Wisconsin’s reknowned natural heritage, economic vitality and quality of life are now under attack by the corporatization of agriculture. Increasing vertical integration and horizontal consolidation in the food sector means the loss of a competitive market and food sovereignty. Whereas a century ago farmers received 38 cents of every consumer food dollar, now it is down to just 19 cents. Family farmers have been reduced to “price takers” at the mercy of food cartels. Just a handful of multinational corporations now control over half of the beef, pork, flour, chicken, and food retail markets across the U.S. Farmers forced to go under contract and sign one-sided technology use agreements (TUAs) for patented genetically engineered crop and animal varieties also lose decision-making autonomy over their own farming practices. Rural communities dominated by corporate agribusiness suffer economic decline as profits are extracted by absentee owners for distant shareholders and farm inputs are purchased farm away. The results in Wisconsin of this farm crisis have been catastrophic. Since 1970 Wisconsin has lost 50,000 farmers and almost a quarter of its farmland.
Consumers also suffer from this corporatization trend. Thanks to price fixing at the now defunct Green Bay, WI cheese exchange, Kraft Foods (a subsidary of Philip-Morris) was able to reap millions in windfall profits from both WI farmers and consumers for years. Currently, Kraft is importing massive quantities of milk protein concentrate (MPC) from as far away as India, New Zealand, and Ukraine as a cheap substitute for domestic milk in cheesemaking. Despite the fact that MPC has never been tested or approved for use in human food, both the FDA and DATCP are reluctant to take on a powerful corporation like Kraft and enforce the law. Agribusiness challenges to “right to know” and “truth in labeling” means that most consumers are kept ignorant of the actual nature, quality, and social cost of the food that they consume. This is even worse when the consumers are children – such as those now eating genetically engineered (GE) food through the federally mandated USDA school lunch program and will also soon be served irradiated meat without their parent’s consent under the latest Farm Bill provisions.
Corporate manipulation of the state “right to farm” law, as well as strongarm lobbying and outright corruption, has forced many rural communities to “welcome” confined animal feeding operations (CAFOs) – aka “factory farms” – with few if any limits to protect existing rural character, adjacent property values, or environmental quality. As of Sept. 2002 over 110 such facilities were located in the state – most of them (90%) being dairy outfits with over 2000 cows. A decade ago there were only two such mega-dairies in Wisconsin. A proposed 5000 steer feedlot on just 80 acres near the town of Gibson in Manitowoc County under contract to meat giant, Smithfield, would set an even more dangerous precedent within the state. Smithfield was fined $12.7 million for over 7,000 federal Clean Water Act violations in its dumping of waste into the Pagan River in Virginia in 1997 – then the largest civil penalty in U.S. history. Largescale feedlots and consolidated slaugherhouses almost guarantee contamination – and subsequent food poisonings and product recalls. Steers forcefed grain in confinement have up to 300 times more E coli bacteria than those allowed to eat their natural food - grass - on pasture.
Excessive nutrient runoff from agriculture is already widespread statewide, and clearly aggravated by the scale of livestock operations. Factory farms routinely use spray fields as manure dumpsites, rather than trying to utilize their waste in an agronomically productive manner. Over 40% of the wells in Madison’s Lake Mendota watershed are already contaminated with unsafe nitrate levels, and according to the WI DNR 10% of all wells statewide exceed safe nitrate levels. Fish kills induced by manure spills from factory farms are becoming more frequent and catastrophic. As early as 1991 a feedlot in Iowa County dumped 30,000 gallons of liquid manure into a stream, killing tens of thousands of fish for 13 miles downstream. In 1998 a mega-dairy in Manitowoc County experienced a massive spill that left a manure plume a quarter mile long in Lake Michigan. Another 1999 manure spill wiped out fish along six miles of the South Fork of the Baraboo River – a Class 3 Trout Stream.
Runaway factory farm pollution poses a serious health threat to Wisconsin residents. The 1993 cryptosporidium outbreak in Milwaukee that killed over 100 people and sickened 400,000 was a wake-up call for the entire nation about the consequences of shoddy water treatment in an age of polluted agricultural runoff. Cryptosporidium – which is not killed by chlorine - is now been found in many rural WI wells, indicating manure seepage into ground water. Recent federal reports show that the antibiotics, hormones, and other chemicals widespread in factory farm operations are also turning up in surface water bodies. Neighbors to factory farms are now reporting increased respiratory problems and chronic illnesses due to the toxic presence of hydrogen sulfide and ammonia fumes from the containment lagoons – symptoms shared by farmworkers, as well. The massive manure containment structures are themselves an occupational hazard – a WI farmworker recently died when his vehicle skidded and sank into a factory farm lagoon (his body was never recovered).
Unfortunately, taxpayers are also footing the bill for this corporatization of agriculture. Between 1996 and 1999, WI received $475 million in federal farm subsidies, yet over 50% of this money went to the largest 10% of farms – mostly corporate owned or subcontracted. Such anti family farm bias is also found in the activities of public agencies such as the WI Dept. of Agriculture, Trade,and Consumer Protection (DATCP). State officials have actively recruited factory farm operators to relocate to WI, and one such operation, Holsum Dairy in Calumet County - owned by a group of New Mexico investors - received a $850,000 low interest loan from the WI Dept. of Commerce to construct its 2,850 cow operation. Under the Dairy 2020 program close to 600 farmers got $1.5 million to expand their operations over the past five years. Some factory farms even received taxpayer assistance as they were being cited for serious environmental problems – for example, the Schaefer Farm in Grant County that received a $300,000 DATCP grant to expand its already polluting hog operation in the Little Platte River basin, an Exceptional Resource Water.
At UW-Madison the bulk of research within the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences (CALS) has also fallen under the influence of corporate agribusiness. For as little as $600, private companies are able to leverage their own crop varieties into UW field trials. Researchers are told at patenting seminars by the office of University Industry Relations (UIR) that there is no more interest in the scientific value of their work - only its commercial value. UW-Madison extension agents promote recombinant bovine growth hormone (rBGH) at Dairy 2020 farmevents where Monsanto also provides a free lunch. Phillip/Morris Kraft is sponsoring research at UW-River Falls to study the economic feasibility of Hmong and Latino immigrants as a low wage work force in mega-dairies, while the UW-Madison Center for Dairy Research devotes its time to engineering expensive robotic milkers.
As of 2001 UW-Madison had no certified or even transitional organic cropland in its entire field trial system – though some innovative sustainable agriculture research is being sponsored on private farms. Over 23% of WI dairy farmers have adopted managed intensive rotational grazing (MIRG) systems, yet this fastest growing segment of the dairy industry has been largely self initiated with little help from either state taxpayers or land grant colleges supposedly mandated to provide “practical education … accessible to all.” The UW Center for Integrated Agricultural Systems (CIAS) has done amazing work considering its paltry annual budget - just $318,000 of which 83% is devoted to staffing. Like Iowa State’s besieged Leopold Center for Sustainable Agriculture, UW’s CIAS remains vulnerable to state fiscal whim, and has already suffered a 3% budget cut along with the rest of CALS. In contrast, outgoing WI governor, Scott McCallum would have state taxpayers paying nearly half of the $317 million tab for “BioStar” another corporate-friendly initiative to keep UW-Madison and Wisconsin at the cutting edge of biotech research.
Recommendations:
- Increase state monies for more sustainable family-farmer oriented rural development such as ADD by redirecting funding away from programs such as Dairy 2020
- Adopt statewide procurement policies for public institutions – schools, prisons, hospitals – that emphasize more locally grown organic foods in cafeterias
- Guarantee base level funding for CIAS and other existing sustainable organic agriculture programs within the UW system – mandate funding increases on par with taxpayer support for more conventional biotech agricultural research
- Empower the attorney general to enforce state anti-trust rules against agribusiness corporations engaged in price fixing and market manipulation
- Pass and enforce mandatory consumer GE labeling legislation at the state level
References:
- Gomez, Miguel. “Impacts of Concentration in Hog Production on Economic Growth in Rural Illinois: An Econometric Analysis.” IL State Univ. 2000
- Iowa State University. “Iowa Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations Air Quality Study.” Feb. 2002
- Jackson-Smith Douglas and Brad Barham. “The Changing Face of WI Dairy Farms” Program on Agricultural Technology Studies (PATS) – UW Madison Aug. 2000
- Marks, Robbin. “Cesspools of Shame – How Factory Lagoons and Sprayfields Threatn Environmental and Public Health.” NRDC July 2001
- Midwest Environmental Advocates. “Model Livestock Ordinance: Balance Between Environment, Economy, and Agriculture.” 2002
- Mueller, Willard F. et al “Cheese Pricing: A Study of the National Cheese Exchange.” UW-Madison Dept. of Economics. March 1996
- National Farmers Union. “Consolidation in Food Retailing and Dairy – Implications for Farmers and Consumers in a Global Food System.” 2001 www.nfu.org
- Nett, Lisa and Kerry Schumann. “Incentive to Expand: Taxpayer Dollars Used to Encourage Big Agriculture.” WISPIRG 2000
- Organic Farming Research Foundation. “State of the States - Organic Systems Research at Land Grant Institutions, 2000 – 2001” www.ofrf.org
- Sierra Club. “The Rapsheet on Animal Factories.” August 2002
- WI Dept. of Natural Resources. “Nitrate in Ground Water – A Continuing Issue for WI Citizens.” 1999
- WI Rural Development Center. “Private Interests, Public Responsibilities, and the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences.” Jan. 1993
