Untitled Document
Old MacDonald Inc. has a farm, and e-i-e-i-o, it
stinks and
it pollutes!
Congress is about to pass a humongous farm bill, and
there has been wide coverage of the fact that the bulk of crop subsidies
provided by the bill go to very large agribusiness operations — with
60 percent of family farmers getting not a dime in crop payments. However,
there’s another agribusiness subsidy stuck in this whopper of a bill
that gets little media coverage. Under the guise of environmental
improvement, it provides about $180 million to huge corporate entities that
run industrialized hog and cattle operations. These factory farms keep the
animals confined, feeding and medicating them in an assembly-line process.
Having hundreds of animals crammed into these factory
facilities, however, creates a special problem for industrial agriculture.
Hogs and cattle defecate and urinate. A lot. What to do with all this
excrement? They channel it into lined ponds, called manure lagoons. In 2002, as these massive-scale livestock operations
were spreading across rural America, corporate lobbyists quietly changed a
farm conservation program to make them outfits eligible for funding —
and to declare that manure lagoons could be paid for as a
“conservation measure.”
How ironic, because these lagoons are notorious for
leaking into groundwater, overflowing into nearby streams, and fouling the
air for everyone downwind. The factory operations also are squeezing small
sustainable farmers out of business — so it’s doubly ironic
that your and my tax dollars are being used to subsidize them. Our nation’s environmental laws were based for
years on the ethical precept that the polluter must pay. Now that’s
been perverted to the unethical notion that we must subsidize the polluter.
Jim Hightower is a national radio commentator,
columnist, and author.
This article appears in Jan 24-30, 2008.
