This The Guardian report by Charlie Hope-D'Anieri, features Lew Carter and his wife, Kathy, who settled down in Carter's home town, Williams, Iowa, population 307. Before long, they were effectively exiled by industrial hog production in the area:
Unwittingly, Carter had settled down in the epicenter of Iowa’s explosive growth of hog farms, known as confinements. These facilities, which house thousands of animals in sheds, have allowed the state’s hog population to more than double since 1982 – it now raises nearly a third of US hogs. Hamilton county is home to fewer than 15,000 people and more than 1 million hogs.
Over the decades, as hog farms surrounded their home, the Carters say the odor of manure became an eye-stinging, nose-burning nuisance. The smell disrupted everyday life, Kathy says. Most oppressive were days when neighboring farms emptied the manure pits under the confinements and spread the waste as fertilizer on fields across the road. “It would take a full week before we could even stand to be outside,” Lew says. “We didn’t dare open our windows.”
Last year they finally gave up the country dream and moved to a ranch house in Rockford, an hour north-east of Williams. The hog industry says “it’s great for our Iowa communities. It’s great for our little towns,” says Kathy. “But we’ve seen so many towns just turn to dust.”
The state’s pork industry promotes itself as an engine of economic growth and benefit for people in Iowa but a new report published on Thursday from Food and Water Watch, a non-governmental organization, casts doubts on these claims.
Read more about industrial hog farms here.
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