June 28, 2007 issue
Mountain City CAFO Project Stalled—For Now
Story by Celeste von Mangan
It was autumn 2003 when the first murmurings were heard regarding the construction of a Concentrated Animal Feed Operation or CAFO, in Mountain City, Tenn. The proposed 699 dairy herd was to be the first factory farm ever in Johnson County and the majority of the residents were less then pleased with the prospect of such an operation coming to their clean mountain home. From the first threat that a big farming operation was moving in, the close-knit community held meetings and gathered information so that they could keep the proposed CAFO, called High Mountain Heifers, from being established. For now, the project has stalled.
“A local corporation, Maymead, wanted to put in a CAFO here in Johnson County in the middle of a residential district,” said Dean Whitworth of the Watauga Watershed Alliance (WWA). “Residents and members of WWA did not think it was a good idea. Back in the 1990s, the EPA determined that CAFOs or factory farms were point-source polluters—the kind of pollution you get when you have rain washing off the streets. Under the EPA Clean Water Act, once defined as a point source polluter, activities must be regulated. It was to be a small CAFO with 699 cows—699 because at 700, the controls on CAFOs become more restricted. Well, there were a number of neighbors against it.”
The WWA was founded because the CAFO project was proposed. At first called the Johnson County Citizens Committee for Clean Air and Water, the citizens of Mountain City and members of WWA were soon holding bake sales, raffles and other fundraisers to gather resources to fight the proposed CAFO.
“This fellow in North Carolina named Jerry Anderson was already in the business with
CAFOs,” said Whitworth. “Back in 1999, North Carolina had a lot of trouble with hog CAFOs and it really turned North Carolina against CAFOs. This fellow who had a CAFO there came under a lot of pressure so he decided to move to another state—Tennessee. Local citizens fought it, talked to local and state agencies trying to get meetings with them. Going back to the early 1990s, the Tennessee Department of Environment and Conservation (TDEC) told them they needed to come up with hog, dairy and beef CAFO definitions. Those operations defined as CAFOs by the EPA had to obtain a license in order to operate. We were telling them, ‘Do not give these people one.’ This area has karst soil—it is very permeable soil. If you put pollution on the surface of this ground, in a few days it will show up in a your well. We fought this, but like anything else it is politically influenced. The corporation was quite powerful. So we had very little influence in trying to stop it. We decided our best strategy to fight was to delay them.”
And delay them they did. The WWA held meetings in Nashville beginning in 2003 with the Attorney General, the Department of Agriculture and the Department of Environment and Conservation. According to “The Right to Farm Act” that the state of Tennessee has, normal agriculture cannot be regulated. The question became, was a CAFO normal agriculture? The Attorney General’s office and the Department of Agriculture thought CAFOs were normal agriculture so they could not be contested under the law; the Department of Environment and Conservation thought they were not normal agriculture. They determined their status by the fact that CAFOs required regulation, so they would not fall under normal agriculture. Then the WWA explored the possibility of filing a nuisance lawsuit against High Mountain Heifers. By late 2005, the proposed CAFO project was two years behind schedule.
“I suspect—and this is strictly speculation on my part,” said Whitworth, “that there were problems in the partnership [between Maymead and High Mountain Heifers]. There were probably financial pressures building up in this partnership. In December of 2005, the wife of Jerry Anderson was found dead in the toolbox of her pickup truck somewhere in South Carolina. Anderson was arrested and jailed for her murder. There’s a trial going on right now. I heard two numbers for insurance money taken out on her—3 million and 4 million. It messed up the corporate partnership. There were hundreds of heifers with their tails surgically cut off, standing on a lot. All those heifers with the bobtails are gone and there was no building of the factory for over three and a half years. They did get their permit—they had a great deal of assistance from the federal government. The Tennessee state regulations did not include public input, though they are supposed to. Their meetings were show-and-tell, dog and pony shows. They could build the CAFO tomorrow—the money is there for them.”
While Whitworth and the WWA did not want anyone to be killed, he said the murder further slowed the CAFOs progress, effectively dissolving the partnership. And there were other factors as well: WWA filed a lawsuit against the EPA because TDEC was not enforcing the Clean Water Act. Though the lawsuit was dismissed on the grounds that the EPA has not determined that Tennessee is in noncompliance and the EPA has no non-discretionary or mandatory duty to perform. Then the fickle market swayed.
“Anderson got in trouble—the market forces started shifting,” said Whitworth. “The price for organic milk started going up. People began buying organic dairy products. The low-priced milk is laced with hormones and antibiotics. People are more nervous about our food sources; the market failed as well at this juncture. Weird things happen when you crowd 700 cows together that long—they get sick, and to counteract that, producers have to make sure they do not get sick so they load them up with Cipro. It’s the same antibiotic people use. The Cipro is passed out of the cows and the manure is spread on fields. You get these super bugs resistant to antibiotics and people get sick and die. They load the cows with hormones too. They shoot her with hormones because she only comes fresh when she’s pregnant. They keep shooting her with hormones and her life span is only half that of a normal cow. She produces milk constantly and she doesn’t leave the CAFO until she dies.”
Whitworth also pointed out that Johnson County is shifting demographically and socially from a strictly agricultural community to one with second homes, retirement homes and vacation houses.
“Right here in Johnson County we are in the headwaters all the way to Memphis,” He said. “If we can’t protect the headwaters, we can’t protect anything. This has been a grassroots and driven initiative. We had no powerful backers come in. We raised over $100,000 through bake sales, county fairs, black powder shoots—anything we could come up with to fight this.”
Right now, the WWA has adopted a wait-and-see stance as well as a proactive one.
“This is our home and we need to take care of it,” said Whitworth.
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