Wednesday was a difficult day for The American Independent News Network, which is the larger entity that operates The Iowa Independent. Our chief executive and founder announced two of our sister sites would close and their content would be moved to The American Independent.
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Iowa 3rd District congressional candidate Ed Fallon wants to impose a nationwide moratorium on livestock confinements built by corporations.
Fallon, a Des Moines Democrat, is challenging incumbent Democratic Rep. Leonard Boswell in the June 3 primary election. Iowa Independent caught up with Fallon as he stopped in Albia Tuesday morning on a campaign swing across the district.Known as CAFOs, or concentrated animal feeding operations, these full-scale production facilities, some housing tens of thousands of livestock animals, have long been the subject of controversy in Iowa. As the top producer of hogs in the nation, Iowa is home to many corporate-owned — and many family-owned — CAFOs.
Fallon wouldn’t provide any specifics to define exactly what types of facilities would be affected by his proposed moratorium. “I don’t have the exact number,” said Fallon. “Because I’m fully aware that to get this moratorium passed in Congress it’s going to take a tremendous coalition-building effort. And one item that we’ll be discussing will be what that threshold is. But again, I want to be really clear, I’m not targeting the small operator with a few hundred hogs. That’s not my concern.”
The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency defines a hog production facility as a “large concentrated animal feeding operation” if there are 2,500 head of hogs in the facility. The Iowa Department of Natural Resources has a series of environmental regulations governing CAFOs, many of which take effect if the facility houses 1,250 or more hogs. ” Maybe you look at what the DNR has done here and compare that with what other types of permitting thresholds have been established in other states for other types of production,” said Fallon. “Maybe that’s a reasonable standard, but again, this legislation wouldn’t only affect Iowa, and it wouldn’t only affect hogs. It will affect confinement operations nationwide, and I think there’s a lot of interest in this beyond Iowa.”
Fallon said a 2005 United States Department of Agriculture report showed that 71 percent of all the hogs slaughtered were raised either by the meatpackers or raised on contract. “For years and years there was nearly unanimous expression of concern about the risk of vertical integration, and here we have it happening,” he said. One of his ultimate goals would be a ban on meatpacker ownership of livestock, similar to the proposal supported by Boswell and Sen. Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa. That proposal was stripped from the final version of the farm bill earlier this year.
Fallon said a moratorium on livestock confinements would help get such a ban passed by Congress. “Maybe the best way to get to a packer ban and other types of reforms to affect hog production is through a moratorium,” said Fallon. “A moratorium kind of forces everybody to the table.”
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