposable nature of bodies paired with the constancy the killing machinery suggests a fictitious hygiene of the consumer product. The result for the industry, as Giddens might predict, has been a perennial oscillation between public disinterest and outrage over meat manufacture, between consent to and dissent from this version of modernity.¹³

The emergence of a new round of organized public opposition to the industry’s practices in the 1990s then surely did not surprise firms, though it may have vexed them in what industry insiders have always believed was an extraordinarily tough business. As Steve Bjerkle writes, "The [historical] difficulty of making a profit in the industry is ... hard to argue. The traditional rule of thumb ... provides a margin of 1 percent; meat processing ... yields 2 percent."¹⁴ As he and others also point out, firms relocated to remote areas in order to escape organized labor and public scrutiny in general. The fact that labor currently plays a marginal role in efforts to reform the food system, in fact, has much to do with battles lost in the 1980s. Packers shut their doors in older factory towns such as Des Moines, Waterloo, and Sioux City and opened the new pork complexes located in places like eastern North Carolina, northern Missouri, and the Oklahoma Panhandle in a largely successful effort to purge union labor from meat packing. As Michael Broadway noted of the industry in the mid-1990s, "The establishment of the low-cost competitors like IBP has led to a massive restructuring of beef and pork processing. Wages have been slashed, working conditions have deteriorated, and injury rates have increased, while at the same time production has become concentrated among a few companies."¹⁵

After the last significant strikes in the industry were broken by the mid-1980s, the pork industry appeared to have its pick of business-friendly production sites in cash-strapped rural regions.¹⁶ Corporations began to follow the lead of Iowa Beef Packers, who revolutionized the industry with a form of production that enabled firms not only to bypass unions in packing but also reduce the costs of skilled butchers in supermarkets by boxing meat at plants on assembly lines.¹⁷ Later, packers set their sights on reducing superfluous labor locked in smaller, family-based farms that had previously dominated pre-slaughter production. Assisted by industrial swine specialists at land grant universities, firms found that a regime of sub-therapeutic antibiotics, controlled genetics, early weaning, segregated sow and fattening facilities, artificial hormones and nutrient-rich feed additives combined with rigid confinement of animals could achieve rates of production nearly comparable to smaller farmers. Although losses associated with unskilled, minimally-remunerated workers who often became sick or injured on the job affected efficiency somewhat, firms’ massive scale and vertical integration lowered inputs costs. In addition, packing firms who produced their own livestock or who kept a captive supply of livestock through a network of contract growers could depress prices. This lack of price transparency worked to firms’ advantage by driving prices below the cost of production for a time and thus pushing less well-capitalized family farmers out of business.¹⁸ This trend was especially marked from 1990 to 2000, when the number of farms selling hogs declined by a staggering 60 percent.¹⁹

In the race to integrate swine production from "piglet to pork chop," industry insiders declared that the competitiveness of pork processing complexes would be dependent on the ability to produce about produce shelf-ready cuts of meat from about 2 to 4 million hogs a year. To achieve this, firms needed abundant water, land, and power. This has largely to do with the industry’s rather indelicate limiting factor, manure. With each pig producing from 2 to 8 times the amount of waste produced by their human consumers, their tight confinement presents a disposal problem comparable to what regulators face with industrial mining and manufacturing.²⁰ Hog facilities, usually clustered in groups of eight buildings with about 1,000 animals per edifice each produce a city-sized waste volume. Hog slurry, flushed out of barns with water and gathered in lakes commonly referred to as "lagoons," is generally disposed of by spraying it on crops as fertilizer. State environmental laws generally dictate a set amount of crop land required per animal, or a set maximum poundage of nutrients per acre that may be applied (generally a nitrogen or phosphorous standard). Firms must find customers willing to accept the waste stream, usually offered as complimentary fertilizer. Though in fact organic waste can substitute well for artificial nitrogen-phosphorous fertilizers, over-application or year-round delivery of waste may jeopardize recipients’ crops or well-water. Runoff from saturated or frozen fields jeopardizes surface waters for the region as a whole. Thus, firms pioneering intensive forms of swine production sought areas with land for sale and land potentially for sale to accommodate growth as well as the exhaustion of lagoons. Aging populations ready to sell or move away were presumably more important than an abundant low-cost local labor supply, despite company claims to lawmakers that their value to communities was as job creators.²¹

Most often, companies claimed that beyond these factors, sites were selected in an unbiased fashion with safety and the environment in mind. Corporate representatives promised regulators that state-of-the-art facilities would be immune from spills or routine dumping into surface waters, thereby qualifying as "zero discharge" facilities. Western Kansas and the panhandle of Oklahoma, for example, were said to be ideal sites for confined animal facilities because there were virtually no perennial surface waters in the region, human settlements were widely spaced apart, and the flat terrain was less likely to present a runoff problem. Having some knowledge of the experience of early boom-and-bust operations in swine mega-farming, however, corporations apparently knew that they would inevitably pollute air and water, and anger local citizens.²² Even in dry areas, there was the issue of nitrate seepage of wastes into groundwater because "zero-discharge" in fact legally meant between one-quarter and one-eighth inch seepage per day into soils. According to one technical consultant, the per diem leakage rates acknowledged by researchers at Kansas State University at one test site translated into 4.35 million gallons per year for a single large facility or 87 million gallons into groundwater over the estimated 15-year lifespan of a facility.²³

Given the problems associated with large-scale livestock production, a political fact emerges: siting successful mega-swine complex has much more to do with the scarcity of political or economic resources held by rural communities than hydrology. Swine corporations setting up operations in the early and mid-1990s shopped for venues where local and state governments would be willing not only to let them open their doors,²⁴ but to subsidize the costs of investment and operation, minimize liability, and facilitate exit from operations if and when necessary. Where firms were able to maximize such dispensations, other factors such as safety and the environment, or land availability, were clearly ignored or downplayed.²⁵

Given the seriousness of problems created by massive new swine operations, it seems obvious that the industry’s rapid restructuring would generate public protest of some sort. What sources of collective bargaining farmers or laborers might have exercised prior to restructuring were defunct, but the disequilibria generated by industry’s relocation and physical consolidation created grounds for new dissent. However, the lakes of open sewage, the poisoned rivers and wells, and the waves of indigent laborers that came to define the new corporate swine enclaves did not generate universal protest among residents near the facilities. Some communities accepted them more readily than others; some groups within communities were more amenable than others. The industry’s abuses also do not explain why the issue of swine production galvanized audiences in cities and suburbs in a way that many other urgent rural crises have not. Hog production, in fact, became a widely recognized issue as a result of unusual coalitions of farmers and rural residents with traditionally left-partisan actors. Such coalitions, as I shall argue, formed because they were politically exigent to all groups involved. However, none could have come about if rural residents and farmers -- the most crucial part of such coalitions -- had not become convinced that industry’s overwhelming power had rendered traditional channels of political access useless.

Understanding the significance of anti-swine mobilization in rural communities first requires some examination of why people often decline to enter such political battles. It remains an open question in fact whether in any given rural community the greater paradox is the presence of anti-swine activism or the relative absence of it. While on the one hand, the offenses of the industry are significant and readily recognized by many (odor, spills, rising crime, dropping property values, added tax burdens to accommodate corporations’ tax abatements), there are reasons why many people find it impossible to question the industry. Reasons often have more to do with ideas of liberty, or of notions of rights and wrong than with measurable costs and benefits to individuals.

Where they do exist, however, such interests bear mention. Respondents in all three states pointed out, for example, that the jobs created in swine production regions in services, government, schools, and commerce did create real opportunities for off-farm employment. As one respondent in Oklahoma pointed out, "Not many people from around here work in the plant or the facilities, but there are more fast food places and motels, and two thousand more customers, so most people see that as a good thing." Confronting the industry, likewise, creates silence among many who do not eagerly consent to the industry. In Sullivan County, Missouri, as grower Rolf Christen points out, there is great reticence among citizens to criticize the swine corporation that moved to the area in the early 1990s. For Christen, who heads a group of residents suing the corporation for violations of federal environmental law, such reticence is particularly frustrating because even individuals willing to be listed as plaintiffs often refuse to identify themselves publicly. Here, where Premium Standard Farms contracted a larger percentage of local residents for management and administration than in the previous case (the Seaboard Farms factory in Guymon, Oklahoma), few families are without connection to the industry. "Everyone has a spouse, a cousin, or an in-law who works for the company," he pointed out. "People worry that their friends or family members might get fired if they spoke up."²⁶

The specter of division in rural areas silences many as well. "These are people you go to church with, who you see in town every day," commented one Kansas activist. In addition, when corporations have the support of those who generally speak as the voice of communities -- usually newspaper editors, heads of chambers of commerce, county commissioners, and local attorneys -- dissent often involves confronting cadres of people who, by virtue of financial stature and education are seen to uphold standards of respectability. Confronting the oft-united opinion of such civic leaders, who often rotate in and out of various public offices, also carries with it the risk of social isolation in all the institutions with which an individual might have associations. Here, the question of mobilization and identity are key -- whereas in more populous situations involvement in political action might offer an individual the choice of entering a new community with attendant social networks, this is not an option in a cases where virtually every public and private domain involves approximately the same set of people.

The often staggering cost of fighting corporate farms also inhibits many would-be opponents of corporate swine. One leading opponent of swine facilities reported to the author that lobbying full time against a single large corporation as a volunteer had cost her about 30,000 dollars per year. Similarly, in an activist update published on the web by the Oklahoma Sierra Club, Panhandle farmer Jay Clapp reported that the cost of fighting just one step in the fight against a single large facility (in this case, the dispute involved a license from the state water board) would cost 20,000 dollars in attorney fees for nine days’ representation during a crucial administrative hearing.²⁷ Even where campaigns are straightforward approaches to elected officials, distances to capital cities may involve 12-hour drives. Phone calls, hotel bills, and attorney fees may overwhelm activists, particularly in areas where household incomes hover at around 25 thousand dollars annually. Age is also a consideration. Farmers, the population most affected by swine pollution, are perhaps the oldest working sector in the U.S. According to the Department of Agriculture, the average farmer in 1992 was 53 years old, with 25 percent of farmers over 65 years of age.²⁸ In one particularly drawn-out battle in Oklahoma where members of the Bethel church of God fought the construction of a 25 thousand-head hog facility, nearly every member of the congregation was elderly.²⁹

Notably, these limitations are seldom lost on swine corporations. Where various communities in this study attempted to regulate corporations locally, for example, they were sued or threatened with suits by their target firms. In Missouri, Premium Standard Farms sued tiny Lincoln Township (154 voters on the rolls) for 7.9 million dollars after the leaders passed planning and zoning regulations requiring confinement facilities to keep a mile-wide buffer between facilities and residences and to secure bonding for sewage lagoon cleanup.³⁰ Likewise in Kansas, Seaboard and various agribusiness corporations threatened suit against county commissioners who placed limitations on the construction of swine facilities after sites had been planned. According to Charles Benjamin, the lead counsel for the Sierra Club in Kansas, county commissioners were also warned that they were personally liable for losses incurred to firms by such legislation.³¹ In Oklahoma, swine corporations repeatedly challenged laws passed in 1997 and 1998 mandating setbacks and licensing procedures in the courts and the state legislature. These incessant battles were extraordinarily costly for many activists. "I take time away from my farm to go to the legislature. They fly to Topeka in Lear jets," remarked farmer Jerold Hubbard, who has been active in campaigns to stop expansion of corporate swine facilities in southwest Kansas. "I have to drive 300 miles, and I can’t even deduct the expenses from my taxes."

Finally, many people’s ideas of freedom compel them to accept the problems created by swine production as something natural or inevitable. These beliefs have to do with a complicated set of issues worth untangling. Hog corporations may offend rural residents but not prompt them to organize opposition because in many senses these operations represent only a rough incremental step further in food manufacturing that expanded greatly in scale throughout the 20^th century. Thus a discourse about "the price of progress" utilized by swine corporations and their champions in government actually melds well with a long tradition of so-called "progressive" farming. Certainly after the exit of New Deal agrarians from positions of power in U.S. agriculture, the ethos of farm policy had been the idea that the family farm would prosper through a partnership with industrial agribusiness. Therefore, while increased yields (at increased cost per unit) amid inelastic demand did nothing but bring commodity prices down in real terms over time, many farmers continued to believe that they shared common interests with the corporations that sold them inputs and bought what they grew.³² As one individual brought up on a farm near Liberal, Kansas remembered from political discussion among other farmers, "Most people, if you ask them who’s to blame for farm [bankruptcy], will tell you it’s the labor unions and the welfare state that caused the inflation that brought prices down."

Corporations thus defended their operations upon three prevalent ideas, namely that: 1) large farm size is evidence of success and agricultural ambition; 2) business is the natural ally of farmers, and 3) government should not unduly regulate agriculture. Challenging corporations’ rights-based claims that their operations ought not to be curtailed was not an easy or straightforward task. To challenge swine corporations’ claims that they represented the future of farming required anti-corporate actors to claim that either a) what corporations were doing did not constitute farming; or b) society had overriding claims to regulate the size of farms and the nature of technologies used to produce food. Making either of these arguments entailed challenging a larger orthodoxy that continues to dominate agriculture in regulatory, policymaking, and research circles.

Such pragmatic and ideational reasons for quiescence having been acknowledged, it is also important to note the reasons why many individuals did mobilize rapidly in opposition to industrial swine production. In these cases, people similarly based their actions on anticipated costs to their homes or farms, but also on acceptable claims of what was right and wrong. Those with clear and indisputable claims to harm were immediate neighbors of swine facilities as well as independent hog producers in the vicinity of swine complexes. As residents feared, facilities depressed property significantly within a three mile radius of the facilities.³³ Some claimed that their houses had become wholly un-saleable because of the stench and the risks of well-water contamination.³⁴ Others claimed serious damage to health, including respiratory problems, headaches, irritability, and memory loss from hydrogen sulfide poisoning. Farmers claimed that the concentration of hogs and corporations’ vertical integration drove smaller independent processing facilities under, leaving growers with no markets at all.

Residents living beyond the immediate vicinity of facilities also had measurable material claims against swine producers. In cities, crime rates skyrocketed after slaughterhouses opened, largely due to circumstances under which human cargo was smuggled into rural industrial enclaves. Many of the individuals seeking work in the facilities arrived badly in debt to gangs of coyotes (smugglers of immigrants) and to the swine corporations. As a matter of company policy, most owed for passage over the border and bus fare from the border. If offered a job, immigrants were also forced to purchase boots, safety equipment, and butcher knives from the company at inflated prices. They were also generally billed by the company for housing in shared apartments or trailers. The combination of immigrants’ debt, desperation, frequent occupational injury, disregard by local residents, and criminal gangs produced a noxious mixture. In Texas County, Oklahoma, for example, violent crime rose 378 percent after the arrival of the Seaboard corporation’s pork processing plant, according to one study.³⁵

Interestingly, division also provoked many to oppose corporate swine. In a manner contrary from individuals who refused to speak out against industrial abuses because of fear of injecting permanent strife into tight-knit communities, others cited contention as the principal reason they opposed corporate operations in the vicinity of their towns. In one particularly bitter fight that occurred in Great Bend, Kansas, for example, one man many explained to reporters that he had joined opponents of the industry because of what the issue had already done to the community. Running as a write-in candidate for the city council, resident Jon Carroll said, "I don’t think I am ever going to forgive Seaboard for what it has done to relationships and friendships in this town."³⁶

Finally, many bristled at the corporations’ presence because they felt they had violated standards of fair play. Whereas many considered themselves pro-business, corporations universally received extraordinarily large bundles of government resources by way of block grants, tax abatements, and low-interest finance. In Oklahoma, an article in Time Magazine calculated that the cost to the state for a single swine complex in the panhandle town of Guymon was in excess of $60 million. The most visible cost of residents was the school levy. The corporation paid no school taxes, but at the same time its workers expanded the school district by over 300 students.³⁷

What ultimately stunned residents in areas where swine corporations had set up shop or were planning to expand was simply how fast the landscape and the character of their regions could change. The task of trying to regulate the industry, force it to pay its way better, or halt its expansion required opponents of the industry to simultaneously develop plans of action, a set of defensible legal and moral claims against the industry, and a sense of who or what set of interests they represented. These fluctuated over time as opponents of corporate swine came into contact with one another and sought new audiences out of necessity. For example, where opponents identified themselves simply as residents or property-holders with grievances about foul odors, they were limited to quite narrow venues of arbitration. With common-law claims registered in courts and constituent complaints on the desk of caseworkers at the state capitol, opponents found they attracted little sympathy or notice. This for many people was a rude wake-up call. As recalled by Suzette Hatfield, who ultimately became one of the most visible and effective voices for reform on the issue, "When I started, I just thought it would be a straightforward matter of going to [lawmakers] and telling them what was going on. ... What I didn’t realize was that these [operations] had been built with the foreknowledge, the attention, and the approval of lawmakers."³⁸

Realizing that their case would have to reach wider audiences, opponents of corporate swine broadened their case by emphasizing to reporters and lawmakers that massive operations threatened family farms and farm communities. In Oklahoma, swine opponents formed the Oklahoma Family Farm Alliance; in Missouri, groups collaborated on numerous occasions with the Missouri Rural Crisis Center. In Kansas, the Farmers’ Union and the progressive Kansas Rural Center provided assistance to anti-swine campaigns. Here, grievances about odor and contamination combined well with demands that lawmakers stop corporate farming, or, as was featured in a 1996 benefit concert with Willie Nelson, that officials "Stop Factory Farms." Thus, anti-swine campaigns also brought local groups of farmers into dialogue with a network of progressive rural advocacy groups who had for some time been challenging dominant paradigms of industrial agriculture. Groups such as the Missouri Rural Crisis Center--founded during the Farm Crisis of the 1980s--were at the same time forming links to opponents of genetically-engineered foods, to Latin American campesino organizations, to advocates of organic and sustainable agriculture, and to groups of Black farmers in the U.S. South suing the USDA for discrimination in agriculture programs.

A third set of claims swine opponents made pertained to the environment. This was perhaps the strongest grievance opponents had, but for many also the most problematic. While on the one hand the most egregious deception offered by the corporations was that their operations were safe and nonpolluting, on the other hand making claims as environmentalists was not palatable for many. Documenting seepage in groundwater and damage to waterways by spills involved approaching professionals associated with environmentalist organizations. With regulatory officials working for state governments unauthorized to monitor livestock facilities or in some cases corrupt (as demonstrated by the 2001 indictment of the Missouri engineer who certified dozens of lagoon liners in that state), swine opponents found themselves in a quandary. While many knew the operations threatened health and the environment, proving this required documentation. Accordingly, rural groups turned to the Sierra Club and a number of local environmental groups for assistance in gathering evidence that would help their case.

The dialogue between groups that resulted from this sort of collaboration are significant. While certainly the relationship between agriculturalists and environmental groups has not always been of one piece (many farmers, for example, view themselves as conservation-minded, and many environmental groups have worked to preserve farmland and grazing pastures from urban sprawl or mining) it can nonetheless be said that the most visible environmentalist lobbies have often clashed noisily with the most visible agricultural lobbies. The American Farm Bureau Federation and the National Cattlemen’s Association have explicitly branded environmentalists as extremist enemies of family farms. This enmity has exploded in national debates over rangeland management, farm subsidies, the Endangered Species Act, and federal standards on clean water and air. At local levels various people involved in anti-swine campaigns recalled that their initial opinions of environmental groups had been formed through negative media and pronouncements of farm lobbies. Others, however, had directly clashed at point with conservation groups over issues of wildlife corridors and water use in rural areas.

When opponents of swine facilities approached environmentalists--in most cases state chapters of the Sierra Club--they usually did so quietly with many reservations. Reticence had partly to do with suspicion, but residents also knew that contact with environmental groups was best kept quiet because of inevitable accusations that anti-swine groups were merely a shill for powerful outside interests. In some instances the contact between local anti-swine groups and environmentalists was kept deliberately at a minimum, entailing only the exchange of quantitative data and legal information. In other cases interlocutors from the more progressive farm groups accompanied consultants from environmentalist lobbies. In another case in Kansas, activists from United We Stand, the party organization of presidential hopeful Ross Perot, had organized around the issue and made connections between local groups and environmentalists.

Paradoxically, this limited, local-level entente probably had a more measurable impact on established environmentalist lobbies than it did on the ad hoc grass-roots groups who initiated the campaigns. Responding to campaigns generated at local levels, the most powerful environmental lobbies by the late 1990s placed the issue of confined animal feeding operations on their list of top priorities. In 1999, the Sierra Club designated clean water, with feedlots their paramount concern, as one of four leading issues that would guide political action through 2001. In 1998 and 2001, the Natural Resources Defense Council produced two major investigative reports on the issue, "America’s Animal Factories" and "Cesspools of Shame." Meanwhile such groups also pooled resources with many dozens of other groups though the feedlot committee of the Clean Water Network. Similarly, the Water Keeper Alliance, an umbrella organization of 70 regional watchdog groups from various watersheds around the country, targeted industrial hog factories at the national level beginning in January 2001 with a set of lawsuits filed in Missouri and North Carolina charging the country’s largest swine producer with violations of the Clean Water Act and the Resource Conservation and Recovery Act. Finally, in a unprecedented move, the legal team filing the suit, headed by Robert Kennedy Jr. and including Jan Schlichtmann (the attorney profiled in A Civil Case) and litigators from anti-tobacco suits of the 1990s, sued the same corporation under the Racketeer Influenced and Criminal Organizations statute charging that the Smithfield corporation for years knowingly and systematically violated environmental laws.

The collaboration among hitherto unlinked groups and communities over industrial swine production has thus far produced some modest results for some communities. Such results should not be overblown--all three states examined remain hosts to confinement facilities producing about eight million hogs a year. Moreover, those individuals working at the center of grassroots campaigns report feeling exhausted and defeated by endless battles with legislators, corporate attorneys and managers, state regulators, land grant university personnel, and lobbyists for agribusiness. But such exhaustion, notably, plagues many not because campaigns failed to bring the issue to public attention, but because they succeeded in doing so.

Making corporate swine production more than a local and rural issue in the end has had benefits and costs. On the one hand dialogue and political collaboration among diverse groups over confined animal facilities have contributed to a new public reckoning over food production, environment, and social justice. In this mix, faith-based groups, animal welfare advocates, trade watch groups, and public health groups have also figured into broader discussions about the role of social justice concerns in the rational reform of food production. Groups such as the Methodist Heartland Ministry and the National Catholic Rural Life Conference have recently brought together groups of environmentalists, farmers and ranchers, and advocates of organic and sustainable agriculture to talk about what sorts of policy changes might simultaneously address crises of natural resource depletion and falling farm income. Also notable in this vein is the recent work of Defenders of Wildlife, which has underwritten the work of Family Farm Defenders, an advocacy organization for small growers.

Collaboration among various groups has also generated media attention over anti-swine campaigns. Much coverage has been sympathetic, particularly in instances where the expansion of the hog industry appeared to threaten the interests of larger population centers, as when swine corporations attempted to site facilities near Kansas City, Missouri or Wichita, Kansas. Then, having made such a connection between swine corporations and pollution in the mind of the public, professionals working in environmental organizations did subsequent media work that helped sever some of the cozy financial ties between swine corporations and elected officials. In Missouri, for example, the Sierra Club obtained a list in 2000 of financial contributions made to candidates for public office by the state’s largest pork producer, Premium Standard Farms. Calling candidates one by one, the Sierra Club’s lead advocate on factory farms informed candidates that they would appear on a published list of campaign finance recipients the following week. Within two days, every candidate, including Senate candidate John Ashcroft, returned the money. "People running for office recognize this is dirty money," commented Sierra Club spokesman Ken Midkiff to the press, "and they returned it. We didn’t have to make the case at all."³⁹

When it came to obtaining clear and measurable relief from industrial swine pollution, results of campaigns were mixed. The assessment of outcomes as measured by environmentalist organizations, who logically were interested in reducing pollution in aggregate terms, was at times different from resident grass-roots groups, who were logically interested in closing down the particular facilities near their homes. The campaigns forced legislators in all three states to write new laws governing large-scale swine production. In general, legislation established setback distances and more stringent licensing procedures for the largest facilities. In Oklahoma, where the new laws were strongest, a temporary moratorium on construction of large swine facilities and a three-mile setback actually did give a number of communities leverage in stopping corporate expansion at certain sites. In many other cases, particularly in Kansas and Missouri, opponents of the industry lamented that legislation was so weak that it gave corporations a "license to pollute." In Kansas, grass-roots activists felt that regulatory legislation represented a victory for the corporations. In this case, a little-known provision of the swine regulatory bill passed in 1998 complicated efforts by swine opponents to regulate the industry locally. Under provisions of the bill, counties were actually prevented from passing water use and pollution standards that were stricter than those stipulated by state law. Although this portion of the legislation may not withstand a court challenge, it nonetheless made activists’ campaigns more difficult.

Legal action also proved to be a roller-coaster ride of high hopes and disappointment for environmentalists and local resident groups. In northern Missouri, for example, where dozens of spills from improperly built lagoons had fouled waters, a group of 70 families sued the Premium Standard Farms corporation for violations of federal clean air and water standards. The citizens’ suit was first taken up by the state attorney general, but then hastily settled in 1999, much to the dismay of the citizens involved who believed little improvement would come of the consent decree signed by the state. The company promised to pay a fine of 1 million dollars, spend 25 million dollars on new technology to cut its pollution, and participate in a task force in industry waste. In time, the citizens’ assessment proved accurate. State officials scrambled to distance themselves from the agreement when waste spills continued at devastatingly frequent intervals. Two years after the agreement, the company had spent only a small portion of the 25 million dollars, its fines had been reduced in court, and fifty-three more spills into rivers had occurred.⁴⁰ Meanwhile, though, the dispute had taken a different turn at the federal level. The case was taken up by the Environmental Protection Agency in a federal-level suit, but then two years later the will of the EPA and the Department of Justice to pursue the litigation had changed rapidly after Clinton administration appointees were replaced by appointees of President George W. Bush. A settlement reached in November 2001 provided some hope for gradual, long-term improvements but provided no guarantees to residents that pollution of waterways would stop, nor did it mandate any penalties for the dozens of spills to date.⁴¹ This case in Missouri was very similar to a set of citizens’ lawsuits in the Oklahoma Panhandle. In that instance, 13 separate lawsuits battling two giant hog facilities were settled by the state attorney general in December 2001 with miniscule cleanup fines (about 45,000 dollars in all) and promises by the Seaboard Corporation to spend three million dollars on environmental improvements.⁴² No fines or damages were paid to neighbors of the facilities.

Ironically, as grass-roots opponents of corporate swine operations exhausted avenues of remediation at state and then federal levels, what remained for many were last-ditch campaigns for county- and municipal-level ordinances that would limit the size of particular facilities or at best keep them out of range. This strategy, although most likely to provide tangible results for grass-roots groups fighting for the integrity of their neighborhoods and communities, tended to isolate opponents of corporate swine in intense local disputes. In the three states examined for this article, Kansas was the state where swine opponents used this strategy most frequently. This had partly to do with the minimal recourse citizens had to lawsuits over federal environmental standards, where the strongest claim opponents generally made pertained to the Clean Water Act. With virtually no surface waters in the vicinity of large swine operations, no such course of federal legal action made sense. County-level organization such as occurred in Kansas had also to do with the structure of enabling legislation in the mid-1990s which permitted local officials to lift bans on corporate farming on a county-by-county basis. As a result, groups opposing swine operations tended to mobilize around local referenda and pool resources such as information and consultant contacts through an anti-swine coalition, Stewards of the Land.

Logically, campaigns often became narrower rather than broader because energies had to be expended in establishing the precise technical basis for setbacks, zoning, licensing, and water monitoring in a particular geologic zone and microclimate. Where activists had been successful in blocking massive swine operations, such as in Barton County, Kansas where the Seaboard Corporation attempted to establish a 4 million-hog processing plant, activists who had been involved in the campaign were ambivalent about the results. "We’ve managed to fight them to a draw in Western Kansas," said one technical consultant with the Sierra Club, "but it’s a NIMBY ("not in my backyard") issue. [Without federal standards] they just set up somewhere else." In a separate interview, the lead counsel for the Sierra Club in Kansas, Charles Benjamin, noted that corporate agribusiness had become quite adept in dealing with local-level campaigns. When attempting to establish facilities in a given area, "the corporate strategy," he argued, "is to go way too far and then scale back to the level of production they originally needed." Ed Hopkins, the legislative director for the Sierra Club in Washington, D.C., also echoed this sentiment. "The Sierra Club," he remarked, "has spent a lot of time organizing people in rural areas. The problem is that they often just move onto the next town. We even find that some of the people we’ve chased out of the United States have ended up in Canada. ... Our victories are sort of temporary because you chase them out of one place and they show up somewhere else."

With lawsuits and state legislation offering dubious gains for activists, a set of potentially incongruent paths now remain for opponents of corporate swine, oscillating between local resistance and national coalition-building. Organizations fighting anti-factory farms presently make a composite case against the industry’s practices. They include the grievances of neighbors of swine facilities, environmentalists, farmers, physicians’ groups, animal rights advocates, and, somewhat less frequently, champions of workers’ rights. The consensus among such groups is tenuous, however, and may be bound together by the abject dearth of action taken by federal lawmakers and regulators on the problems caused by corporate swine. Reports circulated on web sites by the Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy, Global Resource Action Center for the Environment (better known by its acronym GRACE), the Sierra Club, and the Natural Resources Defense Council bear the mark of ongoing dialogue among advocacy groups coming at the issue of swine production from very different points of view. Each report mentions the complaints lodged by the others. Beyond that, groups have collaborated in specific campaigns, such as the Keep Antibiotics Working coalition, which includes representatives from all groups with grievances with the prominent exception of organized labor.⁴³

An important question is whether dialogue and joint political action make anti-factory farm coalitions are more than the divisible sum of their parts. There is some indication that collaboration may broaden individuals’ or organizations’ points of view to the extent that they defend positions they might not have defended prior to joint efforts.⁴⁴ If campaigns against corporate swine have indeed provoked individuals and organizations to reconsider traditional political alignments and reconfigure core claims about agriculture, such a set of coalitions might prefigure a larger movement for a thoroughgoing reform of the food system. Improvements that the public might well come to associate with reform of factory farms include living wages for food sector workers and steady incomes for farms, safe food and safeguarded antibiotic stocks, higher quality food, cleaner water and air, and more humane treatment of farm animals. What is highlighted by the course of events at local levels is a tension between network-building for long-term goals, and local mobilization for short-term relief from corporate expansion.

(2000). Candidates Refuse Campaign Cash from Premium Standard Farms. Associated Press.

Barlett, D.L. and J. Steele (1998). The Empire of the Pigs. Time.

Benjamin, C. (1998). Report on the National Status of Factory Hog Farming.

Bjerkle, S., in Stull et al, eds. (1995). On the Horns of a Dilemma: The U.S. Meat and Poultry Industry. Any Way You Cut It: Meat Processing and Small-Town America. D. D. Stull, M. Broadway and D. Griffith. Lawrence, KS, University of Kansas Press.

Braun, J. and P. Braun (1998). Pigs, Profits, and Rural Communities. Binghamton, NY, State University of New York.

Brecker, J., T. Costello, et al. (2000). Globalization from Below: The Power of Solidarity Boston, MA South End Press.

Broadway, M. (1995). From City to Countryside: Recent Changes in the Structure and Location of the Meat- and Fish-Processing Industries. Any Way You Cut It: Meat Processing and Small Town America. D.D. Stull, M. Broadway and D. Griffith. Lawrence, Kansas, University of Kansas Press.

Clapp, J. (2001). Jay's Report, Oklahoma Sierra Club. 2002.

Cochrane, W. (1999). A Food and Agricultural Policy for the 21^st Century, Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy.

Eisnitz, G.A. (1997). Slaughterhouse: The Shocking Story of Greed, Neglect, and Inhumane Treatment inside the U.S. Meat Industry. Amherst, NY, Prometheus Books.

Elliott, I. (2002). Going the Whole Hog. The Ecologist. 31:55.

Giddens, A. (1991). Modernity and Self-Identity: Self and Soceity in the Late Modern Age. Stanford, Stanford University Press.

Gorbach, S.L. (2001). "Antimicrobial Use in Animal Feed-Time to Stop." New England Journal of Medicine (345):1202.

Grey, M. (1995). Pork, Poultry, and Newcomers in Storm Lake, Iowa. Any Way You Cut It: Meat Processing and Small-Town America. D.D. Stull, M. Broadway and D. Griffith. Lawrence, KS, University of Kansas Press.

Hackenberg, R.A.C., in Stull et al, eds. (1995). Joe Hill Died for your Sins: Empowering Minority Workers in the New Industrial Labor Force. Any Way You Cut It: Meat Processing and Small-Town America. D.D. Stull, M. Broadway and D. Griffith. Lawrence, KS, University of Kansas Press.

Heffernan, W., M. Hendrickson, et al. (1999). Consolidation in the Food and Agriculture System: Report to the National Farmers' Union.

Hegeman, R. (1999). Seaboard Hog Referendum Pits Neighbor against Neighbor. Associated Press.

Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy (2001). The Price We Pay for Corporate Hogs. Minneapolis, MN, Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy.

Jenkins, R. (2001). Seaboard Agrees to New Safeguards. Associated Press.

Mansur, M. (2001). Regulators Vow Tougher Line with Missouri Hog Operations. The Kansas City Star.

Missouri Rural Crisis Center (1996). Hog Wars: the Corporate Grab for Control of the Hog Industry and How Citizens Are Fighting Back. Columbia, MO, Missouri Rural Crisis Center.

Muegge, S.P. (2001). Author's interview. Tonkawa, OK.

North Central Regional Center for Rural Development (1999). Bringing Home the Bacon? The Myth of the Role of Corporate Hog Farming in Rural Revitalization. Poteau, OK, The Kerr Center.

Robbins, J. (2001). The Food Revolution. Berkeley, CA, Conari Press.

Skaggs, J.M. (1986). Prime Cut: Livestock Raising and Meatpacking in the United States, 1607-1983. College Station, TX, Texas A & M Press.

Talley, T. (1999). Water Permit Granted for Corporate Hog Farm. Associated Press.

United States Department of Agriculture (1998). A Time to Act: A Report of the USDA Commission on Small Farms. Washington, DC, United States Department of Agriculture.

Volland, C. (1998). Critique of the Kansas State University Lagoon Research Project. Kansas City, Spectrum Technologists.

Wing, S. and S. Wolf (2000). "Intensive Livestock Operations, Health, and Quality of Life among Eastern North Carolina Residents." Environmental Health Perspectives 108(3).

1 | Heffernan, W., M. Hendrickson, et al. (1999). "Consolidation in the Food and Agriculture System: Report to the National Farmers' Union."

2 | Wing, S. and S. Wolf (2000). "Intensive Livestock Operations, Health, and Quality of Life among Eastern North Carolina Residents." Environmental Health Perspectives 108(3); Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy (2001). The Price We Pay for Corporate Hogs. Minneapolis, MN, Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy.

3 | Author’s interview, January 2002.

4 | Hackenberg, R.A.C. (1995). "Joe Hill Died for your Sins: Empowering Minority Workers in the New Industrial Labor Force." in Any Way You Cut It: Meat Processing and Small-Town America. D.D. Stull, M. Broadway and D. Griffith, eds. Lawrence, KS, University of Kansas Press.

5 | In this instance, independent farmers won a referendum conducted by the Department of Agriculture under the Clinton Administration, but the directive to remove a mandatory "check-off" payment to the NPPC was shelved under new leadership in the Bush administration. See Missouri Rural Crisis Center (1996). Hog Wars: the Corporate Grab for Control of the Hog Industry and How Citizens Are Fighting Back. Columbia, MO, Missouri Rural Crisis Center.

6 | Benjamin, C. (1998). Report on the National Status of Factory Hog Farming, unpublished report; Cochrane, W. (1999). A Food and Agricultural Policy for the 21^st Century, Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy Policy.

7 | Gorbach, S.L. (2001). "Antimicrobial Use in Animal Feed-Time to Stop." New England Journal of Medicine (345): 1202.

8 | Sierra Club (1999). Clean Water and Factory Farms Campaign. Web site report.

9 | See Eisnitz, G.A. (1997). Slaughterhouse: The Shocking Story of Greed, Neglect, and Inhumane Treatment inside the U.S. Meat Industry. Amherst, NY, Prometheus Books; Robbins, J. (2001). The Food Revolution. Berkeley, CA, Conari Press.

10 | Brecker, J., T. Costello, et al. (2000 ). Globalization from Below: The Power of Solidarity Boston, MA South End Press.

11 | Skaggs, J.M. (1986). Prime Cut: Livestock Raising and Meatpacking in the United States, 1607-1983. College Station, TX, Texas A & M Press.

12 | The Jungle (1906), 35.

13 | Giddens, A. (1991). Modernity and Self-Identity: Self and Society in the Late Modern Age. Stanford, Stanford University Press.

14 | Bjerkle, S., in Stull et al, eds. (1995). On the Horns of a Dilemma: The U.S. Meat and Poultry Industry. Any Way You Cut It: Meat Processing and Small-Town America. D.D. Stull, M. Broadway and D. Griffith. Lawrence, KS, University of Kansas Press.

15 | Broadway, M. (1995). From City to Countryside: Recent Changes in the Structure and Location of the Meat- and Fish-Processing Industries. Any Way You Cut It: Meat Processing and Small Town America. D.D. Stull, M. Broadway and D. Griffith. Lawrence, Kansas, University of Kansas Press.

16 | Grey, M. (1995). Pork, Poultry, and Newcomers in Storm Lake, Iowa. Any Way You Cut It: Meat Processing and Small-Town America. D.D. Stull, M. Broadway and D. Griffith. Lawrence, KS, University of Kansas Press; Barlett, D.L. and J. Steele (1998). "The Empire of the Pigs," Time, November 30.

17 | Bjerkle, S., in Stull et al, eds. (1995). On the Horns of a Dilemma: The U.S. Meat and Poultry Industry. Any Way You Cut It: Meat Processing and Small-Town America. D.D. Stull, M. Broadway and D. Griffith. Lawrence, KS, University of Kansas Press.

18 | Braun, J. and P. Braun (1998) "Inside the Industry from a Family Hog Farmer," Pigs, Profits, and Rural Communities. Binghamton, NY, State University of New York; Senator Paul Muegge, Author's interview. August 2001.

19 | Institute for Agriculture and Trade Police, "The Price We Pay for Corporate Hogs," chapter 1.

20 | Elliott, I. (2002). "Going the Whole Hog." The Ecologist. 31:55.

21 | Almost without exception, large-scale animal production and processing facilities rely on a rotating supply of foreign-born labor. In some cases, corporations such as Seaboard and Excel (a subsidiary of Cargill) in Kansas have sought workers among populations of Southeast Asian refugee populations residing in Wichita. On the Eastern Seaboard, agribusiness has similarly recruited laborers from new Guatemalan and El Salvadoran populations. In aggregate terms, the largest exporter of labor to the agribusiness sector is Mexico.

22 | See, for example, Laura DeLind (1998), who chronicles the experience of residents of Parma, Michigan, who were hosts to early mega-farms owned by Sand Livestock Systems. The corporation operated in the area from 1983 to 1992, when they declared bankruptcy, reorganized, and moved elsewhere.

23 | Volland, C. (1998). Critique of the Kansas State University Lagoon Research Project. Kansas City, Spectrum Technologists.

24 | The first task for corporations was convincing lawmakers to permit them to operate vertically-integrated facilities at all. In all three states examined in this study, laws prohibiting corporate farming were lifted at the explicit demands of industry lobbies representing the interests of the two principal investing corporations in these states, the Seaboard Corporation and Premium Standard Farms. Altering such laws was a delicate endeavor that had to be done quietly or provisionally, however. Despite anti-regulationist public attitudes on most issues in the rural Midwest, farmers have pursued and won prohibitions on corporate farms in eight Great Plains states the last twenty years. In some cases, they have won prohibitions by referendum, overriding legislators who have refused to enact such bans. In Oklahoma, the state legislature altered its anti-corporate farming law to accommodate swine in 1991, just prior to Seaboard’s announcement that it would open facilities in the Panhandle. In Missouri, a quid pro quo was even more apparent: the legislature passed a bill in 1993 that allowed a three-county exemption from corporate farming laws in precisely the area Premium Standard Farms wished to expand. The bill passed at midnight as an amendment on an unrelated piece of legislation, tacked on by state representative who worked as a $22,000-a-year consultant to the electricity supplier for the corporation.

In Kansas, the state legislature passed legislation allowing local ruling bodies to lift anti-corporate farming laws on a county-wide basis. This law, ostensibly crafted as a means of minimizing contention, would ultimately serve anti-hog activists as a means of maximizing public protest. Carrying with it the mark of conservative maxims of "local control," the law gave county commissioners the option of welcoming hog facilities through passage of a resolution approving them. What state legislators did not anticipate was the invocation by citizens of a secondary provision in the legislation. Citizens were allowed to veto these resolutions through referenda if they protested within 60 days of its announcement. Since most county commission resolutions regarding agricultural licenses were but small items in local newspapers, many residents in counties that "welcomed" the facilities remember having no knowledge of corporations’ presence until their facilities were built and operating. However, as citizens became aware of the presence of industrial swine facilities, corporations lost such invisibility.

25 | This first become widely apparent not in the Great Plains but in the state of North Carolina, which in the 1990s became the second largest state producer of pork. As documented in a Pulitzer Prize-winning news series, hog facilities that were hastily placed in impoverished but populous eastern part of the state are wholly unsuitable for the production of 10 million hogs (Stith and Warrick 1995). Cataclysmic spills after floods and heavy rains in the mid-1990s badly contaminated wells, drinking water, and rivers; riverine pfiesteria outbreaks believed linked to factory farming killed nearly 2 billion fish and poisoned 26 people.

26 | Rolf Christen, Author’s interview, November 2001.

27 | Clapp, J. (2001). Jay's Report, Oklahoma Sierra Club. 2002.

28 | United States Department of Agriculture (1998). A Time to Act: A Report of the USDA Commission on Small Farms. Washington, DC, United States Department of Agriculture.

29 | Talley, T. (1999). Water Permit Granted for Corporate Hog Farm. Associated Press, May 12.

30 | Missouri Rural Crisis Center (1996). Hog Wars: the Corporate Grab for Control of the Hog Industry and How Citizens Are Fighting Back. Columbia, MO, Missouri Rural Crisis Center.

31 | Threats of litigation also undermined local democracy. In Kansas, under 1994 legislative rules, corporate farms of any type were supposed to be permitted only on a county-by-county pending a resolution of county commissioners. The legislation also permitted citizens to dispute such resolutions by registering protests within 60 days of resolutions’ passage. In such cases, the issue was generally passed to citizen referenda. The binding nature of such resolutions remained unclear, however. In 19 of 21 such referenda, voters rejected swine production. Nonetheless, in several cases, county commissioners refused to reverse their resolutions, ostensibly because of fears of lawsuits.

32 | The issue of the false partnership of farmers with agribusiness is addressed well by a number of recent works. On the issue of price and demand, see Cochrane (1999), "A Food and Agricultural Policy for the 21^st Century." On the question of concentration in agriculture and lack of competition among firms, see Michael Stumo’s identically titled but different report (2000), "A Food and Agricultural Policy for the 21^st Century," Organization for Competitive Markets. On the question of the historical relationship of policymakers to agriculture, see Mary Summers (2000) "the New Deal Farm Programs: Looking for Reconstruction in American Agriculture," Agricultural History 74 (2): 241-257. Regarding the relationship of farmers to various farm organizations, and of the latter to policymakers, see Defenders of Wildlife reports: (2000) "Amber Waves of Grain," and (2001) "Addressing the Crisis in Rural America." On this issue, see also Mary Summers (2001), "From the Heartland to Seattle: The Family Farm Movement of the 1980s and the Legacy of Agrarian State Building," in The Countryside in the Age of the Modern State: Political Histories of Rural America, C.M. Stock and R.D. Johnston, eds. Cornell University Press.

33 | A number of studies have demonstrated a significant impact of industrial hog facilities on property values in a one-to-three mile radius. See Hamed, Mubarak, Thomas G. Johnson, Kathleen K. Miller (1999) "The Impacts of Animal Feeding Operations on Rural Land Values," Report presented to the Saline County Study Steering Committee. Columbia: University of Missouri; Palmquist, R, F. Roka, and T. Vukina. 1997. "Hog Operations, Environmental Impacts, and Residential Property Values," Land Economics 73(1): 114-124; Kilpatrick, John. 2001. "Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations and Proximate Property Values," The Appraisal Journal (July); and Taff, Steven J., Douglas Tiffany, and Sanford Weisberg. 1996. "Measured Effects of Feedlots on Residential Property Values in Minnesota: A Report to the Legislature," University of Minnesota Staff Paper Series (July).

34 | Barlett, "The Empire of the Hogs."

35 | North Central Regional Center for Rural Development (1999). Bringing Home the Bacon? The Myth of the Role of Corporate Hog Farming in Rural Revitalization. Poteau, OK, The Kerr Center.

36 | Hegeman, R. (1999). Seaboard Hog Referendum Pits Neighbor against Neighbor. Associated Press.

37 | Barlett, D. L. and J. Steele (1998). The Empire of the Pigs.

38 | Suzette Hatfield, Oklahoma Family Farm Alliance, Author’s interview, August 2001.

39 | (2000). Candidates Refuse Campaign Cash from Premium Standard Farms. Associated Press.

40 | Mansur, M. (2001). Regulators Vow Tougher Line with Missouri Hog Operations. The Kansas City Star.

41 | In the settlement reached on November 19, 2001, Premium Standard Farms agreed to spend at least 50 million dollars to curb pollution from its 1,000 hog barns and 163 lagoons. Regulators claimed that the settlement improved upon the state’s consent decree two years earlier because it required the company to achieve a specific reduction in pollution. It required the giant hog operations to install wastewater treatment plants similar to what metropolitan areas build to deal with human waste. It also allows air monitoring around barns and lagoons, which is a significant step forward in an industry classified as "agriculture" and thereby usually exempt from any clean air standards (Mansur 2001).

42 | Jenkins, R. (2001). "Seaboard Agrees to New Safeguards," Associated Press.

43 | The Keep Antibiotics Working campaign includes the Center for a Livable Future, the Center for Science in the Public Interest, Environmental Defense, Food Animals Concern Trust (FACT), the Global Resource Action Center for the Environment (GRACE), the Humane Society, the Institute for Agriculture and Trade Police, the National Catholic Rural Life Conference, the Natural Resource Defense Council, Physicians for Social Responsibility, the Sierra Club, and the Union of Concerned Scientists.

44 | Recently, for example, scientists at the University of Manitoba announced the development of the "enviro-pig," a genetically-engineered pig which would produce 75 percent less phosphorous. Presumably such an animal might address problems of surface water contamination cited by environmentalists. However, in this case major environmentalist groups including the Sierra Club uniformly denounced the technology. Similarly, the Institute for Food and Agriculture Policy--a longtime advocate of family farms--released a document on corporate swine operations in 2001 that discussed animal welfare and antibiotic use at length. This is significant because small and mid-sized farmers have often been very hostile to groups seeking reform in on-farm production methods.