HOGGING THE PROFITS - Foodopoly: The Battle Over the Future of Food and Farming in America - page 108

Klicker told the governor at a listening session in February 2011: “We don't need less environmental reg-
ulations. We need local control, stronger permitting standards, and tough new fines and penalties to crack
down on factory farm polluters.” 27
Klicker, a longtime ICCI leader and factory farm fighter, makes no bones about how he feels about it.
He told the Burlington Hawk Eye , “My feeling is, if a farmer is raising hogs in a confinement, they prob-
ably need to be visited by [Iowa's Department of Human Services], because they probably have kids in the
closet.” 28
Although Iowa has the largest number of hogs in the country—almost 18 million were counted in the
last agricultural census—ICCI is continuing to successfully oppose the construction of new and expanding
facilities. 29 A five-thousand-head Cargill operation was stopped in Adair County in August 2011; the ICCI
staff worked with their membership to “educate” and “influence” the Board of Supervisors to recommend
to the DNR that the permit be denied. ICCI won 2 to 1. Next it invited DNR staff to the county and organ-
ized a meeting that included many of the neighbors of the proposed facility. In an unusually quick win, the
DNR denied the permit without the Board of Supervisors appealing.
Iowa is not the only state where activists are fighting factory hog farms. Rhonda Perry, executive dir-
ector of the MRCC, has been fighting the same types of battles in her state. She and her husband, Roger
Allison, one of the founders of MRCC, have spent the last twenty-five years facing down the pork industry
and some of the other largest corporate agribusinesses in the world, and against all odds they have won
a significant number of rounds. Both were raised on family farms in Missouri, coming of age during the
farm crisis of the mid-1980s. They met and married during the early years of their struggle for family farm
justice.
In 1985 Roger Allison's parents faced foreclosure on their family farm. At that time, it was the federal
government that was keeping the prices farmers received much lower than the cost of doing business, even
though the cost of fuel and other inputs had increased dramatically. USDA's Farm Home Administration,
the lender of last resort for farmers (since renamed the Farm Service Administration), was holding hun-
dreds of auctions on the steps of local courthouses, selling farms for pennies on the dollar.
Allison decided to fight back through litigation and political organizing. His family sued the USDA
for the illegal foreclosure and won; the lawsuit was eventually part of a large class-action suit against the
agency, which finally halted the unlawful foreclosures.
Eventually Allison and Perry were able to buy Allison's parents' farm from the USDA to add to their
own. Today, besides continuing to fight for family farmers at MRCC, they raise row crops and seventy-five
cattle in a cow-calf operation, and also help run Patchwork Family Farms, a co-op of fifteen independent
family hog farmers who sell directly to consumers.
Perry says that before the onslaught of factory hog farms, the state had been well suited to small-scale
and diverse family farms. Hogs were a good supplement to farm income, because they mature quickly, and
if prices dropped, a farmer could just grow fewer hogs the next time around. When Perry was a girl, hogs
were ready to go to market frequently, and her family would call the five places they could sell to, and then
choose the one with the best price. Today there is almost no place in Missouri that an independent farmer
can take hogs to market: the giant integrator Smithfield has all but taken over.
Today Missouri is a tragic case study of the impacts of corporate hog farming—a sad story reflected
statistically in a loss of farms that happened overnight. According to the USDA, the number of small,
family-farmed hog operations in Missouri dropped from 23,000 in 1985 to 3,000 large ones in 2007, a de-
cline of 87 percent. While the number of farms has declined dramatically, the number of hogs grown in the
state has remained constant, with 95 percent raised in operations that have more than two thousand anim-
als. Meanwhile, the consumer price of pork has increased 71 percent between 1985 and today, while the
farmer's share has decreased 49 percent. 30