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enough of griscom little! we need new environmental voices! please salon!
The continual aggregation of farms into these CAFOs has introduced a pretty rapid environmental problem for really the past decade. While the economies of scale to such facilities are understandable from a business sense, the economies of aggregate pollution are just too strenuous to waterways for us to ignore or to allow farms to "regulate themselves."
I live in Waco, Texas, and we have had a huge problem with pollution from dairy farms along the Bosque river, which empties into Lake Waco, where the city and much of the surrounding facilities gets its drinking water. The city of Waco has been involved in legal disputes with farms along the Bosque watershed as well as with the Texas Natural Resoure Commission about this, and has had to fight tooth and nail to get beyond governmental indifference. As a homeowner and taxpayer, I am one of thousands footing the bill for the increased water treatment and other activities our city must engage in to combat this pollution. It's a huge problem for us, and it's very hard to get anywhere because of the lobbyists and businessmen involved in the agricultural sector and dairy industry. These industries need to do a better job of maintaining or controlling of their own waste products, as opposed to passing on the problem. That entails regulation of some sort.
The thing I find ironic is Bush's indifference to this issue given that the Bosque river literally runs through his Crawford ranch, and he is as much as victim of this pollution as anyone else.
The "proliferation" of CAFO's in the last 20 years, and the rise in pollution from CAFO's, is almost totally due to the growth of large scale confined hog operations.
Also, I think that "factory farm" has become an extremely muddled concept. It is used in different ways by different writers. Most writers, including Ms. Little, do not make it clear what their usage of "factory farm" means. It has gotten to where I no longer think that this is a useful concept at all.
