Living near a CAFO (Concentrated Animal Feeding Operation)

[Artemas2]

Cows I don't mind, but poultry and pigs freaking stink.

There will be smell no matter what. For how bad, wind direction and elevation will be factors as well as the farm's odor and manure management practices.

You may be able to get better information from your County Conservation District about specifics or request an odor/wind study. Some districts are more helpful than others so YMMV on that one.

I spent thirteen years living in an area with feedlots and processing plants. I can say wholeheartedly that you want no part of anything they bring to the area. They have negative impacts on everything fron air quality to polluting the water table. Swine are the absolute worst at the latter. Due to the employee base they attract, read that as southern and illegal, there will be an increase in local crime at all levels: doubling of domestic violence, tripling of property crime etc. There is no upside except for the few elite locals who may profit from land sales and the corporations that run the facilities. If you own property, my best advice is to sell now while you can. That's the only good you'll get out of if.

Can confirm. The borough I worked patrol in is near our local Cargill plant. Most of them were decent enough, but the ones that caused problems could be a nightmare.

[Paso Quito]

One thing that I haven't seen mentioned is the truck traffic associated with these operations. I don't know about the swine operation but there is a lot of truck traffic associated with large chicken operations. If the route in/out of the facility runs by your property I would expect road damage and noise at the very least.

Around here it seems that the chicken houses cluster. The basic setup (here anyway) is eight big buildings and once one set is established more usually follow. I've driven by these facilities and smelled nothing (1/4 mile away) and other times regretted being on that road... wondered if the smell would come out of the car seats!

Also associated with the chicken operations are feed mills where they make all the chicken food and processing plants (650,000 to 1,300,000 birds/week) where they prepare the chicken for market. The processing plant is going to have a lot truck and auto traffic.

[Crow Hunter]

I will not be on the truck route for either.

The Tyson processing plant for the chickens is about 35 plus miles away.

I am not sure where Tosh has the swine slaughtered/processed. It isn't local. The closest location I can think of is Newbern TN where there is a sausage plant and that is a good distance away.

Right now, I am not selling. I will keep my eyes open for opportunities though.

I actually prefer steeper hills and stone bottom creeks over rolling hills and sandy bottom creeks. I wouldn't have to go much further east to do that (my property is right in the topography transition) zone.

Still sucks to have a multi-decade goal/plan destroyed after having worked and sacrificed and done all the right things to be able to retire early to live a quiet, peaceful life on a nice piece of property you scrimped and saved to afford with nothing you can do about it.

[Totem Polar]

Still sucks to have a multi-decade goal/plan destroyed after having worked and sacrificed and done all the right things to be able to retire early to live a quiet, peaceful life on a nice piece of property you scrimped and saved to afford with nothing you can do about it.

That does suck. I wish you the best of luck with this.

[Blades]

Unfortunately no.

The only thing of historical note was my several greats Grandfather that was murdered down the road a piece from where we planned on building. I actually own a piece of his farm. It made several of the papers but seriously doubt it would be something anyone would want to do an historical plaque, especially now.

http:// https://www.newspapers.com/c...oleman-murder/

Enemy of my enemy? Call to PETA?

[Baldanders]

There are already lost of hog barns around the area and have been for years. Tosh Farms is local to me and he has lots of contracted barns all over the area. They were always 10+ miles away.

The chicken barns are new. Tyson recently opened up a factory in Humboldt TN which is around 30 miles away and apparently people are now putting in chicken barns to go with all the hog barns that Tosh had subcontracted.

I am looking for property elsewhere now. I actually found an interesting property in an area that I thought would be "safe" from barns. While I was examining the adjacent properties low and behold I see the familiar outline from the satellite view and sure enough, there was a pair of chicken barns right down the road.

Even moving to what I would assume to be a "safe" area that is predominantly hills and woods with almost no flat farmland for nutrient management, there is still a chance.

I think the only thing to do is to buy a big enough piece of ground that I won't be near them, but I am not sure how big a piece of ground that needs to be. It would take 640 to have a square piece of ground that was 1 mile by 1 mile.

If you can't smell them at .25 mile away, I could buy a 640 acres and build a house directly in the middle and have no chance of smelling it no matter if someone buys something right next to my property line.

It is quite frustrating. I HATE living in a subdivision. I really don't like living the the "semi" subdivision that I live in now but both of those prevent this from happening.

First world problems, right?

You never know, you might find a situation like we did where we have a supposed covenant that covers no factory farming (or even chain link fences) but everyone sees their land as a hunting/shooting paradise.

The sound of semi-regular gunfire in the 'hood is a helpful sign. 😀 No one in on/near our road has much more than 15 acres, so only so much you can set up on one lot.

No permanent guarantees, but I would say we are good for a few decades.

[Welder]

It's been a super hot week. I saw this thread, wanted to reply, recognized that my views would run counter to probably the entire forum's views, that I didn't have energy for debate, and decided to wait until the weekend.

I grew up on what you all might consider a CAFO, which is an acronym I'd never heard before. We didn't even make it onto the low end of the scale of what you'd find out west, but in my area, 1000 head of steers on one farm was considerable. We had 1200 acres, and probably 200-250 of it was for the cattle; the rest was for the crops that we grew to feed them and to sell. The number of head that can be supported indefinitely on one acre of land varies widely based on the land's location, soil type, and weather patterns, but in my area it's basically one large (non-calf) head per acre. This is for a grazing operation, which is what most non-farmers believe is the ideal way to raise cattle. It's humane, looks nice as you drive by, reminds you of the farms in the kids' books your parents read to you, etc.

Let me say that there are successful, profitable grazing operations in my area. Grazing takes a *lot* of land per head, and because the profit per head going to any of the packing plants is low, these grazers would quickly go under if they sold traditionally. You'll never see a tractor trailer load of cattle leaving a grazer and headed to a packing plant around here. Instead, they're partnering with local slaughterhouses and selling a couple head at a time and at a premium to the $75/plate restaurants and to the rich people who can afford to spend several times more than the average for their meat.

The reason for CAFO's is simply that like most developed countries, we are no longer an ag-based or -driven economy. We have people stacked in suburbs and apartments who need to eat. So the idea (I think I saw it earlier in the week in the first several posts) that CAFO's aren't traditional, or at least 'normal' agriculture is a very outdated one. Like decades outdated. As a greater and greater percentage of our population is drawn to jobs that are indoors, a smaller and smaller percentage is responsible for feeding them.

The top-down pressure to keep food prices competitive created this environment; no one woke up one day and said, "Wow, we don't need to, but wouldn't it be great if we could stack all our animals inside and now have to deal with manure removal and quicker spread of disease?" This is capitalism at work, just in a way that literally doesn't smell good. The people who moved off of the farm to greener pastures (pun intended), like me and like your own ancestors at some point back in time, are the ones who created this. The fact is that only the rich would be able to afford meat if we grew it the way you see in the children's books.

Actually, same thing with crops if we did away with hybrids or GMO's. I don't know about you, but I walked hundreds of miles per year on hundreds of acres of field to pull (literally "pull," with my hands) up Johnson Grass, which is a weed that contaminates all fields but especially corn fields because both corn and Johnson Grass are in the grass family and Roundup (our only grass killer at the time) couldn't be used because it would kill both. We planted on 36" rows which was the old row spacing back when horses had to be able to walk between them; even then 30" was becoming more common but since I had to walk up and down every other row for the entire field, and because corn leaves are sharp and leave small itchy scratches all over your arms, I was fine with 36". I also had to drag a bag of Pramitol with me which is an everything-killer, and spread the pellets around the root ball of the Johnson Grass. Nothing would grow in that area for several years afterwards; it would be bare. So yeah, we had a sprayer, and yeah, it was sitting in the shed while I was out sweating in the corn field during the summer while my friends were swimming in pools or playing Nintendo. All because we had no chemical that could control Johnson Grass in corn. So a lot of farmers rejoiced when "Roundup-Ready" corn was introduced. Spray Roundup on the field, it kills the Johnson Grass and doesn't affect the corn. But now the corn is a GMO which is evil, right? Anyone who says that and who spent their teen years swimming in pools has no credibility with me. Zero.

My main point in writing this post is not so much that you should rejoice to be living by a CAFO, or that you should sing the National Anthem when you drive by one; it's more that they are necessary evils and they're necessary because now you and I don't have to walk around picking up eggs after our chickens or worry about the cattle getting out in the middle of the night and getting whacked on the highway. We don't have to work 70+ hours per week on the farm, and a lot of us will have money to retire one day. When it's raining, snowing, or blazing hot outside many of us (not me, but that's by choice) can look at it from inside our conditioned environments and comment about how pretty it is or how we'll go swimming after we get off work.

[Borderland]

CAFO's are large corporate businesses.

2020

The top 10 U.S. agricultural exports: soybeans ($25.683 billion), corn ($9.210 billion), tree nuts ($8.402 billion), pork & pork products ($7.715 billion), beef & beef products ($7.649 billion), prepared foods ($6.773 billion), dairy products ($6.453 billion), wheat ($6.298 billion), cotton ($5.976 billion) and soybean meal ($4.758 billion).

If anyone wanted to make the case for US AG production being there to feed the US population I could get behind that, but it isn't. It's there just like other large US corporations that export billions of dollars worth of product to other countries. Corporate profit is what drives CAFO's, not the fact that they're in business solely to feed the US population that mostly live in cities. Small farming/ranching could easily feed the US population without excessive price increases.


https://youtu.be/7gt-VqgxTSA

[Welder]

CAFO's are large corporate businesses.

2020



If anyone wanted to make the case for US AG production being there to feed the US population I could get behind that, but it isn't. It's there just like other large US corporations that export billions of dollars worth of product to other countries. Corporate profit is what drives CAFO's, not the fact that they're in business solely to feed the US population that mostly live in cities. Small farming/ranching could easily feed the US population without excessive price increases.


https://youtu.be/7gt-VqgxTSA

Welcome to capitalism; did you grow up in the USSR? Profit is what we do here. I'm not a corporation, but I'm a businessman and I'm darn sure in it for the profit. Why are corporate profits bad but mine are not? Or are all profits bad?

Small farming and ranching could easily feed the US population without excessive price increases? LOL! What crystal ball did you get that from? And what were you smoking when you saw it there? Do you have any idea the scale of agriculture necessary to feed 330 million people? Please state your references and / or qualifications for making such a statement. Please also define "small farming / ranching." The US does not just export ag products; we import them, too. Much like oil. On any given year we may be either a net beef exporter or a net beef importer, for example.

As a past farmer and as an Agricultural Economics graduate who wore the silly something-cum-laude sash, this is firmly within my lane.

[Welder]

PS - The youtube video was nice and touching, a bunch of old people trying to do things in the old ways. Did you notice the broken-up and falling-down fences and buildings on those farms? Look closely. That's laziness right there. Or the shot of a guy throwing flakes of hay to a single Holstein? That's how you're going to feed the country? Good grief, you need another 200 million farmers if that's how you're going to make it.

Should we get rid of CNC machining stations too and go back to the ole lineshafts powered by waterwheels? What about elevator operators? Telephone switchboard operators? Sometimes occupations and ways of doing things just become obsolete. The people in the video are a prime example. They're on TV with "Non GMO" subtitles complaining that they aren't making enough money. When a business isn't making money, you change the business model. Old-style ag was horribly inefficient; sorry, that's the facts. Nobody throws square bales to individual cattle anymore. People who DO choose to do things like that are either hobby farmers who made their money elsewhere, have a niche market for their products (remember the rich people I mentioned earlier?), or are going out of business.

I'm sorry for the general public that this way of life is over (and has actually been over for decades). The public has a really screwed-up perception of what farming really is, again thanks to the kids' storybooks that they never seem to realize were written in 1830, and so of course they're upset when they learn that the reality is quite different from the dream. I could tell you some stories about what farming is really like, but half of them wouldn't be believed and the other half would upset your sensibilities. Yeah, part of my job every day was running a pitchfork (silage fork, actually, but few know what that is), but I never wore overalls like the characters in the video.

Every facet of that video's filming, actually, was made to appeal to the public's sense of nostalgia. It was brilliant. Really. But you didn't get to see the tremendously larger amount of fuel being burnt by outdated tractors on farms like that so they can pull cultivator after cultivator through those fields since they won't spray them. You didn't hear the numbers on deaths of unvaccinated cattle so they can be 'organic.' You didn't hear how their fields did on drought years when all that cultivating released the moisture from the ground, drying it out way more than their neighbors' non-organic and no-tilled and sprayed fields. They talk about rotating crops like that's something new. LOL!!!! Crop rotation is done by EVERYONE, ALL FARMERS rotate crops. It's not new science. Good grief, we were rotating crops in the 1960's. Land will not, will not, will not last for long unless it's fertilized and properly cropped. Anyone who wants to be in business profitably in 10 years will crop their land properly.

Again, that video. Wow. The bottom line is that you have people there who want to turn the clock back. But the clock doesn't turn back. It doesn't. There's less romance in ag than people want to believe. There was less romance in ag 100 years ago than people want to believe; the only difference is, back then, most people knew it. Farming is a lifestyle, and I don't care if it's a CAFO you're talking about or some backwards dude still throwing flakes of hay to a single Holstein. You have to love it. One steer or 100,000 steers, the problems are the same -- it's just the magnitude of them. I didn't love it, and so I left. But I darn well know how it's done, and probably 30% of my customers are either farmers or farm equipment dealers, so I stay solidly in the loop.

If you want to be a small-timer, you need a niche market. That's it. 40 acres around here won't let you survive unless you've got poultry houses, greenhouses, or some other niche. What the people in the video are complaining about is that they aren't making enough of a homogenous product to stay in business. Corn is corn is corn, beef is beef is beef. Etc. I bet that nobody on this forum could taste the difference between an Angus and a Simmental and a Charolais, but the Angus farmers got themselves a niche by pushing pure Angus beef. That's what I'm talking about. I personally prefer Holstein, which is probably why I like burgers the best, LOL. Bunch of old ground-up cows.

If the public really wants non-GMO, then they'll pay the extra for it. If they won't, then the public has spoken, the product won't sell, and those farmers will either get with the program or go out of business. Myself, having lived on a farm and seen it all, give me GMO corn and give me beef with Ralgro in it; I don't care. I drank water out of tile ditches when I was thirsty and I've run a hoe chopping thistles enough to know better. I think if every person in the country would spend a month on a farm and a month with a policeman, it would do them good. Give the ones who like GMO a hoe and a knife for the square bale strings and say, Go to it!