The fire hall in Nickerson, Nebraska, population 350, was packed. The metal chairs set up for the planning- board meeting were all taken. There was no room left in the aisles. Folks had squeezed into the back of the room, and the crowd stretched out the front doors and into the parking lot, where the latecomers were left pacing in the gathering dark, demanding to be let inside. Most Monday nights, the village board is lucky if one or two people show up to voice an opinion on municipal matters. On April 4, 2016, there were hundreds—so many that the board moved the meeting to a larger room and opened the windows to let the people outside hear.

The zoning committee was planning to act on a proposal that had caught the attention of everyone in the area. An unnamed company wanted to build a massive chicken-processing plant, designated in filings only as “Project Rawhide,” on a tract of agricultural land about halfway to Fremont, a larger town a few miles to the south. The plant, according to a report submitted by the company, would create 1,100 new meatpacking jobs, support 125 area farmers by buying 1.6 million chickens per week, and bring in an estimated 2,000 additional jobs indirectly linked to the project. As people poured into the fire hall, someone from the Greater Fremont Development Council, which had courted the project, handed out fact sheets, claiming that it would bring in a quarter of a billion dollars in revenue.

Randy Ruppert didn’t buy the math. He farmed 220 acres not far from the planned site just outside Fremont, where he had retired after 48 years of working for railroad companies as a manager of major construction projects. He was trained to think through problems systematically, and he envisioned a host of undiscussed downsides: truck traffic, odor, inadequate waste disposal, public health risks. One of his last assignments, at RailWorks Track Systems, had been to help the meatpacking giant Cargill head off the swamping of its corn-milling plant in Blair, Nebraska, about 20 miles east of Nickerson, during the Missouri River flood of 2011. The city of Blair had raced to stack a mile of sandbags around its municipal wastewater-treatment facility, and Cargill ended up building an eight-foot-high, three-mile-long emergency levee at a cost of more than $20 million. This new poultry plant was to be sited squarely in the flood plain of the Lower Platte River. What would happen when heavy rains came again?

The Lower Platte’s watershed was already classified as the sixth most polluted in the United States, thanks to another Cargill plant, in Schuyler, Nebraska, 30 miles upstream. Ruppert had become something of an environmentalist in his retirement, trying to persuade area corn and soybean growers to switch to no-till farming and to plant buffer strips along their streams to keep their fertilizers from adding to the toxic runoff. He even restored 65 acres of his own pastureland to high-diversity prairie. Millions of chickens would not only undo that work but also leave the river water unsuitable—even untreatable—for drinking. Discreetly, he began talking to neighbors. Ruppert is an unassuming man, gregarious but soft-spoken, a blue-jeans-and-ball-cap guy who earns respect with his precise attention to detail. (He likes to relax by spending unbroken hours engraving decorative designs into rifle parts under a microscope.) After he’d spent a few days laying out his concerns, hand-painted signs started appearing along the highway: NO PROJECT RAWHIDE, CHICKENS STINK, COMING SOON: BIRD FLU.

Ruppert also decided to contact Jane Kleeb, the founder of a nonprofit advocacy group called Bold Nebraska, which had become the leading force in the state against the proposed Keystone XL pipeline. For nearly eight years, Kleeb had kept that project on hold by rallying farmers and ranchers around concerns over contamination of surface and groundwater in the event of a spill—until finally, in November 2015, President Barack Obama announced that he was rejecting the plan. (President Trump has reversed that decision, but Bold Nebraska’s efforts continue to hold up construction in Nebraska.) Ruppert figured Kleeb could help him build opposition to what he considered another threat to the state’s waterways by contacting the people on Bold Nebraska’s mailing list and its followers on social media. Ruppert spoke with Kleeb on the phone a couple of times, and she agreed to come to the board meeting in Nickerson and even go to his home beforehand to talk with people from the community about how to fight the plant.