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Our Correspondent: Ken Midkiff Update: Ken Midkiff no longer works for the Sierra Club, but he's still involved in the issues. Look for his forthsoming book from St. Martin's Press, The Meat You Eat: Corporate Farming and the Decline of the American Diet, due out in Summer 2004.
Midkiff grew up on a farm and raised pigs as a Future Farmer of America during high school. As he tells it, he knew his animals by both name and disposition, knowing enough to give some porkers a friendly scratch behind the ears and some others a wide berth –- real wide. Life after FFA didn’t hold much farming for Ken, but it’s been a valuable background for his environmental advocacy. For 8 years he was in charge of the Ozark Chapter of the Sierra Club. Since last October, he’s been director of the Sierra Club’s Clean Water Campaign. (A longtime canoeist and fisherman, Ken also knows water). Among other things, the Clean Water Campaign keeps a close watch on the pollution caused by Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations, or CAFOs -- the so-called factory farms which, it must be stressed, are more factory than farm.
In CAFOs hogs, chickens and cattle are not treated as individual animals so much as production units, commonly numbering in the tens of thousands. And such concentrations pose considerable problems. For one thing, they stink. As Midkiff puts it, "a dozen hogs don’t smell like a bed of roses, but a few thousand hogs could knock a rat off a gut wagon." But CAFOs do more than just assault the olfactory senses. According to the Environmental Protection Agency, hog, chicken and cattle waste are responsible for polluting 35,000 miles of U.S. rivers. Agricultural wastes are increasingly to blame for causing catastrophic fish kills, the contamination of drinking water, and even a vast "dead zone" in the Gulf of Mexico, hundreds of miles from the source. By no means limited to the West, the menace is rapidly spreading there. The problem is not so much family farms, mind you, as it is big agribusiness – multinational in scope and typically headquartered in major cities. To make matters worse, the industry is largely unregulated and out of control. In most cases, unless local communities organize against the big livestock operations, the pollution goes unchecked. That’s where Ken comes in. Midkiff is hitting the highway with a vengeance, bringing information and advice to local organizers who want to keep the offenders in check. We intend to follow along as he makes his way across the flatlands, up and over the Continental Divide, all the way to the Central Valley of California. Along the way, he’ll talk with activists and politicians, farmers and just-folks, periodically reporting back with news of his doings. Here’s a preview: The Territory: Southwestern Missouri Tysons, Inc. has a large slaughterhouse in Noel, Missouri, that is being sued by Oklahoma residents for allegedly polluting the Elk River, which then enters the Grand Lake of the Cherokees. The Noel slaughterhouse "processes" 300,000 chickens per day, and discharges wastewater to the tune of 1.2 million gallons per day. Central Texas The Bosque and Leon Rivers are being impacted by many large dairy operations, and the contamination affects the drinking water for the town of Waco. "The mayor," says Ken, "is honked about it." The Sierra Club has funded a Water Sentinels Project for these watersheds –- creating teams of trained volunteers to sample and develop a database of water quality (or lack thereof) on these rivers. Sunray/Dumas, Texas Seaboard, Inc. wants to build a 16,000-hog-per-day slaughterhouse in Pampa, TX (in the Panhandle, about 40 miles northeast of Amarillo), and is seeking public subsidies and a public water supply (275 million gallons per day from the Ogallala Aquifer). In response to requests from local opponents, the Sierra Club and Midkiff are engaging in rural organizing efforts and considering producing and running public service radio ads in the Panhandle towns. Clovis, New Mexico Concerned Citizens for Clean Water (CCCW) led by Sierra Club members Paul and Keri Elders of Ranchdale, New Mexico (near Clovis) are trying to prevent the California-based dairy industry from depleting the southern portion of the Ogallala Aquifer. So far, Sierra Club assistance has been limited to providing CCCW with information about these dairies’ activities in the Chino Basin and California’s Central Valley. The data has been used to good effect, however, before local planning and zoning bodies and with the New Mexico Division of Water Resources. Snake River Plains, Idaho This is undoubtedly the most hostile place in the US for a Sierra Club staffer (not that the ones above are all that inviting). However, when Midkiff went there a couple of months ago to help organize against the big California-based dairies and the associated groundwater depletion, surface water pollution, and ever-present stench, the red carpet was rolled out by local farmers and rural residents alike. Roger Singer (Idaho Sierra Club director) and Midkiff were even treated to a vegetarian buffet at a rural resident's house in Marsing, ID (Owyhee County). There are over 90 dairies in the Snake River Plains that are required to have a permit from the EPA, and only one that does (and that’s only because the neighbors brought a lawsuit). Milford, Utah This is a hog-CAFO story and it’s the largest of the large: at least 250,000 hogs in one spot (some of the neighbors claim there are up to 1 million). The facility is called Circle 4 as it was originally a joint project of the four Big Pig companies, which is now solely owned by Smithfield. As far as CAFO-related problems go, you name it, Circle 4’s got it. Midkiff has been engaged with local residents and their attorney for several years, going back to a hearing by the Utah Water Quality Board in 1996. Local activists have now filed a lawsuit against Circle 4 for groundwater contamination. California’s Central Valley Big Dairy has ruled this area for decades and now the poop has finally hit the fan. Recently, the Sierra Club legal team won a major victory by preventing a 29,000-cow dairy from locating near Bakersfield. The Central Valley is at the headwaters of the rivers that feed the San Francisco Bay-Delta, providing copious quantities of what are euphemistically called "nutrients" to the area. Up to Top |
Ken Midkiff is no stranger to swine. As Ken himself likes to say, he knows hogs from both ends. 