It’s great that there will be a major conference at Drake University on the “rising environmental and public health impacts” of CAFOs with an eye on “prevention strategies.”
The guest essay about it in the Sept. 8 Register , however, seems to suggest that the conference might be weak on the economic causes of CAFOs and the damage to the Iowa farm economy they have caused. For those of us who were fighting against CAFOs during the 1980s farm crisis, this seems strange, given that former Senate Agriculture Committee Chairman Tom Harkin was a co-author of the Register piece. Back then, Harkin introduced the Harkin-Alexander bill and the Harkin-Gephardt bill, which would have ended the biggest subsidies that CAFOs have received, paid, not by taxpayers, but by farmers, in the form of cheap, below cost farm prices.
Although abundant information about these bills is available at the Harkin center at Drake, Harkin did not mention them in the essay. This economic factor is crucial, because you can’t do much fix those “environmental and public health” impacts without economic justice for farmers.