Bigger isn’t always better
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CAFOs — 970, with a total of more than 3.4 million hogs — behind Iowa, Minnesota, and North Carolina. Though Illinois has a relatively small number of beef feedlots compared to no. 1 Nebraska, our state still ranks 7 th with 139 facilities, and more than 124,000 head. The modern system involves raising large numbers of livestock in relatively small spaces: according to guidelines promulgated by the Environmental Protection Agency, any hog farm bigger than 2,500 head, beef operation larger than 1,000 head, or dairy farm with more than 700 cows counts as a CAFO. The animals are mostly kept in sheds, in small pens or crates on concrete floors that have slats to allow excrement to accumulate in an underground pit or be piped outside into massive holding ponds, called lagoons.

In 2006, the Illinois Environmental Protection Agency observed 63 livestock facilities using underground pits, 28 using lagoons, and 13 using holding ponds. However, these numbers reflect only the facilities IEPA inspectors visited; there’s no publicly-available list of the number or location of CAFOs in Illinois.

There’s something undeniably unnatural about animals spending their lives indoors, in such absurdly large numbers, in such obscenely cramped quarters. David Kirby, a New York Times reporter now writing a book on CAFOs, has visited many factory farms and says even the “model” CAFOs are disturbing.

“It’s still depressing, I’m sorry. Pigs and cows and chickens want to be outside,” Kirby says. “Man’s laws can’t change nature’s laws.” But Hudson — one of the three main characters in Kirby’s book — doesn’t waste her time talking about the health and comfort of the animals.

“The Farm Bureau likes to call me PETA,” she says, referring to the radical group People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals. “They have their place in society, but I’m not PETA.” Instead, Hudson focuses mainly on the effects factory farms have on human beings, and their first awareness of the problem usually involves the smell. In certain weather conditions, a motorist speeding down the interstate can catch a whiff of a CAFO. The most obvious problem with putting so many animals on such relatively small acreage is that the animals produce more excrement than the land can absorb. Corporate farmers recognize the problem by drawing up so-called “nutrient management plans” with maps showing where the poop will be distributed — usually on the fields of cash crop farmers willing to accept the fertilizer. Some factory farms use systems that inject the excrement into the soil; most use simpler sprinkler-type systems that simply spray animal excrement around in a circle.

But the complicated calculus of “NMPs,” as they’re called in the biz, can go awry if, for example, rainy weather raises the level of the poop lagoons at the same time fields are too saturated to absorb liquid waste. Such dilemmas lead to corner-cutting like over-application of fertilizer, spraying beyond promised boundaries, and pumping raw animal sewage into waterways to relieve the pressure on swollen lagoons.

During a particularly wet season in 2001, Hudson got a tip that the nearby dairy was pumping millions of gallons of waste from a lagoon into a creek. She took a friend up on his standing offer to ride in his private airplane, and took her camera and two TV news crews along.

She has aerial photos of a pumper posed next to a monstrous river of liquid dung. “It looks like they’re trying to suck up the Atlantic Ocean with a straw,” she says.