Hightower rallies crowd against corporate agriculture

Anita Weier  —  4/05/2008 5:28 pm

Progressive author and columnist Jim Hightower energized a gathering of 160 people at a conference about the impacts of large livestock operations in Wisconsin with homespun humor and sharp wit.

Praising the group of farmers, environmentalists and concerned citizens who spent a beautiful spring Saturday holed up in the Marriott Madison West discussing impacts of massive dairy, hog and chicken farms, Hightower urged them to pursue a united fight against big agriculture.

"We hear that America is a conservative country, that we are a cautious people, that we are a fearful people, that we march in lockstep to the corporate order," he said. "That is not so. We are a bunch of mutts and mavericks. That is who built America."

It is possible to "escape the corporate tentacles" and be something more than workers and consumers, Hightower told the group.

"You, who are taking on the CAFO (Confined Animal Feeding Operation) giants, you are showing the guts and gumption to pioneer and to challenge the conventional wisdom, to confront the corporate order, to crash the bureaucratic barriers," he said.

CAFOs are defined in state law as operations with at least 1,000 "animal units - 700 milking cows, 100,000 pigs or 100,000 layer chickens - that store or spread manure.

The fight against such operations will not be easy, Hightower said, because opponents are challenging the money and power of the agribusiness establishment and its effect on politicians. He added that those present should follow the example of three Wisconsin groups - the Organic Valley Family of Farms, Union Cab and Fighting Bob Fest - that he said all developed their own way of taking back power for the people.

"You are trying to change some 60-odd years of ignorance and arrogance, avarice that have brought us an industrialized, conglomeratized, subsidized and globalized food and agricultural system that is unsustainable," said the former Texas agriculture commissioner. "It is a system that runs roughshod over family farmers, runs roughshod over our soil and water, over small business and rural communities, over food and industry workers, over consumers, over food itself, over our people's values of fairness and justice and opportunity. The agribusiness powers get to thinking they are the top dogs and we are just a bunch of fire hydrants out here in the countryside."

Referring to huge farms with thousands of animals as "the concentration camps of agriculture," Hightower accused corporate agriculture of turning food production into an assembly line using genetic engineering, antibiotics, sex hormones, irradiation and cloning so that "every cow and every tomato will have the same texture, taste and composition."

Farm families are not going gently into the night, but are being subjected to a long-term carefully plotted mugging, he alleged.

"No political party will solve this situation," Hightower said. "We've got to do it ourselves at the grassroots level. You have shown the way - the sustainable way that unites farm families with consumers, with environmentalists and with local economies."

The idea of a sustainable food economy is powerful and cannot be stopped, but those working toward it must educate themselves and be organized, Hightower urged.

"You have to come together. You've got to be vigilant. But I think we can have faith in what is coming. The people of this country want good food. They want a sustainable system. They want the common good," added Hightowner, who will also speak Sunday at the Barrymore Theatre at 7 p.m. for a $5 entry fee and has written a book titled "Swim Against the Current: Even a Dead Fish Can Go with the Flow."

Others at the conference added scientific arguments and statistics to Hightower's provocative speech, which was sponsored by Midwest Environmental Advocates and the law firm of Garvey, McNeil & McGillivray.

Attorneys Peter McKeever and Jamie Saul spoke about they called weak state regulation that relies on required waste management plans but has very little enforcement behind it. Others noted cases where E. coli has entered wells because of manure-contaminated groundwater.

State law has severely limited the power of local governments to prevent new or expanded large livestock operations, Saul said.

But Gordon Stevenson, chief of the runoff management division for the state Department of Natural Resources, said small farm operations cause more manure pollution problems than large farms.

"Only 180 of Wisconsin's 30,000 livestock and poultry operations are CAFOs," he said, and most are owned by family farmers. Yet he said a single CAFO - farms with at least 1,000 animal units - has as much pollution potential as Sun Prairie would if it did not treat sewage.

Anita Weier  —  4/05/2008 5:28 pm