Karen Hudson has become a reluctant expert on the consequences of concentrated animal feeding operations

Karen Hudson didn’t know what to think when she first learned that factory farming was coming to her town. Elmwood, Ill., is a small but prosperous bedroom community about 20 miles west of Peoria, and a retired Caterpillar worker who owned some acreage there wanted to construct a “swine finishing” facility to raise hogs, a few thousand at a time, for the North Carolina-based pork-producing giant Murphy Family Farms. Hudson attended an informational meeting at Elmwood High School, and asked one of the guest speakers to send her more information.

A few days later, she received a book in the mail: Understanding the Impacts of Large-Scale Swine Production. She curled up in the window seat in one corner of her kitchen, read the entire 200-page scientific study in one night, and resolved to do everything she could to try to stop the hog farm. That was in 1996, and Hudson’s life has never been the same. At the time, she didn’t foresee that this one simple decision would soon turn her home phone into a national hotline, her guest room into a cramped office, and her basement into a library of scholarly studies and manure management manuals. She couldn’t have predicted that she would find herself making speeches at scientific gatherings like the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Health, or that she would be interviewed by media ranging from the Washington Post to Forbes magazine to Japanese Daily American. She didn’t imagine that she would network with the likes of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. (chairman of the Waterkeeper Alliance) and Farm Aid founder Willie Nelson, or that she would tour pig farms in Poland. She certainly never dreamed that, despite her fear of flying, she would learn to lean out of airplane windows to take pictures of massive animal excrement spills.

No, at the time, she just wanted to keep this one hog farm away, and she was only halfway successful at that. With some likeminded neighbors, Hudson — who lives on a corn and soybean farm that has been in her husband Rocky’s family for five generations — started a group called Families Against Rural Messes, or FARM, hoping the catchy name would help generate publicity.

One of their first initiatives took advantage of the annual Spoon River Valley Scenic Drive: FARM hosted an informational booth featuring a map showing other nearby communities where factory farms were in the planning phases, and a roll of butcher paper people could sign to ask then-Gov. Jim Edgar to intervene.

Hundreds of people signed the petition. “It was the most exhausting thing I’ve ever done in my life,” Hudson says. Murphy Family Farms abandoned its Elmwood site, citing potential drainage problems, and moved a little ways north to Knox County. The Elmwood property owner, however, brought in a different factory farm — a 1,250-head dairy operation.

Over the next few years, Inwood Dairy changed hands several times and is now called New Horizons, with a herd Hudson estimates at 1,600. The dairy has had numerous notices of violation, and in 2001 created a massive manure spill, purposely dumping 2 million gallons of waste into a ravine as a precaution to prevent the overflow of the dairy’s 41-million-gallon lagoon. No longer her sole focus, the nearby dairy has nevertheless provided Hudson with a constant reminder of why she quit her job with CILCO to work full time educating people about the hazards of industrial agriculture.

“I got bit by the bug of this-is-not-right,” she says.

Factory farming or industrial agriculture — whichever term you want to use, it sounds like an oxymoron. The image conjured up by the words “factory” or “industrial” are fundamentally opposite to the pastoral image associated with the words “farming” or “agriculture.”

But these mega-farms have managed to change animal husbandry into a process reminiscent of an assembly line, with animals artificially inseminated, raised in age-segregated environments (to prevent young animals from passing disease to older animals, and vice versa), fed a diet of supplements to speed their development, and then shipped off to a slaughterhouse without ever getting to roll in the hay or root around in the mud. Controlling the process “from semen to cellophane” is big ag’s mantra.

Illinois has more of these concentrated feeding operations, or CAFOs, than most states. Using U.S. Department of Agriculture’s 2002 census, Food & Water Watch, a nonprofit consumer advocacy organization based in Washington D.C., ranked Illinois as having one of the highest concentrations of factory farms in the U.S., with the 4th highest number of swine

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