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Now
I grew up south of Indianapolis on the
glacier-smoothed plains of central Indiana. My grandparents owned
a small farm, whittled down over the years to about 40 acres
of bottomland, in some of the most productive agricultural land
in America. Like many of their neighbors they mostly grew field
corn (and later soybeans), raised a few cows and bred a few horses.
Even then farming for them
was a hobby, an avocation, a link to a way of life that was slipping
away. My grandfather, who was born on that farm in 1906, graduated
from Purdue University and became a master electrician, who helped
design RCA's first color TV. My grandmother, the only child of
an unwed mother, came to the US at the age of 13 from the industrial
city of Sheffield, England. When she married my grandfather she'd
never seen a cow, a few days after the honeymoon she was milking
one. She ran the local drugstore for nearly 50 years. In their
so-called spare time, they farmed.
My parent's house was in a
sterile and treeless subdivision about five miles away, but I
largely grew up on that farm: feeding the cattle and horses,
baling hay, bushhogging pastures, weeding the garden, gleaning
corn from the harvested field, fishing for catfish in the creek
that divided the fields and pastures from the small copse of
woods, learning to identify the songs of birds, a lifelong obsession.
Even so, the farm, which had
been in my mother's family since 1845, was in an unalterable
state of decay by the time I arrived on the scene in 1959. The
great red barn, with it's multiple levels, vast hayloft and secret
rooms, was in disrepair, the grain silos were empty and rusting
ruins, the great beech trees that stalked the pasture hollowed
out and died off, one by one, winter by winter.
In the late-1960s, after a
doomed battle, the local power company condemned a swath of land
right through the heart of the cornfield for a high-voltage transmission
corridor. A fifth of the field was lost to the giant towers and
the songs of redwing blackbirds and meadowlarks were drowned
out by the bristling electric hum of the powerlines.
After that the neighbors began
selling out. The local diary went first, replaced by a retirement
complex, an indoor tennis center and a sprawling Baptist temple
and school. Then came a gas station, a golf course and a McDonalds.
Then two large subdivisions of upscale houses and a manmade lake,
where the water was dyed Sunday cartoon blue.
When my grandfather died from
pancreatic cancer (most likely inflicted by the pesticides that
had been forced upon him by the ag companies) in the early 1970s,
he and a hog farmer by the name of Boatenwright were the last
holdouts in that patch of blacksoiled land along Buck Creek.
Boatenwright's place was about
a mile down the road. You couldn't miss it. He was a hog farmer
and the noxious smell permeated the valley. On hot, humid days,
the sweat stench of the hogs was nauseating, even at a distance.
In August, I'd work in the fields with a bandana wrapped around
my face to ease the stench.
How strange that I've come
to miss that wretched smell.
That hog farm along Buck Creek
was typical for its time. It was a small operation with about
25 pigs. Old man Boatenwright also ran some cows and made money
fixing tractors, bush hogs and combines.
Not any more. There are more
hogs than ever in Indiana, but fewer hog farmers and farms. The
number of hog farms has dropped from 64,500 in 1980 to 10,500
in 2000, though the number of hogs has increased by about 5 million.
It's an unsettling trend on many counts.
Hog production is a factory
operation these days, largely controlled by two major conglomerations:
Tyson Foods and Smithfield Farms. Hogs are raised in stifling
feedlots of concrete, corrugated iron and wire, housing 15,000
to 20,000 animals in a single building. They are the concentration
camps of American agriculture, the filthy abattoirs of our hidden
system of meat production.
Pig factories are the foulest
outposts in American agriculture. A single hog excretes nearly
3 gallons of waste per day, or 2.5 times the average human's
daily total. A 6,000-sow hog factory will generate approximately
50 tons of raw manure a day. An operation the size of Premium
Standard Farms in northern Missouri, with more than 2 million
pigs and sows in 1995, will generate five times as much sewage
as the entire city of Indianapolis. But hog farms aren't required
to treat the waste. Generally, the stream of fecal waste is simply
sluiced into giant holding lagoons, where it can spill into creeks
or leach into ground water. Increasingly, hog operations are
disposing of their manure by spraying it on fields as fertilizer,
with vile consequences for the environment and the general ambience
of the neighborhood.
Over the past quarter century,
Indiana hog farms were responsible for 201 animal waste spills,
wiping out more than 750,000 fish. These hog-growing factories
contribute more excrement spills than any other industry.
It's not just creeks and rivers
that are getting flooded with pig shit. A recent study by the
EPA found that more than 13 percent of the domestic drinking-water
wells in the Midwest contain unsafe levels of nitrates, attributable
to manure from hog feedlots. Another study found that groundwater
beneath fields which have been sprayed with hog manure contained
five times as much nitrates as is considered safe for humans.
Such nitrate-leaden water has been linked to spontaneous abortions
and "blue baby" syndrome.
A typical hog operation these
days is Pohlmann Farms in Montgomery County, Indiana. This giant
facility once confined 35,000 hogs. The owner, Klaus Pohlmann,
is a German, whose father, Anton, ran the biggest egg factory
in Europe, until numerous convictions for animal cruelty and
environmental violations led to him being banned from ever again
operating an animal enterprise in Germany.
Like father, like son. Pohlmann
the pig factory owner has racked up an impressive rapsheet in
Indiana. In 2002, Pohlmann was cited for dumping 50,000 gallons
of hog excrement into the creek, killing more than 3,000 fish.
He was fined $230,000 for the fish kill. But that was far from
the first incident. From 1979 to 2003, Pohlmann has been cited
nine times for hog manure spills into Little Sugar Creek. The
state Department of Natural Resources estimates that his operation
alone has killed more than 70,000 fish.
Pohlmann was arrested for drunk
driving a couple of years ago, while he was careening his way
to meet with state officials who were investigating yet another
spill. It was his sixth arrest for drunk driving. Faced with
mounting fines and possible jail time, Pohlmann offered his farm
for sale. It was bought by National Pork Producers, Inc., an
Iowa-based conglomerate with its own history of environmental
crimes. And the beat goes on.
My grandfather's farm is now
a shopping mall. The black soil, milled to such fine fertility
by the Wisconsin glaciation, now buried under a black sea of
asphalt. The old Boatenwright pig farm is now a quick lube, specializing
in servicing SUVs.
America is being ground apart
from the inside, by heartless bankers, insatiable conglomerates,
a president who lies by remote control.
We are a hollow nation, a poisonous
shell of our former selves.
CounterPunch
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