Premium Standard Farms, Tyson, MoArk, Cargill, and Smithfield talk a good game. When they want permission to build processing plants and to contract with farmers to build CAFOs (contained animal feeding operations), the mantra they repeat to the community is: JOBS. We’ll bring lots of jobs. That’s a siren song in depressed rural areas.

And they are telling the truth. Sort of. Those processing plants need workers. Trouble is, as it always seems to turn out, farmers make lousy factory workers. Sure, some of them try it, but few last long at it. So the CAFOs come in, drive the independent hog farmers and chicken farmers out of existence, and then the farmers, many of them, end up migrating to the cities to look for work.

But you needn’t be concerned that those processing plants stand idle for lack of busy hands. Workers are easy to come by. In Premium Standard Farms plants, which are in Mercer, Putnam, and Sullivan counties on the central, northern border of the state, 55 percent of the workers–as of five years ago–had Hispanic surnames. The percentage might be higher now. Some of those workers are legal. Others ….

The beauty of hiring Latinos is that they don’t file suits with OSHA, they don’t complain, in fact many don’t speak English. I suppose you could call the turnover a downside: 125 percent in any given year. But big ag swats that difficulty aside with a steady supply of new workers. After all, the work requires no skill.

Ken Midkiff, my Sierra Club source for this posting, calls it a “confirmed rumor” that replacement workers are brought up from border towns like El Paso by the bus load. The drivers get $100 a head. Word gets around in places like Salinas, says Midkiff, and workers just show up looking for jobs.

They get paid maybe five or six bucks an hour, and the company provides their living accommodations, such as they are. Midkiff visited the housing that Tyson provides its workers in McDonald County, in the southwest corner of the state. He said that the company takes $50 a week out of the workers’ paychecks–that’s $200 a month–for Acorn trailers. Most of them had no electricity, running water or bathrooms. A few had natural gas.

The corporation can point out, though, that the primitive conditions are hardly its fault. Utility companies don’t like to turn on power for those trailers because of the high turnover rate. People leave and don’t pay the bill.

The farmers that sign contracts to raise the hogs and chickens aren’t all that much better off than the factory workers. CAFO owners have to build the barns and flush systems at their own expense to corporate specifications. The contract they sign stipulates what will be done on any given day and what days hogs will be picked up. The hogs must meet a weight standard or the corporation penalizes the farmer. The arrangement is so weighted in the company’s favor that the CAFO owner ends up being nothing more than a hog janitor.

The community at large fares no better than those directly tied to Smithfield, Cargill et.al. In fact, the larger community pays a considerable price, as I’ll explain in my next posting.

Any knowledgeable birder in St. Louis will tell you that there are no waterfowl on the Missouri River:  no ducks, no herons, no gulls.  That’s because the Missouri isn’t a river anymore.  The Corps of Engineers has turned it into a big ditch with a deep, fast flowing main channel.  It has no sloughs anymore, and it’s not suitable for waterfowl. 

It is suitable for barge traffic.  In addition to its locks and dams, the Missouri, unlike the Mississippi, has rock jetties that jut out into the river forcing the water to flow quickly in the deepest part of the channel.  That’s good for barges.  If you’ve ever been down to the confluence of the two major rivers, you’ll see how much more quickly than the Mississippi the Missouri moves.

The Mississippi is broad enough and deep enough not to need those rock jetties.  But barges on the Mississip do need locks and dams, and there are 27 of them.  Those locks and dams make the spots that are wide and thus too shallow for barges deep enough for them to navigate.  The Corps of Engineers lo-o-ves to build them and to beat the drums for more of them.  Who cares about a few silly old herons?

I say, who cares about a few silly old barges?  Who needs them?  We, the taxpayers, don’t need them.  Only ConAgra and Cargill do, as a cheap means of shipping their grain.  And we get stuck with the bill for subsidizing their “cheap” means of transportation. 

Hey, there’s a highway system out there.  Let them use that and leave the flood plains to flood and the herons to breed. 

And the Least Terns.  They are even more in need of breeding grounds than the herons.  Least Terns are quick, acrobatic fliers who would make any fighter jet jock look like a stumblebum.  My husband, who is a birder, has twice witnessed Least Terns–an endangered species–build nests on the mudflats and gravel of Ellis Bay above the locks and dams of Alton, only to have the nests destroyed and the babies drowned when the Corps flooded the bay. 

The Corps would, no doubt, have patiently explained that, because the river was low, it was necessary to close the locks and back up the river to make it deep enough for barge traffic.  Oh well then, that’s different.  Can’t have those barges waiting around for baby birds to grow up.

What the Corps won’t tell you is that building those locks and dams is a boondoggle, and that their own studies show it.  In 1998-99, their own economist, Donald Sweeney, blew the whistle on them for lying about the conclusions of a fifty million dollar feasibility study on new locks and dams.  His study showed that building them made no sense economically. The Corps reversed his opinion, declaring publicly that it was feasible.  When Sweeney’s internal protests were ignored, he went public.

Quite a brouhaha ensued in the media, but nobody at the Corps lost his job or was reprimanded–well, nobody but Sweeney, that is.

Who knows but what that exposure of the Corps’ lying impressed Claire McCaskill?  She voted no on the bill that just passed the Senate giving Missouri interests $4 billion for locks and dams.  McCaskill doesn’t approve of the lack of oversight of the Corps of Engineers:

The Senate vote was delayed for nearly two months by Sen. Russ Feingold, D-Wis., who joined McCaskill in opposing the water bill after arguing that the Congress had weakened Senate provisions giving independent experts power to oversee Army engineers’ studies justifying river construction.

Unfortunately, she does approve of the projects themselves, she just doesn’t seem to trust the Corps of Engineers to be honest.

To be honest, neither do I. And we’re about to give them four billion dollars to play with.  If ever there was a federal agency that needed to just fade into the sunset, it’s this one.