From the Missouri Rural Crisis Center:  

Please Forward!!!

STOP The Factory Farm Protection Bills!

The Legislative Spring Break is Over Monday (the 28th)!  

Please Call Legislators THIS WEEK–

Tell Them to Vote NO on Senate Bill 187 & House Bill 209!!!

Tell them to VOTE NO on House Bill 100, House Joint Resolution 3

& House Joint Resolution 17!

Hundreds of phone calls and emails are making a difference!  SB 187 & HB 209 have become very controversial in the Missouri statehouse.  But the PRO-corporate agri-business, ANTI-property rights, ANTI-family farm bills are still moving!  The following bills would have a radical and damaging effect on the property rights of Missouri ‘s family farmers and rural landowners and on our rights to local control.  

Names of bills and legislators to call are below.

– Senate Bill 187 & House Bill 209 “The CAFO Protection Bills”:

Written to protect Premium Standard Farms (PSF; owned by Smithfield Foods–the largest pork corporation in the world), the CAFO Protection Bills would limit the rights of family farmers and rural landowners to defend their property through the court system.

House Bill 100, House Joint Resolution 3 & House Joint Resolution 17 would:

Restrict the ability of local elected representatives to respond to the needs of their citizens through “local control”.

Please Call/Email “Key Legislators” & Call/Email YOUR State Senator & Representative!

Tell them to VOTE NO on Senate Bill 187 & House Bill 209!

Tell them to VOTE NO on House Bill 100, House Joint Resolution 3

& House Joint Resolution 17!

* See Below for “Key Legislators”.

* You can call YOUR State Senator and Representative by calling the House Switchboard at (573) 751-2000 with your zip code.

An Attack on Rural Private Property Rights (The CAFO Protection Bills)!

Senate Bill 187 & House Bill 209

Corporate agri-business has deep pockets and significant influence in Jefferson City .  At the expense of Missouri’s independent family farmers, rural landowners and their constitutional right to protect their property through the court system, corporate lobbyists have convinced some legislators of the need to protect a very small minority of corporate industrial livestock operations.  Written to protect Premium Standard Farms (PSF), owned by Smithfield Foods, the largest pork corporation in the world, this misguided and dangerous policy would be protecting CAFOs at the expense of the vast majority of Missouri ‘s family farmers and rural citizens.

* Please tell Missouri legislators: “Taking away the rights of farmers and landowners to protect their properties through the court system is unconstitutional and just plain wrong!  Vote NO on Senate Bill 187 & House Bill 209!”

An Attack on Local Control!

House Bill 100, House Joint Resolution 3 & House Joint Resolution 17

For 8 years, family farmers, rural landowners and county commissioners have fought against attempts to take away local control.  Hundreds have journeyed to Jefferson City to ensure that our local elected representatives retain the tools necessary to respond to the needs of their citizens.  

Yet again this year, bills (HB 100, HJR 3 & HJR 17) are moving through the House Chamber that would strip Local Control and the ability of local communities to protect family farmers and landowners from the negative impacts of industrial livestock operations.

* Please tell Missouri ‘s legislators: “Government is best when it is closest to the people.  Don’t Mess with OUR Local Control! Vote NO on HB 100, HJR 3 & HJR 17”

You can call YOUR State Senator and Representative by calling the House Switchboard at (573) 751-2000 with your zip code.

Please Call Key Representatives!

Rep. Tom Loehner (573) 751-1344    Tom.Loehner@house.mo.gov  

Rep. Jerry Nolte (573) 751-1470    Jerry.Nolte@house.mo.gov  

Rep. Casey Guernsey (573) 751-4285    Casey.Guernsey@house.mo.gov  

Rep. Diane Franklin (573) 751-1119     Diane.Franklin@house.mo.gov  

Rep. Keith Fredrick (573) 751-3834    Keith.Frederick@house.mo.gov  

Rep. David Day (573) 751-1446    David.Day@house.mo.gov  

Rep. Kent Hampton (573) 751-3629    Kent.Hampton@house.mo.gov  

Rep. Lincoln Hough (573) 751-9809    Lincoln.Hough@house.mo.gov  

Rep. Mike McGhee (573) 751-1462    Mike.McGhee@house.mo.gov

Rep. Randy Asbury (573) 751-6566    Randy.Asbury@house.mo.gov

Rep. Delus Johnson (573) 751-3666    Delus.Johnson@house.mo.gov

Rep. Anne Zerr (573) 751-3717    Anne.Zerr@house.mo.gov

Rep. Galen Higdon (573) 751-3643    Galen.Higdon@house.mo.gov

Rep. Ray Weter (573) 751-2565    Raymond.Weter@house.mo.gov

Rep. Billy Pat Wright (573) 751-1494    Billy.Wright@house.mo.gov

Rep. Jason Holsman (573) 751-6607    Jason.Holsman@house.mo.gov

Rep. Joe Aull (573) 751-2204    Joe.Aull@house.mo.gov  

Rep. Linda Black (573) 751-2317    Linda.Black@house.mo.gov

Rep. Doug Funderburk (573) 751-2176    Doug.Funderburk@house.mo.gov

Please Call Key Senators!

*You can email all Senators here: http://www.senate.mo.gov/webma…

Senator Rob Mayer: (573) 751-3859

Senator Chuck Purgason: (573) 751-1882

Senator Tom Dempsey: (573) 751-1141

Senator Kevin Engler: (573) 751-3455

Senator Brad Lager: (573) 751-1415

Senator Victor Callahan: (573) 751-3074

Senator Jason Crowell: (573) 751-2459

Senator Dan Brown: (573) 751-5713

Senator Jack Goodman: (573) 751-2234

Senator Maria Chappelle-Nadal: (573) 751-4106

Senator Jane Cunningham: (573) 751-1186

Senator Mike Kehoe: (573) 751-2076

Senator Will Kraus: (573) 751-1464

Senator Ryan McKenna: (573) 751-1492

Senator Brian Nieves: (573) 751-3678

Senator Mike Parson: (573) 751-8793

Senator Jay Wasson: (573) 751-1503

Senator Robin Wright Jones: (573) 751-2606

Senator Jolie Justus: (573) 751-2788

Also, Please Call Governor Nixon @ (573) 751-3222-

Tell him to veto any bill (including SB 187, HB 209, HJR 3, HJR 17 & HB 100) that limits the rights of family farmers and rural landowners to protect their property through the court system, or restricts the ability of local elected representatives to respond to the needs of their citizens through “local control”.

Thank you for your time to engage in the democratic process to protect Missouri ‘s farm families and rural property rights!

Please feel free to call Missouri Rural Crisis Center at (573) 449-1336 with questions.

The endeavor to rein in CAFOs is the classic political battle between grassroots organizing and big money.

Big ag took some hard punches to the midsection in the last couple of weeks with the publication of two reports critical of CAFOs: one from the Union of Concerned Scientists, the other a two year study from the Pew Research Group and Johns Hopkins University. Between them, those reports spent about 400 pages documenting what grassroots activists have been shouting about the harm to family farmers, the harm to the environment, and the harm to public health.

Big deal. Smithfield and Tyson just tightened their abs and absorbed the blows. It’ll take a lot more than that to topple them.

Here’s how the battle’s being waged in Missouri.

Last year, then-Republican Chris Koster led a failed attempt in the Senate to pass a bill that would have hurt Missourians in two ways. First, it would have outlawed “nuisance lawsuits”. Sure, such lawsuits are a “nuisance” if you’re MOArk. Otherwise, they are attempts by John Q. Citizens to stand up against CAFOs that are ruining their lives. Second, the bill would have wrested the only vestige of local control of CAFOs away from citizens. Grassroots pressure was so heavy that the bill didn’t even come up for a vote.

The battle on the lawsuit front continues to rage. Premium Standard Farms came out of a particularly bloody round last year when the court ordered it to pay 4.5 million dollars to three plaintiff families. Last month a leaked memo revealed how Smithfield, which just bought Premium Standard Farms, plans to handle the threat of future suits. With hundreds more families waiting in the wings to sue, the corporation has decided not to settle out of court and not to try any suit brought by several plaintiffs at one trial. Instead, Smithfield will try each case separately.  

Few suits are as successful as the one that garnered $4.5 million, and Smithfield figures to wear out the opposition: try the cases separately so that each family has to hire legal help and hang in through all the company’s appeals, thus forcing plaintiff attorneys, whose resources may be spread thin, to wait years for any payoff.

Of course, that tactic will also be expensive for Smithfield:

When considering the acquisition of Premium Standard, Smithfield estimated its financial exposure to the litigation at $150 million to $200 million, according to the memo.

You get some idea of how lucrative CAFOs are when you see that Smithfield still considered PSF worth buying despite a $200 million legal downside. The reason CAFOs are so lucrative is that they’re heavily subsidized by you and me. And besides, like most polluting industries, they slough the cost of their pollution onto taxpayers.

Grain growers are heavily subsidized by the government, so CAFO owners get cheap food for their hogs and chickens. The Union of Concerned Scientists reports that “from 1997 to 2005 taxpayer-subsidized grain prices saved CAFOs nearly $35 billion in animal feed.” You can bet that family farmers who raise their own grain to feed their livestock could use those kinds of subsidies.

Keeping CAFO animals alive long enough to be slaughtered requires antibiotics, and that practice is creating drug resistant strains of pathogens. You don’t think Land O’ Lakes or Tyson will pay your bill at St. John’s Mercy or your funeral bill when one of those bugs picks you off, do you? No, nor will they clean up the streams in MacDonald County either.

On top of that, whatever few improvements big ag does have to make, it expects us to pay for them. Twin bills sponsored by Rep. Munzlinger (R-Williamstown) and Senator Clemens (R-Marshfield) would have granted tax credits for odor abatement programs. Aside from the fact that such technology is generally ineffective, there’s no reason why you and I should pay for the privilege of helping run farmers out of business who would raise antibiotic-free animals that don’t pollute the streams or raise a stench nobody can live near.

That bill (as well as the Monsanto-sponsored bill that would have prevented dairy farmers who don’t give their cows hormones from mentioning that fact on the packaging) have stalled in the legislature because of citizen pressure.

Watch out, though. True, it’s an election year, and legislators are as leery of controversy as a mouse who spies a cat. But some of those little rodents are sneaky. They like to give the impression that a bill is dead, only to attach the language as an amendment to an unrelated bill.  

With the legislature due to wind up in the next couple of weeks, activist groups such as the Missouri Rural Crisis Center and the Sierra Club will be watching carefully for end runs. Opponents can sometimes stop such a move by behind-the-scenes lobbying, basically getting enough support together and saying, “We don’t want to vote on this. It’s too hot.” Another tactic is to amend the amendment, taking out the objectionable language.

If the activists keep big ag from getting tax credits or keep Monsanto from preventing honest labeling of dairy products, we’ll call the ’08 legislative round a draw. Jeff Harris’s bill to grant local entities control over licensing CAFOs went nowhere, of course. He knew it wouldn’t. But we’ll settle for stopping odor abatement tax credits this year and hope for support of Harris’s idea in next year’s legislature. Or the year after.

Photo: farmsanctuary.org

The nerve of some citizens. I mean, really. Thinking they can attend a public meeting (that we want kept private), assuming they can question us for barring them from such meetings, presuming they have … like… rights. And this Sierra Club jerk, Midkiff, did more than question us. He told us how it was going to be. But I guess we showed him.

What a poor sport, though. When Tony Messenger of the Springfield News-Leader asked Midkiff to write an Op-Ed piece about what’s been going on, he agreed to do it. Well screw him, and lotsa luck getting anybody to pay attention. We’re the pooh-bahs and that’s how it’s going to stay.

Here’s a pirated copy of what Midkiff plans to publish:

Public monies, public meetings

Ken Midkiff

At the last meeting of the Missouri Air Conservation Committee (MACC), under “Meeting Schedule” on the agenda was a notation that a tour was scheduled at Premium Standard Farms, Inc. on March 26.

The MACC is the body – created by statute – that oversees the Air Pollution Control Program (APCP) of the Missouri Department of Natural Resources.  APCP personnel serve as staff for the MACC.  MACC also establishes policies, positions, and adopts regulations about air quality.  Members are nominated by the Governor and approved by the state senate.   Members serve without compensation, but expenses (meals, lodging, travel) are paid for with public monies.

All of this makes the MACC a public body, subject to the Open Meetings and Records Act.  The act is a state law – Chapter 610 of the Revised Statutes of Missouri – and is known commonly as the Sunshine Act in that the intent is to shine the sun on actions of public bodies and elected officials.

But, in a rather blatant attempt to avoid complying with this law, a reporter from the Post-Dispatch was told that this was NOT a meeting that the public could attend, but was a tour of a private operation.   I sent an email to Jim Kavanaugh, Director of the APCP, informing him that I, reporters, attorneys, and other citizens intended to attend.  He forwarded my email to David Gilmore, Public Relations guy for the MACC.  Mr. Gilmore referred to my “request” and stated that I needed to submit this to Robert Brundage, attorney with the law firm of Newman, Conley, and Ruth and legal counsel for the Missouri Agriculture Industry organization.

Mr. Gilmore was then informed that my email in no way was a request, but rather was a simple notice of intent to attend a public meeting, so that arrangements could be made.  I further noted that it was not at all understood why it was necessary to seek approval from an attorney with a private law firm in order to attend a public meeting and asked for an explanation of this.

Mr. Kavanaugh then sent an email stating that Mr. Gilmore was not at work due to an illness, and that the “tour” might not take place due to scheduling conflicts.

That’s where it now stands.    

It should be noted that the MACC is currently considering regulations to impose odor controls on most factory hog operations.  It should also be noted that a representative of Premium Standard Farms is on record as adamantly opposing such controls.   The concern is that employees of the hog operations would have members of MACC all to themselves during this private “tour” and would lobby the members to adopt the positions of Premium Standard Farms.

Whatever.  This is apparently yet another attempt by a public entity, operating with public funds, to avoid complying with state law – and provides yet another example why we need a Sunshine Act.  

Ken Midkiff is pictured above.

Premium Standard Farms, which operates swine CAFOs (contained animal feeding operations) in three northern Missouri counties, sustained a body blow when it lost a lawsuit to four families in September of last year. The families had sued over destruction of property values as a result of the CAFOs, and the jury awarded them $4.5 million.

Premium Standard Farms is a Goliath and can easily shell out 4.5 mill, no problem.  The problem is that 53 other plaintiffs had, at that time, also filed suit.  And if they were to prevail, more would surely follow.  A few million here, a few million there.  Before you know it, Premium Standard Farms could be facing a serious outlay of cash.

So the corporation took steps.  It supported a bill offered last spring by Senator Chris Koster (R.–at the time, Republican–Harrisonville).  SB 364 would have restricted anti-CAFO activists in two important respects.

First, it would have forbidden “nuisance” lawsuits.  Indeed, Premium Standard Farms tried to sell this legislation to rural citizens as an innocent attempt to rein in city folk who come to the country and find that the normal activities of farmers don’t fit their romantic notions of country life.  The said “city folk”–according to Premium Standard Farms–file nuisance lawsuits against farmers who combine at night and against farmers whose combining kicks up dust.

But while such frivolous lawsuits have no doubt occurred–rarely–the real point of SB364 was to make those loss of property values lawsuits disappear.  The legislation was aimed not at city folk but at people who had lived on the land for generations.

The other agenda of the bill was to prevent local health boards from creating health ordinances that could be used to block the building of CAFOs.  Currently, those county health boards are the only defense communities have in preventing the building of such farms.

Tim Gibbons of the Missouri Rural Crisis Center was one of a group of citizens who met with Koster and implored him not to press forward with the bill.  Gibbons says that Koster negotiated with his group for two weeks about possible changes but never budged on the two crucial points.  Those two weeks, though, gave the Missouri Rural Crisis Center the time it needed to get the word out to its constituents to pressure their Republican senators to oppose the bill.  Their phone calls worked.  SB364 didn’t so much go down in flames as it pooped out, if you’ll pardon the pun.  It wasn’t brought to a vote, because it would have failed.

Premium Standard Farms was essentially kicked out of Iowa in 1989 for insisting on building an unlicensed CAFO near a state park.  It found more fertile ground in Missouri, under then Governor John Ashcroft.  Could be that Missouri, eighteen years later, is about to catch up with Iowa as regards handling this corporate predator.