DaytonDailyNews.com

Explosive megafarm growth often pits communities against farmers

By Mike Wagner and Dale Dempsey
Dayton Daily News

EECH GROVE, Ky. | The two trucks carrying the chicken carcasses slowed as they passed the small cemetery where Bernadine Edwards was burying her husband, Billy.

The stench was picked up by a light breeze and filtered its way through the small memorial service a few hundred feet from the rows of long silver chicken houses.

"Even after he was in the ground they couldn’t let us have no peace," said Edwards, whose house sits on a hill across from the cemetery and the 16 chicken houses owned by Tyson Foods Inc. "It’s like a war down here between people who think we need those damn chicken houses and those of us who want them to go away."

Since her husband died in 1999, Edwards said she has been constantly harassed by workers who operate the chicken farm across the road: Her dog was poisoned, nails and dead chickens were left in her driveway, someone pounded on the outside walls of her home late at night and a bullet was fired through her kitchen window.

Stirman Adams, the man who runs the 16 chicken houses for Tyson, said no one from his family or any of his workers has ever harassed Edwards.

"I’m not saying those things didn’t happen to her, but we had nothing to do with any of it," said Adams. "I knew the memorial service for her husband was going on that day, so we called and told everyone to not bring feed trucks or anything down that road."

The explosive growth of megafarms — big farms housing thousands of chickens, hogs, turkeys, beef and dairy cattle — pits neighbor against neighbor, farmer against farmer and sometimes family member against family member.

Turf wars are erupting in dozens of states as giant livestock farms increasingly bump up against smaller farms and sprawling housing subdivisions. States are scrambling to write rules and enact standards, but anger is building on both sides about the impact big livestock is having on the environment and the rural way of life.

"I’ve seen serious riffs," said Don Stull, professor of anthropology at the University of Kansas. "There have been shootings over (megafarms) in Kentucky. This shows you the level of anger that’s present in these communities."

One woman's war
Mary Gibson has been angry for 14 years — ever since Park Farms Inc. began raising 100,000 broiler chickens across the road from her Canton horse farm. Gibson has complained of flies, respiratory problems and assorted other grievances. Chemicals from the farm burned her dog, she said; mice ran up and down the blue drapes that hang in her well-appointed living room.

"It is a lifetime of woe, living next to a CAFO," she said, using the acronym for Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations or megafarms.

But Gibson also knows how to raise a fuss. Just ask James A. Pastore Sr.

"She complained from day one," said Pastore, whose family owns Park Farms. "If she makes an official complaint, the agencies have to come out and investigate. Mary knows that and uses it."

Files of Gibson's letters and complaints stuff the record drawers of the Ohio Environmental Protection Agency, the Department of Natural Resources, the Department of Agriculture, state and local health departments, township trustee offices, zoning boards, the Ohio General Assembly, courtrooms, the Farm Bureau, environmental groups and local newspapers.

She has stacks of documents, letters and information on large-scale farming operations, dating back to when Park Farms located across the street.

Gibson blames her neighbors for everything from the dead trees on her property to the rats and mice that scurry under the floor boards and climb up the drapes in her living room.

Pastore and the Stark County health department say that the rodents came from the Gibson's horse barn — a charge that brings Gibson out of her chair.

"There is feed in the barn, and I've never seen a rodent run from a known source of food to where there isn't any," she said.

Gibson saves most of her venom for state regulators. She said citizens have little or no redress against bad behavior because regulators fail to closely monitor the farms.

She discovered some of the limits in the Ohio law when she sought information on Park Farms' waste plans.

Gibson wrote Ohio EPA Director Christopher Jones in October 1999, seeking the logs Park Farms maintains on its poultry waste.

In his response, Jones told Gibson the EPA did not have those records because the farm wouldn't provide them.

Jones wrote: "Ohio EPA can only enforce the requirements that apply to these facilities, which as you know are limited at this time."

The Ohio Department of Agriculture, which took over regulating large farms in August, hopes to clarify the regulations. The department is requiring all large operations — including Park Farms — to re-file for new permits.

But for Gibson, the switch to a new regulator just means she has to change the address on her letters to the state.

"I'm not doing this for me," she said. "I'm doing it for all of us, so we know we're eating well and can breathe the air."

Pastore said his family has always run a clean operation. Like most farm operators, the Pastores were small farmers long before becoming megafarmers.

James Pastore's father started his chicken business in 1946 as a storefront operation, selling to the German, Italian and Jewish families in Canton. The company grew into a chicken processing operation, buying birds from local farmers around Canton.

But as those families started selling off their farms in the postwar suburban boom, Park Farms had to look for new sources of chickens, turning to West Virginia and Georgia, Pastore explained.

In the late 1960s, Pastore's suppliers started to market their chickens directly, cutting out the middleman. Pastore had to find a new supply.

"We had 300 employees," he said. "We saw the handwriting on the wall. Our suppliers had become our competition. We felt we had two choices: just quit or become aggressive. We had good people working for us and paid high wages."

So, in 1988 Pastore bought a parcel of land on Ohio 44 — close enough to Canton to have water and sewer service — invested $15 million and went into the industrial farm business. It was the perfect location, except that it was across the road from Mary Gibson's farm.

Gibson said her daughter Elizabeth won't bring her two daughters to visit because of chemicals she thinks are coming from the chicken operation. She said that she and her husband, David, returned from a vacation in Florida and almost immediately started having respiratory problems.

She's also had trouble selling her property.

"We've tried to sell it for market value, but there are no takers," she said. "It was not a cheap property when we bought it."

Battles about megafarms are growing because of complaints from neighbors like Gibson, said Susan Studer-King of the Ohio Environmental Council. Studer-King has been following the issue for four years and sits on the agriculture department's rule making committee.

"My phone rings off the hook every day from citizens and groups wanting to know how these farms operate and what they can do about them," Studer-King said. "I've worked with over a dozen citizens groups and the pattern is the same; first there is a lot of enthusiasm with rallies and organization, then frustration sets in."

Farmers fight back
In the rolling green hills of Chatham County, N.C., Timothy Craig and his wife Wendy had a simple choice when their plans to open a farm with 5,000 hogs was attacked by neighbors and community officials — give up or fight.

They chose to fight for more than six years.

The Craigs bought the farm in 1994 but didn’t stock their five covered barns with hogs until February 2000. During that time, the Craigs were embroiled in a battle with neighbors and the court system.

Their 200-acre farm is more than a mile from the nearest road and has no nearby neighbors except for a chicken farmer. Their manure lagoon spans more than an acre and can hold five million gallons of hog waste, but there was no evidence the Craigs were a threat to the local environment.

That didn’t matter much to local neighbors.

"If you let one of those things in, then a whole bunch more are on their way," said one Chatham County resident who opposed the Craig farm but didn’t want to be identified. "It wasn’t personal, we just didn’t want all those hogs around here."

North Carolina, after enduring years of environmental problems with hog farms, has strict regulations for any farm with at least 250 hogs. The state’s rules bar waste lagoons or a hog house from being within 1,500 feet of a home, 2,500 feet of a school, church or hospital and 500 feet of any well for a public water system. The state has had a moratorium on new hog operations since 2000.

But Chatham County wanted to enact even tougher regulations on hog farmers, and the Craigs were the main targets of the proposed rules.

"They didn’t want us here," said Craig, 39, and a father of three kids. "If you can’t put a hog farm up here where can you put one? We have never had a problem with our operation, but some people will do anything to try and drive livestock farmers away."

The Craigs’ court case went all the way to the North Carolina Supreme Court, which earlier this year ruled that Chatham County's strict hog farm regulations were unlawful.

The victory meant that the Craigs could keep their hog farm and the state’s 100 counties couldn’t pile more regulations on hog farmers. But the end of the court case hasn't brought unity between people in this small farming community.

"It’s a social, economic and cultural divide between people who were here and the people operating farms now," said Tommy Emmerson, president of the local agribusiness council and a friend of the Craigs. "Some people here tried to lynch Tim’s farm, but they didn’t win."

‘Paul's Lake’
Megafarm operators often complain of lost income from meddling neighbors, particularly when opponents go to court to block expansion plans.

But sometimes the opponents, too, can suffer financially.

In March 1953, Paul and Treva Reeser bought a 69-acre farm east of Greenville, dug out three lakes, and opened a private fishing and camping area dubbed "Paul's Lake."

"It was Mom and Dad's lifelong dream," said Tom Reeser of Dayton. "It was stocked with bass and catfish."

In April 1983, Weaver Bros. chicken farms bought an adjacent 115 acre farm and began a laying and egg-washing operation. By the summer of 1984, three chicken houses were producing more than a million pounds of chicken manure and egg wash wastewater.

Paul's Lake was never the same.

In July 1985, a neighbor told the Reesers, "Hey, you ought to go see your lake."

As Tom Reeser recalls, the largest of the three lakes was covered with a green scum.

"The fish were sticking their heads up through the scum, trying to get air," he said.

The result was a massive fish kill that devastated the fishing camp and set off a decade-long legal battle. The Reesers believed that the contaminants, mostly nitrogen and phosphorus, came from the Weaver Bros. chicken operation.

In 1988, a Darke County court agreed and awarded the Reesers $200,000 in damages. However, the case was appealed on five counts and the appeals court reversed three of them. It was remanded back to the Darke County Court in 1990. Weaver Bros. and Reeser reached an out-of-court settlement before it was retried.

"The property had to be appraised as farmland, and the state statutes said you can't be awarded more than the property is worth," Reeser said. "But the lakes were worth far more than the land. The estimated cost of restoring the lake was $2 million."

Reeser said he has spent $250,000 of his own money on that lawsuit. In August of this year Reeser sued Weaver Brothers again about another fish kill. This time, he said 90 percent of the lake was covered with chicken manure.

Tim Weaver, president of Weaver Bros., said the company is getting a bad rap.

"Reeser has filed over 60 complaints and the EPA and Soil and Water have not found anything we've done wrong," he said. "What other company has had to go through 20 years of scrutiny and allegations? It is very unfair. We go out of our way to be good corporate citizens. It has been kind of emotional for me and my family."

Weaver Brothers was started in 1929 by Weaver's grandfather, in the heart of what has always been chicken country in Darke County.

"It's why we have Poultry Days every summer," Weaver said.

Like others in the chicken and egg business, the company had to grow or go out of business, according to Weaver. "There is a lot of competition in this state with foreign companies coming in," he said. "We had to become more vertically integrated just to survive."

Weaver said he attempted to make peace with Reeser.

"I went down and talked to him, welcomed him to thoroughly investigate our operation and said we can work this out," Weaver said. "A year later he sued me."

The ‘2000 Mouse Event’
Howard MacGregor is surrounded by hundreds of apple and peach trees as he whittles a real Texas longhorn on his back porch in Dawson Springs, Ky.

The 62-year-old MacGregor has the fruit orchard and life he always wanted, but it was nearly destroyed two years ago by thousands of mice who invaded his property after running out of food at the two chicken houses across the street.

"The fields looked like waves moving in the water because there were so many mice moving across," MacGregor said. "They ate up a lot of my fruit trees and damn near put me out of business because the customers were afraid to come up here and buy any peaches. I had mice running over my customers' feet."

In what is known as the "2000 Mouse Event," MacGregor and other neighbors living across from two breeder houses were overrun by mice after the houses were cleaned. When a chicken house is cleaned the feed bins are also emptied, shutting off the food supply for the mice. Mice associate light with food and run toward any building that has lights on.

Unfortunately for MacGregor, that included his property.

"I would set up 20 mouse traps and within 15 minutes they were filled," he said. "And if I didn’t change them right away the mice would start eating the dead mice."

But there's a twist to this confrontation between the people on opposite sides of the fence post. MacGregor considers the O’Reilly family, the people who take care of the 22,000 chickens, good neighbors. And the O’Reillys feel the same way about the MacGregors.

"The thing with the mice was bad, but there haven’t been any other problems. They are real nice people," said Steven O’Reilly, who runs the two houses with his mom. "I’ve eaten some of his peaches and apples. They’re good."

MacGregor said he would rather not live next to a big livestock farm, but the chicken houses haven’t ruined life on his orchard.

"No one really likes chicken houses or the other big animal farms," MacGregor said. "But we have to learn to live with them."

But an hour's drive up the Pennyrile Parkway in western Kentucky, Bernadine Edwards and Stirmann Adams continue to live in conflict.

"There is the horrible smell, the flies that are everywhere and the mice that get in my walls," said Edwards, a school bus driver who said she refuses to move off of her property. "They spray (manure) as thick as they can get it right on the fields in front of my house."

The dispute for Edwards can even be found within her own family, which rarely gets together anymore for Sunday evening dinners. Her son Vince became a grower for Tyson in 1998 and now operates 20 chicken houses.

"I know she doesn’t like what I do, but I do things the right way. Not all of the growers do that," said Vince. "I don’t come to dinners as much any more because I’m busy running those houses and tending to my family, not because I don’t like my mom."

Adams said that Edwards and a few other people have tried to make life as miserable as possible for his operation, which handles 400,000 chickens when the houses are full.

"Food is got to be raised for the American people," he said. "If you can find a better way to do it you could make a fortune, but right now this is the best way out there."

[From the Dayton Daily News: 12.04.2002]