Poweshiek County hog confinement app. withdrawn
Iowa CCI members in Poweshiek County are celebrating a big win today after North Carolina-based corporate hog giant Prestage Farms announced it was withdrawing plans for a factory farm expansion near Grinnell.
Prestage Farms sought to double the size of two existing 2,500-head sites – site 244 and site 301. The Poweshiek County Board of Supervisors took points off the Master Matrix score for both sites after public input and community pressure from CCI members and voted to recommend that the Department of Natural Resources (DNR) deny the construction permits. The DNR overruled county input for site 301 and the county is now appealing that case to the Environmental Protection Commission (EPC). Prestage withdrew its application for site 244 yesterday.
Poweshiek County CCI members organized their community to fight both of these proposals, providing a model for how everyday people can stand up to corporate power and win
CCI members held organizing meetings with dozens of local residents, made hundreds of phone calls, collected hundreds of petition signatures, hand-delivered protest letters to DNR and Prestage offices in Des Moines and Ames, packed a meeting with top DNR officials with over 120 people, and attended county supervisor meetings regularly for weeks.The victory in Poweshiek County marks the seventh factory farm CCI members have stopped across the state of Iowa in 2012.
From the Des Moines Register:
Poweshiek County hog confinement application withdrawn
11:13 AM, Jun 15, 2012 | by Dan Piller
Prestage Farms has withdrawn an application to double the size of two hog confinements near Grinnell from the current 2,500 hog capacity.
The Poweshiek County Board of Supervisors had voted to recommend that the Iowa Department of Natural Resources deny the permit application. Local governing bodies have no authority over hog confinements other than advisory.
Prestage Farms, headquartered in Clinton, N.C., ships more than a million hogs from their birthplaces in Mississippi and North Carolina where they feed to finish before slaughter.The Poweshiek County application had generated oppositon, much of it marshaled by Iowa Citizens for Community Improvement, which has made the confinement issue one of its main points of activism.
“I’ve never felt so darn good in my whole life,” said JoAnn Spies, a local CCI leader and one of the closest neighbors to the proposed expansions.
Hog confinements were introduced in Iowa beginning in the mid-1990s and have gradually replaced the traditional, open-barn style of raising hogs long used by smaller farms. Where once virtually every Iowa farmer raised hogs, today less than ten percent of Iowa’s 92,000 farms have a hog operation.
A combination of strong profits for hog producers and changes in the way confinements are managed, primarily the elimination of the nursery for month-old pigs, has caused a surge in applications this spring for new or expanded confinement barns.
Learn more
See the map illustrating the influx of new/expanding factory farms this spring and what CCI members are doing to fight back.
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Right now, while hundreds of families are worried about their quality of live, property values and environmental impact, the Assoc. of Business and Industry is trying to formalize a rule that would force the Iowa DNR to permanently take a “hands off approach” to factory farms.
Join hundreds of Iowans in telling the Iowa DNR to crack down on factory farms and say no to weakened enforcement.
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