Today’s (Thursday, March 17) community briefing and North Dakota Health Department hearing on a proposed factory hog operation near Buffalo will reveal where the state’s priorities lie regarding big-time livestock production versus local resistance to such operations. The session at Buffalo, about 40 miles west of Fargo in Cass County, could either be a useful and balanced discussion or confirmation that the state Department of Agriculture’s corporate farming bulldozer is fueled up and quite willing to roll over legitimate community concerns.

Given that state health regulations are stacked against public health and environmental values, and that the state ag commissioner actually invited the hog farm company to build in the state’s low-ball regulatory climate, it would not be smart to bet against the 9,000-animal (initially) factory farm.

Add to those factors elements of the ag press that shill for factory livestock farming, and the scales seemed steeply tilted against the people of Buffalo and the surrounding area.

Nothing illegal is going on here. That’s the point. The out-of-state agribusiness partnership that wants to build the hog barn, waste lagoons and manure-spreading service has been in this dance before. It is sufficiently sophisticated to write a permit request that conforms to laws and regulations regarding zoning, health concerns and environmental protections.

Again, that’s the point: North Dakota health and environmental regulations are less stringent than in nearby states. That reality is among the reasons Rolling Green Family Farms of Pipestone, Minn., is looking north to expand its multistate hog business. It’s easier for the partnership – which seems to have changed its designation from LLC (company) to LLP (partnership) to scoot around North Dakota’s anti-corporate farming law – to set up a concentrated animal feeding operation (CAFO) near Buffalo. The company has run into official opposition to pig CAFOs in states where counties and/or townships have more regulatory authority than in North Dakota.

Furthermore, it is not hard to find neighbors of the company’s hog factories who have nothing good to say about the stink, health effects associated with air and water pollution, and destroyed property values.

Is it any wonder residents in and around Buffalo are not only worried about the future of their community but also are resigned to being dismissed by state regulators who work in a system that was designed to dismiss substantive objections. All they want is a counter to the piggish drive to build CAFOs in North Dakota, no matter the damage to host communities. All they want is a little common-sense fresh air blown into a regulatory system that stinks.

