Last month I wrote:

Sometimes you gotta do what you gotta do, even if you  know you aren’t going to succeed–or at least, not right away. Not this year.

Jeff Harris (Democratic representative from Columbia, running for the Attorney General nomination) takes umbrage that Tyson, Smithfield and MOArk are turning the Missouri countryside into their personal fiefdoms. He resents the damage done by CAFOs (contained animal feeding operations) in our state so much that he’s filing two bills this session to restrain CAFOs and big ag.

Apparently CAFO opponents are making inroads against the Farm Bureau’s stranglehold on rural opinion. Witness this headline in the Boonville Daily News:

Lawmaker continues effort to give communities local control over CAFOs – Local voters would have final say on proposed corporate livestock factories

Notice how the CAFOs are described: not as hog farms but as “corporate livestock factories“.

 

The article describes how one of Harris’ bills would give communities the right to put the licensing of CAFOs in their area to a vote and quotes Harris at length. The first page of the article (and the rest is only available in the dead tree version) doesn’t even give the bill’s opponents any response time.

Wonder if the Farm Bureau is going to start characterizing the Boonville Daily News as the liberal media.