The 2002 Farm Bill conservation title spent hundreds of millions of dollars on confinement animal factory feedlots (CAFOs), not just to clean up existing pollution but also to fund new feedlots and expand old ones without accounting for their overall impacts on the environment. Under the Environmental Quality Incentives Program (EQIP) corporate feedlots are eligible for up to $450,000 (75 percent of costs) to build storage facilities for animal sewage. Massive dairies, mega–hog farms, and other confinement feeding factories are actually livestock gulags housing thousands (often tens of thousands) of animals in a single operation, producing an output of wastes equivalent to small cities. Brother David Andrews of the National Catholic Rural Life Conference has described the problem as “a fecal flood.” It’s an ironic—and unsavory—twist to the notion of a Farm Bill “gravy train,” and a slap in the face to any taxpayer who truly cares about conservation.

Thanks to hefty campaign contributions from agribusiness lobbies and the support of a few nonprofit pollution control advocacy organizations, precious Farm Bill conservation dollars are being diverted to build and fortify manure lagoons on corporate feedlots. Meanwhile, three out of every four landowners applying for help to protect and restore wetlands or idle farmlands is turned away due to a lack of funding. The issue brings to light a number of important concerns about the unwholesome interconnections between large livestock operations and Farm Bill subsidy programs.

1. Taxpayer-funded CAFO infrastructure. While enhancing water and air quality are indeed goals in the public’s interest, should taxpayer funds be used to build the infrastructure for agribusiness to comply with regulations? Construction loans and other financing mechanisms are one thing. These cost-share programs are corporate giveaways.

2. Compliance is not conservation. Misconstruing end-of-pipe pollution compliance as conservation is twisted logic. Unfortunately, some politicians and even a few environmental organizations believe that the only way massive hog farms, beef, and poultry factory feedlots, and dairies will only comply with regulations is if we pay them to do so. A 2006 study by the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization reveals that animal factory feedlots are a major contributor to climate change, generating even more greenhouse emissions than automobiles, and causing land and water degradation on a global scale.

3. CAFOs and energy production. CAFOs are now being linked to alternative energy in a few ways. Dry grind grain-based ethanol mills depend on feedlots to consume distiller grains (protein by-products) that are not used in biofuel production. Methane digesters, which convert animal waste into combustible fuels and residual solids and liquids, are being installed on feedlots to deal with excessive manure output. Methane digesters are an extremely valuable technology, particularly for small- and medium-scale operations, but they shouldn’t be used to justify nasty confinement feedlots. Proponents are calling this green power, but it is clearly more brown than clean.

4. CAFOs and the Vegetable-Industrial Complex. In the fall of 2006, an E. coli outbreak was traced to spinach farms in California’s Salinas Valley. Writing in the New York Times, (October 15, 2006) Michael Pollan reports that “the lethal strain of E. coli known as 0157:H7, responsible for this latest outbreak of food poisoning, was unknown before 1982; it is believed to have evolved in the gut of feedlot cattle.” Feedlot agriculture, writes Pollan, produces more than a billion tons of animal manure per year, and it often ends up in places it shouldn’t, such as groundwater, irrigation systems, and industrial spinach fields. As this book goes to press, it has been unconfirmed whether the E. coli contamination occurred in washing facilities, through field applications of raw manure, or other avenues.

5. End-of-pipe Band-Aids versus integrated livestock systems. The only healthful long-term solution to the CAFO crisis is a large-scale shift away from grain-fed confinement facilities and toward perennial, grass pastured integrated livestock farms. Perhaps not surprisingly, manure lagoons have been well funded during the appropriations and budget reconciliation process of the 2002 Farm Bill. Meanwhile, the Conservation Security Program, intended to reward diversified livestock operations and other environmentally responsible farms, has seen its budget slashed (flat-funded) by nearly 80 percent.


Excerpted with permission from Food Fight: The Citizen’s Guide to a Food and Farm Bill, by Daniel Imhoff, Published by Watershed Media and Distributed by UC Press, 2007.