by Ted Genoways
In advance of the April 2012 meeting of the county supervisors at which New Fashion’s building proposal would come to a vote, Jay Lausen asked for an exception to the rules so that they might be allowed to address the board. He shared everything he had uncovered about lax inspection of hog confinements and distributed USDA data showing that 60 percent of the property lay on the Des Moines River Watershed, classified by the DNR as an endangered waterway. But Jay Moore, New Fashion Pork’s environmental construction manager, was also in attendance, and he had come armed with statistics of his own. He passed out flyers showing that the company supported seventeen full-time employees in Emmet County and tallying the tax dollars and other economic benefits paid into the local economy. “We have invested in Emmet County,” Moore said, and he assured the board that his company understood small agricultural communities. New Fashion Pork started as a family farm just across the border in Minnesota, he told them. “It’s still run as a family operation.”
Lausen said that he had done his research on New Fashion Pork, too. “How many family-run operations have three hundred and twenty employees?” he asked Moore. Lausen admitted to me later that he was flushed with anger when turned back to address the board. “This is corporate farming,” he said.
Nothing gets under Brad Freking’s skin quite so much as when people in northern Iowa call him a corporate farmer. “Like we’re these big guys from out of state,” he said to me ruefully. New Fashion’s headquarters are barely twenty miles from Estherville, just across the divide onto the Minnesota River watershed but otherwise indistinguishable from the rolling hills of Iowa, so Freking still views himself as a local farmer and veterinarian whose business grew simply as a way of staying in the game. The expansion of his operation, to his mind, is evidence of sound decision-making and careful planning in a rapidly changing industry. As I sat across the New Fashion conference table from him, I found it hard to peg Freking as some corporate suit. He was a wiry man in his forties, dressed in a blue Oxford shirt and jeans, soft-spoken and careful in choosing his words; but he also made no effort to conceal his corporate ties. Hormel Spirit of Excellence plaques stood lined up on the mantel above a wide fireplace, and Freking sipped from a Hormel mug. He freely admitted that he had been advised against our meeting, but he said there was nothing to hide so he wasn’t going to duck my questions. “Call us a little bit unique in that,” he said. And that openness, he hoped, would show that New Fashion Pork was not some faceless corporation.
Freking grew up on a small farm in Jackson County, Minnesota, with just two hundred head of hogs raised on pasture during warmer months and housed in a barn during the winter. Graduating from the local high school in 1986, at the very height of the worst agricultural downturn since the Great Depression, Freking had no prospects for farming at the time. So he went first to South Dakota State University, where he got a degree in animal science, then continued on to veterinary school at the University of Minnesota. In 1994, he came home with his wife, Meg, to found New Fashion.
“It started extremely small,” he told me, “producing about sixteen thousand pigs a year.” But, having grown slower and more strategically than his competitors, Freking was presented with an opportunity when the downturn in the hog industry arrived in 1998. “We were, financially, in a very good position at that time,” he said. “So we started acquiring distressed sow farms.” That’s why New Fashion’s operation is so geographically diverse. From the Rockies to the Great Lakes, he acquired failing breeding barns, building what he calls a “sow base.”
In 2004, just as this period of acquisition was ending, Iowa began exempting big packers from its vertical integration laws. New Fashion Pork, with its sow base expanded from fewer than 1,000 to more than 50,000, joined in the boom, building as fast as it could and aggressively investing in every link on the supply chain. A decade later, New Fashion Pork not only raises 1.2 million hogs per year but also owns hundreds of thousands of acres of farmland from Indiana to Wyoming, and its Triumph Foods packing plant in St. Joseph, Missouri, now processes 24,000 hogs per day, making it the second-largest hog kill in the United States. The result of all this integration, Freking told me, is that “we’re not only producing pigs. Now we’re producing pork.”
The whole process is fed—and made possible—by injecting waste pits into cornfields as cheap manure, but Freking doesn’t make any apologies for that fact. “It is a great model, if you think about it,” he said. “Here’s my farm, and I put my pig barn on my farm and then I take the organic nutrients out of that pig and put it on the farm to grow the corn to feed the pig. It’s very sustainable.”
Freking allowed that not every one of his competitors lives up to the standard he expects from his facilities, especially during cash-strapped times. “When I think about the acquisitions I did of failing farms,” he said, “most of them had environmental issues. That’s true.” Still, given the construction standards imposed on hog waste pits and the piles of paperwork that must be completed to stay in compliance with the DNR, Freking said he didn’t believe that hog confinements could be contributing more to water contamination than corroding pipes and leaky septic systems in old farmhouses or small town water-treatment plants that flush their systems during flooding.
And if manure was being overapplied and making its way into surface water, that was the fault of corn farmers, not him. While the manure was under his control, he assured me, he made certain it was confined in well-built and well-maintained waste pits. After it was pumped out and sold as manure, it was up to farmers to apply it responsibly and to safeguard their own local water supplies.
A few weeks after the county supervisors meeting at which he had spoken out against New Fashion Pork, Jay Lausen gathered a group of his neighbors to attend a meeting of the Estherville City Council and lobby for passage of a resolution opposing the proposed facility. Everyone knew that such a gesture was merely symbolic and nonbinding, but they wanted the council to send a message to Brad Freking. The resolution was read and unanimously approved, and a week later the Emmet County Board of Supervisors approved a similar Good Neighbor motion. The second vote came just hours before a public meeting at the Regional Wellness Center, called by an upstart group calling itself the Concerned Citizens of Emmet County. More than a hundred people were gathered in the gymnasium as Joe Fitzgibbons, a local attorney and de facto leader of the group, rose to explain concerns about impact on air quality and on the Des Moines River.
Fitzgibbons read from a letter he had sent to Freking, outlining the steps the group intended to pursue: petitioning for mediation, seeking preemptive injunctive relief, and, if necessary, filing suit. He conceded that these legal avenues were “somewhat limited,” but the motions would at least temporarily stave off building and would draw media attention, giving the group time and a platform to make their case. “We’ve taken our fight to the court of public opinion,” he said.
Fitzgibbons then asked if anyone from New Fashion Pork was present in the audience. No one had yet met Freking in person, so they didn’t know he had been in the gymnasium from the very start of the evening. He waited in the audience for a long moment, wondering if anyone had done homework on him and recognized him as he came through the door and sat through the meeting. When no one’s eyes fell on him, Freking finally rose and walked to the front of the room. “Joe, it’s your party,” he said. “What do you want to do here?” Fitzgibbons handed him the mic, and Freking took an hour and a half of questions.
“We are pretty comfortable with the site,” Freking told the crowd at the outset, but by the end of the evening he could see the strength of the opposition. He made the group a promise: “We’re going to pursue an alternative location if possible.” And, in the end, that’s exactly what they did.
“We don’t want to be in a place that we’re not wanted,” Freking told me later. “We honor those in the communities that we work in.”
After the battle in Estherville (and a similar outcry from citizens in Dicki
nson County in 2006), Freking said he had gained “tremendous respect” for the Iowa Great Lakes Watershed and the rivers they feed. He had learned to consider those concerns before purchasing property or applying for a permit to build. “I actually have a map on my desk of the Iowa Great Lakes Watershed,” he said. “We just avoid issues. You understand the watersheds, and you just stay out of them. That’s our approach.”
Later, I recounted that conversation to Lausen. I asked him if this might represent a ray of hope—and a way forward. Sure, the EPA appeared cowed by political pressure and, yes, the Iowa Department of Natural Resources, hamstrung by the governor and legislature, seemed unlikely to carry out more than minimal enforcement of the Clean Water Act. But maybe direct public pressure was enough to appeal to the conscience of these businesses. Maybe it was still possible to have a one-on-one conversation and find the best solution for everyone involved.
Lausen broke out in a broad, characteristic smile. “You haven’t seen where they built instead, have you?” he asked.
By the time we arrived, the sun had burned through the morning rains. The cold of weeks before had turned into a brief, unseasonable warm-up. The sun was so bright, in fact, that we could actually see light glinting on the water running off the newly fertilized fields toward Brown Creek, right where it passes under a bridge and bends into a stand of trees, on its way to the Des Moines River. Steam rose off the blacktop, casting the whole scene in a slight haze. But you could still plainly see: the fields surrounding the New Fashion Pork facility, bright white on the hill above, drained directly into a DNR-maintained wetland restoration site.
The spot where New Fashion Pork had built swung deftly to the east of drainage points affecting local water supplies and therefore avoided Estherville and opposition from townspeople and the city council. But what about everyone downstream in Emmetsburg or Fort Dodge or the half million people who depend on the river in Des Moines? What about all the other Iowans who go to the tap expecting to find clean, safe water?
Chapter 15
WATER WORKS
The soaring, vaulted ceiling and complete quiet can make the filter building of the Des Moines Water Works (DMWW) feel like a cathedral. Tucked into sheltered niches on either side of the tiled gallery, the filters themselves look like nothing more than soaking pools at some long-forgotten Turkish bath, but their green-hued waters are pumped in from the Raccoon and Des Moines rivers, then slow-filtered, up to 50,000 gallons at a time, through 100 tons of gravel and 130 tons of sand. Linda Kinman, the policy analyst and watershed advocate at the DMWW, explained that this building had been in use since the 1940s, but the process it employs is ancient in its simplicity and has worked as effectively as ever—until recently.
Scientists at the water works have been tracking steady increases in levels of nitrates and E. coli in the contributing watersheds since the 1970s, when industrial agriculture first started to hit its stride. But in the last decade those levels have started to assume a predictable pattern: spikes track with periods of peak manure application with noticeable increases each November and then vertiginous leaps to dangerously high concentrations in late spring and early summer. And in the past decade those nitrate levels have started to pose greater and greater threats to public health—an even broader source of concern than the spread of antibiotic-resistant bacteria. And in 2013, the situation finally reached a crisis.
For three months straight, between the end of April and the end of July, as spring thaw then heavy downpours ran off drought-parched fields, scientists at the DMWW measured record nitrate loads coming into their treatment plant. Their public health officials issued alerts to warn parents on days when it was unsafe to let children drink from the tap, reminding them of the risk of “blue baby” syndrome. (Nitrate impairs the oxygen capacity of the bloodstream; in babies and toddlers the syndrome can effectively cut off their air supply, rendering them a deathly blue.) The Raccoon levels at one point reached 24.39 milligrams per liter, more than double the 10 mg/L required by the EPA for safe drinking water under the Clean Water Act.
The situation eventually grew so dire that the DMWW turned off its intakes from the Raccoon and Des Moines rivers and began drawing from alternative sources—lakes under its control, an aquifer storage system, the utility’s underground filtration and storage hold. But as the months wore on and the backup sources began to run dry, the DMWW had no choice but to pull high-nitrate water from the Des Moines River, treat it, and mix it with what remained in the utility stores. By late July, the water flowing through the pipes was registering at 9.65 milligrams per liter. Kinman was granted a face-to-face meeting with the EPA and the Iowa DNR to discuss ways of reducing nitrate loads but came away without any promises. “The political scene in Iowa right now is almost over-the-top supportive of agriculture,” Kinman told me.
After the Iowa environmental groups filed their suit in 2011, asking the EPA to take control of Clean Water Act enforcement, the federal agency had finally been forced to respond. In July 2012, it issued a scathing critique of the DNR’s handling of the state’s CAFOs, finding that the agency had failed to properly issue required permits for operating such a facility, to administer inspections of facilities, to respond to manure spills and other environmental violations, or to assess adequate fines and penalties when violations did occur. But nearly a year after the EPA report, the state of Iowa had still failed to take any action. Seeing the dangerous levels of nitrates—and the overall trend line of water contamination—the DMWW leadership decided they had to speak out publicly. “We didn’t think we could afford to have that happening over and over, year after year,” Kinman told me. “At some point, we will violate.”
Apparently fearing that the crisis would give the EPA leverage to intercede, Governor Branstad stepped in. On May 20, 2013, he sent a letter to Acting EPA Administrator Bob Perciasepe and Assistant Administrator Gina McCarthy, whom President Barack Obama had nominated to lead the agency. Branstad denounced the CAFO compliance inspections as “the ‘gotcha’ approach.” He insisted that “the majority of discharges into Iowa’s waters are accidental spills” and claimed that runoff was unavoidable because it was “caused by Mother Nature.” He demanded that McCarthy come to Iowa and meet with livestock industry leaders before recommending any new corse of action.
In August 2013, McCarthy, who had just been confirmed by the U.S. Senate, gave in; she met with the Farm Bureau members under the picnic shelter at the Iowa State Fairgrounds, pledging to establish a “more trusting relationship between EPA and the agriculture community.” Jay Moore at New Fashion Pork told me, “It was just refreshing to hear her talk.” But many rural residents felt betrayed; Barb Kalbach, a fourth-generation family farmer from Dexter, Iowa, questioned, “Whose side is McCarthy on? Corporate ag polluters or everyday people and the environment?” Within weeks, the EPA and Iowa had struck a deal: the state would reopen hiring for seven of the fourteen positions eliminated by the governor since 2011 and would allocate roughly $30 million to water quality initiatives.
Scientists at the Des Moines Water Works point out that the DNR’s own report on the Raccoon River Watershed, issued in 2008, estimated that 98 percent of overall contamination in Iowa’s waterways originates from manure. A second report, released in late 2011, estimated that “hog manure overall contributes about 63 percent of the bacteria load in the North Raccoon Watershed.” The $30 million allocation, they say, is just too little to address the enormity of the problem, especially when the official stance of everyone involved—from the governor to the Environmental Protection Council to the Farm Bureau—is that excessive manure and soil erosion are not the root causes of the issue.
“I have four little grandkids,” Kinman told me. She tells her daughter, who lives in a rural community, not to give her children tap water. “There are companies that make special bottled water for infants. I said, ‘You buy that in the spring and the fall.’”
I told Dennis Hill, the microbiologist at the DMWW, that ev
eryone at New Fashion Pork had insisted that high nitrate levels were the fault of commercial fertilizers and bacterial loads were the result of aging pipes and poor waste treatment in small towns along the rivers. Hill asked me to simply consider the numbers. There are now nearly 22 million hogs in Iowa and, according to a study conducted by Mark D. Sobsey, director of the University of North Carolina’s Environmental and Virology and Microbiology Laboratory, each one produces about ten times the fecal matter of an average human. Human waste now accounts for roughly 1 percent of all fecal matter generated each year in Iowa. Are we really to believe that is the source of the state’s water problem?
“Those little towns might as well straight-pipe their sewage to the river,” Hill told me. “Compared to what comes in from agriculture, it wouldn’t make any difference.”
Gordon Brand, senior chemist at the DMWW, agreed with Dennis Hill’s assessment. Brand explained that the drought in 2012 had set the stage for a disastrous convergence. Nitrogen-rich fertilizers applied that spring were never dissolved by the usual rains and remained near the surface. Also, with so many crops failing, there were fewer corn and soybean plants uptaking nitrogen, so it all remained in the soil. (In 2012, researchers from the Louisiana Universities Marine Consortium found that the lack of runoff that year had created one of the smallest hypoxic zones in the Mississippi River Delta since scientists began measuring in 1985.) By spring 2013, the ground was extremely hard and supersaturated with nitrogen. But farmers, concerned about the prospect of losing a second year’s crops, spread more fertilizer. “The farmers like to apply a little bit more on the surface,” Brand explained, “to give their corn plant a kick-start.” But almost as soon as they had completed this fresh application, a series of heavy thunderstorms hit Iowa. “And the water’s now really going through the soil,” said Brand, “and that’s not only this year’s nitrate, but some of last year’s.”