Bigger isn’t always better
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CAFO owner. In a suit settled in 1999, Durkee agreed to pay a fine of more than $5,000 for a manure spill that resulted in a fish kill, and promised to build a new manure storage facility and mitigate odors.
Jane McBride, the assistant attorney general assigned to such cases, acknowledges that she doesn’t have the legal tools to always satisfy citizens who call her office complaining about existing or impending CAFOs.
“I don’t think it’s any secret these are extremely controversial proceedings and there is dissatisfaction on all sides,” McBride says. “It’s a very, very difficult land use issue.”
If the caller is complaining about an existing CAFO, McBride talks to the citizen about proving his or her own case. “We need them to document what they’re experiencing, the extent of the interference with their lives, and to work with IEPA inspectors,” she says.
“There is no academic evidence for economy of scale in CAFOs.”
But there’s nothing the AG’s office can do for a caller upset about a planned CAFO. McBride, who has met Hudson on numerous occasions, will sometimes refer such callers to FARM. “When the citizens get word that one of these [CAFOs] is coming in, they generally have a lot of questions,” McBride says. “And to be honest, that’s where some of the interface with Karen comes in. If they want to organize, I might mention Karen.”
It didn’t take long for Hudson’s work to catch the attention of other activists in the anti-big-ag arena. In 1999, she got a call from Diane Hatz, a former music-industry executive who produced the award-winning animated short film The Meatrix and its sequels. Hatz, who now runs a consumer education organization called Sustainable Table, contacted Hudson after hearing her call in to debate a pro-CAFO economist on National Public Radio.
“She was putting together a team, and she said, ‘Would you want to come work for us, doing what you do now, but you’d get paid for it?’ It was a midlife career change,” Hudson, now 53 says, “and I absolutely love it.” The “team” Hatz was recruiting for was Global Resource Action Center for the Environment, or GRACE, which was cofounded by William Weida. Weida, retired professor emeritus at Colorado College, became interested in industrial agricultural (strangely enough) through his work with a nuclear disarmament group.
To shift gears from nukes to farm animals, Weida gave himself a crash course in industrial agriculture. “I got all the information I could find and started to read, because if you’re going to write about this in an academic sense, it takes a heckuva intellectual investment. I read for three years,” Weida says drily, “though I stopped and used the restroom a couple of times.”
He came to some fairly radical conclusions: first, that the industry didn’t need any more regulations — “We just need the ones we have to be enforced,” he says — and secondly, that the popular argument for CAFOs as a cheaper way to raise farm animals than on actual farms, is untrue. “There is no academic evidence for economy of scale in CAFOs,” he says. On Hatz’s recommendation, Weida hired Hudson because she had basically done the same thing. “We didn’t want anybody who didn’t know what they were talking about,” he says. “I was the chair of an economics department, and I wanted someone I could basically tell, ‘Here’s a [figurative] classroom; check in with me at the end of the semester.’ She knows her stuff very well.” Hudson now sets her own schedule educating people about factory farms. She is one of a dozen consultants working for the Socially Responsible Agriculture Project, the purely food-oriented nonprofit that Weida split off from GRACE a few years ago. The others are like her: family farmers outraged about their honorable, traditional way of life being turned into a mechanized money-making machine.
They make speeches at conferences and community gatherings, and answer what Hudson refers to as “SOS calls” from people concerned about CAFOs.
Nowadays, much of SRAP’s work has shifted toward replenishing the infrastructure of services necessary for small producers to get their meat to market — services that have disappeared over the years as large-scale “integrators” have driven out traditional feed mills, auction barns and processing plants. For example, SRAP is currently converting two 53-foot refrigerated trailers into mobile slaughtering facilities to accommodate farmers with a few head of marketable meat, instead of a truckload.
Who funds SRAP is a well-kept secret. Weida says support comes from several sources that prefer to remain anonymous due to physical threats. But for Hudson and the other consultants, the money doesn’t much matter.
“Bill (Weida) always says that we were a group of people that would be doing this job even if we didn’t get paid to do it. And he nailed it,” Hudson says. “If I won the lottery tomorrow, it wouldn’t change anything.”
Contact Dusty Rhodes at [email protected].
