The Fantasy of the Clip Art Farm: Notes from the New Rural Landscape
Kauffman, Janet
FARM IS A four-letter word. Right up there with flag, love, and home. Any kid can draw farm with a few crayons— a red barn, a silo beside it. As easy as love, a heart, and home, a house. But...
...I'VE LIVED on farms all my life, as a child in Pennsylvania, and in this area of Michigan my entire adult life...
...So there's a good chance other facilities have direct tile connections to drains and streams...
...In rural communities like mine, the main issues are water and the new rural landscape, CLIP ART FARM which has shifted dramatically in the last four years from many small and varied farm operations to several huge dairy CAFOs, which own or rent more and more of the landscape (paying a premium for manure disposal...
...Nobody sees the plans or approves the design...
...Chances are those drivers have never seen the fields before, and certainly never tilled them...
...The polluted water entered Lime Creek...
...In 1993 in Milwaukee, 111 people died in a cryptosporidium outbreak, and 403,000 people were sickened...
...The red hip barns, for instance, like the one with haymow brimming in the Department of Ag image, were constructed around here in the late 1800s, with some newer ones built through the 1930s...
...Abusers of the system...
...It brought in huge hydro-hoes to rip down the trees, including the two big maples in my front yard...
...Cheap food...
...Michigan still has no permit system, no inspection of lagoons, no requirement for manure management plans...
...To farm it, settlers not only cleared the trees, they drained the water—through a complex system of trenches and buried clay tiles set end to end...
...At the largest facility (three thousand cows), just opened for business south of town, an entry drive leads past a circular pool that looks 48 n DISSENT / Summer 2002 like it might someday have a clean-water fountain upspurting...
...Rural development" is the catchphrase for this rural industrialization, with tax incentives to industrial Ag facilities, grants for road reconstruction when CAFOs and their trucking rip things up, and massive farm subsidies...
...When people around here—small farmers, teachers, business people, lifelong residents— express concern about the CAFOs' impact on water quality and the risks to watersheds, they are often dismissed by Ag interests as outsiders...
...At CAFOs, you will not see cows outside grazing red hip barns pastureland upright silos for storing feed straw as bedding windmills Yet these elements persist in ads, brochures, the imagination—the full iconography of the myth of the American farm...
...With silage choppers and power augers, feed could be mixed, lifted in silos, moved back to stalls, without much handwork...
...it is potent with pathogens, hormones, antibiotics...
...When operations get CAFO-sized, farmers can't work all the fields, can't know all the ground directly...
...Neighbors get ugly when they can't breathe in their backyards on sunny days, when their kids have to picnic and play inside...
...There's a strange fear, like the fear of loss of faith, to admit that farmers are fallible...
...It's no surprise that whatever big Ag interests touch these days carries a taint in communities like this, a kind of unnatural stench...
...Around my town of Hudson, environmental groups have popped up, including a watershed group...
...In the United States, CAFOs—the biggest operations around— take the bait...
...CAFOs don't even need building permits— they are "agricultural" facilities and are therefore exempt from such regulation...
...Many days now, when the CAFOs are emptying lagoons, and Tail-End tankers of liquid manure roar up and down this road, I count the trucks as they go by, every twenty minutes, hour after hour...
...When they can't swim in the creek...
...AMERICANS HAVE rarely questioned the moral and essential claim of agriculture, to do whatever it wants because it must or face ruin...
...She got the up-front message—this is a clean place, orderly, unadorned...
...Farmers don't like welfare, of course...
...Like the hog CAFOs in North Carolina, Missouri, and Washington and chicken operations all over the place, they're the largest constructions on the new rural landscape: animal factories that from the air resemble airplane hangars...
...These contaminations have all been linked to pollution from livestock operations...
...The tiles formed extensive underground drainage systems, pulling water from the surface and carrying it like any tributary system to ditches or "drains," to streams, to rivers...
...Without it, they'd have to admit that farming is a business, and a CAFO is an industrial facility...
...Department of Agriculture farm subsidies for 1996-2000, with huge increases each year...
...CLIP ART FARM and on to the state of Ohio, where the city of Archbold takes its drinking water...
...The Department of Environmental Quality estimated that twelve million gallons of polluted water entered Lake Hudson, a state park with a swimming beach...
...Even in the recent farm bill discussions, concessions to big Ag in "conservation" measures led to more funding for CAFO lagoon construction, rather than funding for smaller operations or funding for alternative dry-waste systems...
...And if anybody suggests otherwise, Ag people call in the grand defense...
...to the damming of almost every river for irrigation of farmland...
...And many states certify these privileged rights of industrial Agriculture with Right to Farm legislation, and in some places with so-called Agricultural Security Zones where farmers cannot be cited for "nuisance" activity (odor, noise, dust...
...Most neighbors finally give up, give in, and sell—if they can...
...Almost all windmills ceased operation when electricity and electric pumps came to rural areas here in the 1930s...
...Silos were constructed relatively recently, especially through the 1950s to the 1970s, and smaller farms still use them...
...Even though alternative waste systems exist, and are common in Europe—composting, DISSENT / Summer 2002 • 4 9 CLIP ART FARM pelletizing for dry application, sterilization and drying—industrial Ag facilities here have resisted any requirement for dry systems or any waste-treatment (systems even small campgrounds are required to install...
...It looked like hell...
...These f—ers don't really farm...
...Lots of folks like to have a life as well as a job, to go on cruises...
...It's hard to give up...
...JANET KAUFFMAN'S most recent books include Characters on the Loose and Rot...
...The list goes on...
...Farming is in the economic interest, in the national interest, in the global interest...
...The bigger the farms, the more industrial their facilities, the more aid they get...
...My township supervisor, who raises calves for a CAFO, said Walkerton just had a problem with wells...
...Around a CAFO, however, nuisance is a mild word for the intense stench, ammonia and hydrogen sulfide, dust and particulates, truck traffic, allnight flood-lighting, manure sprayed on soil, and manure sprayed on snow...
...Subsidies and payments have become so dear to the Ag industry that they can't see those checks in the mail as welfare checks...
...She also recounts the Michigan Department of Agriculture and USDA's use of pellets of aldrin, "one of the most dangerous" of insecticides in a dusting campaign over Detroit...
...Contaminated water...
...But that's not much more than a trick, and they're being outed...
...These features appear without fail in the clip art images that Microsoft provides as "farm," including this image, chosen by the Michigan Department of Agriculture for the cover of June 2000 Web publication Generally Accepted Agricultural Management Practices...
...When I showed a picture of one of these places to my Mennonite cousin in Pennsylvania, she said it reminded her of a Mennonite church, plain and simple...
...More than two trillion pounds of animal waste per year are applied or sprayed onto soils...
...The redbarnand-silo-background with greenpasturelandforeground sells cheese and milk on television to this day...
...It is not the sweet smell of old-time manure, mixed with straw, composting into soil...
...A brighter future...
...Food is a business, one business, in the world's survival...
...AG PEOPLE AND politicians have to look way back, back to Neverland, or they have to be as nostalgic as clip art designers, to call farmers "the true conservationists," as both Al Gore and George W. Bush did in the last campaign...
...And I said so...
...Silos—those erect ones in the clip art farm—replaced the haymows for storing animal feed...
...The risk to public health and the health of watersheds is no small concern...
...And last year, in Walkerton, Ontario, seven people died from E. coli bacteria in public drinking water supplies...
...Even so, at township and county meetings in my area, I still hear denials of any farm fault...
...With livestock factories reshaping agricultural areas, farm has fallen hard—plummeted— from the sacred to the obscene...
...It's a good, a sacred place...
...then Bean Creek...
...If America wants cheap food . . . " "If you had to pay what food costs...
...Unfortunately, MSU's history of denial of environmental risk is notorious...
...One 52 n DISSENT / Summer 2002 CAFO operator needed a permit from the township for a backyard swimming pool...
...Forty years ago, in Silent Spring, Rachel Carson recalled MSU's spraying of DDT on the campus, obliterating the robin population, "in spite of the assurances of the insecticide people that their sprays were 'harmless to birds...
...Oh, no, no such thing...
...It has two powerful drivers—there's the "farm" (unlike factory) relief from regulation...
...Out back, however, out of sight except from a plane, are the pits, lagoons, and cesspools of millions of gallons of untreated animal waste...
...I've farmed hay here and restored wetlands on my farm...
...In Michigan, the plans are voluntary...
...Without such plans, which include manure-testing and soil-testing, manure application is guesswork...
...Even Farmland Preservation, a program to purchase development rights (PDR) and preserve farmland—the type of program that environmentalists as well as farmers usually support— has been sullied here by substantial PDR payments to the largest Ag land speculator...
...IT'S THE OLDEST lure in America—bigger is better, size matters...
...In the last two years, though, despite the state's wishful claim of "zero discharge" to surface waters, we've had fifteen discharge "events"—animal waste overapplied, drained, dumped, or sprayed onto frozen ground—polluted liquid that flowed into drains and streams...
...Often, it's plain old illegal waste disposal...
...It catches them hell, of course...
...Well, why should we feed the world any more than we clothe it or shingle all the world's roofs...
...Maryland's Eastern Shore has had serious problems with the toxic microbe Pfiesteria piscicida, causing major fish kills...
...Hundreds of Dutch farmers have re-located in the United States (Texas, Idaho, Washington, Indiana, Ohio, Michigan—most of the CAFOs near Hudson are Dutch operations), with facilities ten to fifty times larger than those they left...
...And that number doesn't include the PDR check he got for $794,957 from the state Department of Agriculture, for Farmland Preservation...
...DISSENT / Summer 2002 55...
...Agriculture has a profoundly compromised 50 n DISSENT / Summer 2002 past in this country, where denial and the arguments of economic necessity have supported a range of injustices and degradations, both human and environmental—from the use of slaves in southern agriculture...
...Not here...
...Across the new rural landscape, that noise you hear is the resounding crack in the old mythology...
...They buy up other farmers' land, they bulk up their holdings...
...CAFO dairy design is spare—white siding on the long walls of "freestall" barns where the cows are confined...
...In this fantasy, every farm is a clip art farm...
...Officials declared "the dust is harmless to humans and will not hurt plants or pets," although the bird population was "virtually wiped out," and cats, rabbits, and fish sickened and died in great numbers...
...to the draining of wetlands throughout the Midwest...
...The windmill is a fine design element, though...
...Farmers" receive state and federal subsidies, loan guarantees, and outright payments beyond other interest groups' dreams, payments that few taxpayers—if they knew—would support...
...In summer, animals fed outside on pasture...
...Through it all, agriculture claims it must do what it does...
...But who knows...
...And, more important, when lobbyists for industrial agriculture, such as the American Farm Rureau Federation, argue for CLIP ART FARM no regulation of CAFOs, they talk about family farms, the farmstead, and conjure up the same small-scale clip art image...
...and into the Maumee River, outletting into Lake Erie at Toledo...
...That's f—ing these days...
...The nationwide proliferation of animal factories has turned many livestock farmers into operations officers, business managers...
...many business people, small farmers, and more recently, church groups, have been working for regulation and inspection of the CAFOs...
...Bunkers are excavations with concrete walls on three sides...
...but even the interests of small farmers are ignored, as are those of niche farmers such as nursery growers, truck farmers, orchard growers, organic farmers...
...We stood in the middle of the road, and looked at the machines, the torn-up swath sixty feet wide, at the trees on fire, the smoke rolling, the mud, the whole mess...
...53 CLIP ART FARM in spite of billions of dollars for farm subsidies— seventy-one billion dollars over the last four years...
...Water, air, soil—the natural resources of sustainable farming and all life—have been segmented, wrenched apart, in industrialized agriculture...
...And maybe more powerful, "farmers" receive farm subsidies, a welfare system that dwarfs any assistance offered to anyone else in this country...
...American Agribusiness, Ag producer associations, and the American Farm Bureau Federation, in particular, lobby hard with the fantasy of the clip art farm...
...If you're outside a city, look around—it's not hard to tell when you're near animal confinement faciliCLIP ART FARM ties...
...So far, there have been no penalties...
...Big research funds come from big Ag, after all, not community environmental groups...
...Patriotic...
...If the milkhouse faces the road, maybe there are a few decorative bricks or tiles as a facade...
...And easy to oversize as well, like a sun shining over the farmstead...
...You'd think farmers were all Jesus, with the loaves and fishes, not human beings with self54 n DISSENT / Summer 2002 aggrandizing wishes...
...Seven CAFOs were ordered to stop the discharges...
...It's certainly no secret that farming has changed, consolidated, and concentrated...
...A clip art farm cannot pollute...
...On-the-job training in Hudson, Michigan—with ten thousand cows and two hundred million gallons of untreated, liquefied animal waste each year on the soils, in the watershed...
...The property rights of neighbors and the rights to a healthful environment are subsidiary to industrial f—ers' rights...
...Welfare mothers...
...Still, from the big Ag angle, all people living in rural areas, no matter how long they have lived there or even farmed there, are seen as encroaching on big Ag's agricultural zone...
...Manure "lagoons" are open-air, earthen, or concrete-lined pits that hold millions of gallons of animal waste, contaminated stormwater, and milkhouse wastewater...
...When the road crews piled my trees and heaps of others on two-story high piles and set them on fire, I called up the county road commissioner who lives down the road and who also happens to be a CAFO operator...
...In Hudson, the biggest big Ag guy received $923,980 in U.S...
...Cows used to graze in fields and deposit their waste here and there...
...Before European settlement, this part of Michigan was mostly woodland swamp...
...They may wear the John Deere cap, but they mostly don't drive the tractor...
...Because of water quality concerns, the Netherlands bought out many dairy operations and limited the size of others...
...Food may be cheap on the shelf, but look where we pay for it: milk price-support money, economic development money (a new $1.15 million dollar road to the door of one CAFO, here in Michigan), Environmental Quality Incentives Program (EQIP) grants, "conservation practice" money (lagoon, manure injector subsidies), production flexibility contracts, market loss assistance, loan deficiency payments...
...In winter, livestock were housed in the lower levels of the barns, and hay could be forked down to them through trapdoors or chutes...
...They'd have to acknowledge that farmers are human beings, who need, like the rest of humanity, not just voluntary guidelines, but laws...
...Rural communities suffer division and real loss, as people near CAFOs move out, rather than hazard the respiratory complications that are common among CAFO workers and families...
...They're "recommended...
...One CAFO operator, relocated from the Netherlands, wrote with enthusiasm about how farming was finally a living, rather than a way of life...
...Rural neighbors often have to live with worse-than-any-city conditions of air and water pollution...
...But these days, in many rural communities, farm is an fword, too...
...and on to the Tiffin River, where the town of Defiance takes its drinking water...
...Who are we to question Agriculture, which plants and grows our daily bread, feeds creatures to be our meat...
...The CAFOs use scrapers and huge quantities of water to pump all feces and urine into pits, lagoons as large as some lakes...
...Of the tensions in Hudson, one state cornmissioner of agriculture recently said, it was simply, "a conflict between farming and those who desire to move from urban to rural areas...
...Not one has been fined, even though one of the discharges sent four hundred thousand gallons of manure down a drain to Bear Creek...
...The lowest-tech feature of CAFOs—the one that least lends itself to image design—is the effluent holding pit...
...The livestock operations that surround my Midwest town, Hudson, Michigan, still call themselves farms...
...They're just business folks working the resources—some decent, some money-grubbing, most no more committed to preserving the environment than are mining companies topping mountains in West Virginia...
...If you're not big Ag, you're nobody...
...But as managers of industrial facilities, they hang on to that word farmer and the fantasy of the farm...
...Two years ago, the County Road Commission decided to widen and clear the entire right-of-way of trees and shrubs...
...Windmills date from the land-clearing settlement days of the nineteenth century, when they served as the energy source for pumping water...
...His family had lived and farmed in the area for seven generations...
...The legacies of wish and denial complicate current policies and research...
...So instead of farmland being preserved as open field space, all grain and greenery, which people imagine surrounding the clip art farm, in fact it can be fully developed and industrialized, with factories and effluent wasteholding systems...
...The Environmental Protection Agency estimates that 40 percent of the waters of the United States are too polluted for fishing or swimming...
...When their property values evaporate in the stench...
...No, they say, a farmer's farmwork on a farm is good, even godly...
...It's a system that has promoted big Ag ownership of thousands of acres, across several townships and two county lines a feudal shift, with the domain control of agricultural lands in a few hands...
...From the ground, the buildings are long, low, steel constructions, some of them a quarter mile long...
...farmers know best what is best...
...and, as big as it gets, the first and last word: "If we're going to feed the world...
...The American Farm Bureau Federation is one of the most powerful lobbies in Washington, fifteenth in Fortune's "Power 25" list for 2001, having moved up six slots just since 2000...
...THE ROAD WHERE I live is a dirt road like many in Michigan...
...Liquid manure steeps for months in the pits...
...Preserved" agricultural land can be used in any agriculturerelated way—huge buildings, lagoons, Ag processing plants...
...It's f—ing...
...Clay lagoons leak, concrete lagoons crack...
...Not many CAFOs have the comprehensive "nutrient management" plans that calculate how much or how little manure can be applied on particular soils with particular crops, to function as fertilizer, and not waste...
...So in Michigan, CAFOs continue to dig waste pits, and then more and deeper pits, even where the water table is near the surface...
...It is understandable why state agencies and their research arms, the land-grant universities like Michigan State University, have not jumped in to study watershed risks or public health issues...
...In the new rural landscape, it's a shock to see how far big Ag has booted itself from the natural world...
...Fouled air...
...Liquified manure stinks...
...Slackers...
...Plenty of attention goes to the corporate guns—Cargill, ADM, Monsanto, Tyson, Smithfield—in articles like William Greider's "The Last Farm Crisis" (Nation, November 20, 2000) and in testimony before Congress from vertical integration analysts like Peter Carstensen, who talk about agricultural antitrust issues and concerns about a "lawless" market economy...
...Sixty percent of that pollution comes from agriculture, and with the liquefaction of manure, CAFOs have become the principal contributor to agricultural pollution...
...They hire low-wage laborers or sub-contractors, like the Tail-End haulers with their tankers, to truck manure to remote fields...
...We pay all this for what, cheap cheese...
...For years the state claimed it did not need to comply with the federal Clean Water Act requirement for a permit system because it had a tough "zero discharge" policy...
...Other industrialized countries in the world, such as France and Japan, are willing to pay more for food to protect their water and to protect family operations...
...A surprise EPA inspection of one facility here (one of several federal inspections because Michigan has refused to comply with the Clean Water Act's permit system for CAFOs) found floor drains directly, and illegally, connected to field tiles, which discharged into a nearby stream...
...When I look down this road," he said, "I see a brighter future...
...CAFOs here have not taken the simplest, cheapest steps in pollution prevention: capping tiles when manure is sprayed, monitoring drains...
...And why not...
...Sustainable" agriculture is a subdivision of most university departments of agriculture, as if only some, not all, agriculture can be sustainable...
...When designers draw an "Ag" image, they cluster and stylize the same farm elements that kids draw...
...What you never see at CAFOs—not from the road, and not even from the air—are the things most people picture when they think of "farm...
...My family doctor, who lived around the corner from the largest facility, left last fall...
...nobody inspects the construction...
...This is the new rural landscape...
...Farmers have managed to walk on water for about a hundred years—literally, in Michigan, by draining wetlands...
...Everything's voluntary...
...Eventually the liquified manure will be trucked or pumped or injected or "spray-irrigated," as they say, onto fields...
...The private interest in the profitability of industrial agriculture often overwhelms the public interest in environmental protection...
...That's all in the past, of course, but so are windmills...
...If you fly across the country, look down and notice the metallic glints, the clustered lines and rectangles, reflections off the long metal roofs of the thousands and thousands of animal factories our taxes support, the waste pits we subsidize...
...The myth isn't flimsy...
...or "If we're going to beat world hunger...
...This DISSENT / Summer 2002...
...Most are dairies, and they're all huge, all built within the last few years...
...More than one million dollars to one f—er last year...
...In fact, in Michigan, the state Department of Agriculture and MSU's Ag programs have been instrumental in promoting industrial livestock facilities, in particular the freestall barn and liquefied waste systems for dairies...
...Here, all of the cows are confined yearround, and all the waste is collected in one place...
...Welfare farmers...
...In the new rural landscape, however, silos do not appear...
...Agricultural DISSENT / Summer 2002 n 51 CLIP ART FARM pollutants and pathogens, excess nutrients, and antibiotic-resistant bacteria threaten water quality across the country...
...ACROSS THE COUNTRY, agricultural runoff, of soils, pesticides, and manure, is the major polluter of rivers and streams...
...PDR money can cycle back, buying up more small farms—more land for more PDR money, or to sell or lease to the CAFOs...
...It's been a steep learning curve," one Ag official admitted at a local information session...
...Infallibility is a difficult claim to make for anybody...
...Generally Accepted Agricultural Management Practices are "guidelines...
...You will see bulldozers, tiling machines, the bunkers with black plastic, the manure tankers...
...Milking systems are inspected, but there's no regulation or inspection of the tail-end systems...
...Black plastic held down with tires usually covers the bunkers, one of the low-tech details at these state-of-the-art facilities...
...You will not see animals...
...You hear it all the time around here, an outrage to some, a boast from big Ag: "Farmers know how to farm the government...
...Anything zoned as Agriculture is treated by industrial Ag as a safe zone for the practices they please, no matter who is affected, displaced, harmed, or sickened...
...And under those roofs, the factory meat and milk we pay for through the nose...
...Hay, corn, and other feed are chopped, then dumped and hauled in and out with front-end loaders...
...to the ongoing irrigation of semi-arid lands for farming, depleting aquifers...
...During one discharge, E. coli bacteria in a county drain reached 130,000 colonies/100 ml, a contamination level 130 times the acceptable level for partial body contact...
...In 2000 alone, he received federal checks for $300,473...
...Environmentalists are accused of caring more about water than people, and dismissed for that...
...Around a small farm, of course, freedom to operate the farm business makes sense, and is rarely a nuisance by any definition...
...She has published numerous articles on land use, drainage, and watershed issues...
...Adam may have been booted out of the perfect farm, the Garden of Eden, but the clip art farm constructs itself as an alternative (a fallen farm, perhaps, but in a farmer's control—finally...
...Farm-friendly Congress and most state legislatures listen to big Ag interests with devotion and little skepticism...
...he didn't need a permit from anybody to construct his 1.25 million gallon waste pit...
...Some complied, some didn't...
...Elsewhere in the United States, farm subsidy payments reached the multi-millions for individual producers...
...In the language of law, they're Confined Animal Feeding Operations (CAFOs) with a thousand plus Animal Units—that is, seven hundred or more confined cows—and open-air waste pits that hold millions of gallons of liquefied feces and urine...
...they can't store the quantities of feed required in confinement facilities...
...Seventy and more years ago, loose hay for feed and straw for bedding were lifted into the mows by a system of knives and pulleys...
...The numbers add up...
...IN FACT, the clip art farm elements are thirty to a hundred and thirty years old, anachronisms in most rural areas of the Midwest...
...Most Hudson area CAFOs were built by the same Ag construction company— a company spun off with MSU Ag expertise and affiliated with the largest CAFO development corporation...
...Farms, even the factory f—s, are hallowed and haloed...
...How far this f—ing industry has fallen...
...The myth of the farm, envisioned in the clip art farm, holds powerful sway, as if the goodness of a creative God and all his righteousness had been shifted to human farmer hands...
...CAFOs use concrete "bunker" silos—they just call them bunkers...
...Whenever liquid pools on the surface of Michigan soil, it quickly drains through these underground tile systems, mostly plastic now, and all that water— clean or contaminated—flows directly to streams...
...Sprayed onto fields, it can flow on top of the ground, or seep through the soil with its contaminants, entering field drainage tiles and streams...
Vol. 49 • July 2002 • No. 3
