AR-News: (US MO) Factory farm foes fed up with conditions at huge swine operations

[Animalara2003 at aol.com]

BY ANDREW MARTIN

Chicago Tribune


WALTON, Ill. - (KRT) - John Ryan's announcement that he planned to buy his 
aunt's farm and build a grain storage bin was welcome news in this tiny burg 
that contains little more than a grain elevator, a church and the Walton Tap.
But instead of building the bin, Ryan immediately sold his land to 
out-of-town investors, who in turn erected a farm called Precision Pork that will 
contain up to 5,000 hogs in two long metal barns atop gaping, concrete manure pits.
The way Illinois law is written, neighbors had no real say in whether the 
facility would be approved. So they sued, an increasingly popular - and 
increasingly successful - choice in the raging battle over factory-style farms that is 
playing out across rural America.
>From Alabama to Illinois, grass-roots groups have turned to the courts in an 
attempt to shut down industrial-style concentrated animal feeding operations, 
or CAFOs, or to keep them from being built. In Iowa alone, 14 lawsuits are 
pending that allege hog farms are nuisances.
"People who live in these rural communities are completely fed up," said 
Melanie Shepherdson, an expert on factory farms with the Natural Resources Defense 
Council. "When you have the state government and the federal government not 
doing anything about it, then the people who live in these communities say, `We 
don't want to deal with that, and if you're not going to clean it up, we're 
going to hire our own lawyer.'"




full story:

http://www.kansascity.com/mld/kansascity/news/nation/8274217.htm 
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://lists.envirolink.org/pipermail/ar-news/attachments/20040325/7b8e0084/attachment.html