5/18/2023 0 Comments Factory town grain farms![]() Iowa counties with large farms and high hog sales shrunk in the last 40 years while counties with small farms and low hog sales grew. Swenson says that the hog industry’s growth has not improved rural decline but rather continued the trend: “The argument that somehow or other might be a stabilizing element of rural economies, or created opportunities that otherwise wouldn’t be there – the evidence doesn’t say that.” Rural Iowa is highly dependent on agriculture and to an extent manufacturing, both of which have shed labor over the decades, says David Swenson, a regional economist who retired from teaching at Iowa State University this year. ![]() While the report says that it’s not possible to make sweeping claims about why people are leaving these counties, it notes “job losses, decline of rural services, and nuisance and public health concerns from nearby factory farms could all play a role”. It found that while Iowa’s total population has grown, counties with the most hogs have lost 44% of their population in the last 40 years, declining at twice the rate of rural counties on average. High hog-producing counties – those ranking in the top half of the state’s annual hog sales – are seeing significant population decline, according to the report. Industrial hog production has had an impact on rural Williams. But over the same period, the number of farms raising hogs in Iowa plummeted by 90%, the report found. The average farm in Iowa markets 9,600 hogs a year, 20 times more than 1982. While hog production has exploded in the state, smaller farms have been pushed out as the industry consolidates, according to the report. “Counties in Iowa that had the most growth in factory farms are doing far worse among a number of different indicators.” “This report pushes back on the narrative that factory farms are good for rural communities and that they create jobs and economic opportunities, because we’ve seen the exact opposite,” says the report’s author, Amanda Starbuck, research director at Food and Water Watch. The state’s pork industry promotes itself as an engine of economic growth and benefit for people in Iowa but a new report published on Thursday from Food and Water Watch, a non-governmental organization, casts doubts on these claims.Īnalyzing census data from 1982 to 2017, alongside data from the US Department of Agriculture and other sources, the report found that Iowa counties with the most hogs have experienced higher levels of depopulation, heavier job losses and have seen more retail businesses close, including grocery stores, than other rural counties. “But we’ve seen so many towns just turn to dust.” It’s great for our little towns,” says Kathy. The hog industry says “it’s great for our Iowa communities. ![]() Last year they finally gave up the country dream and moved to a ranch house in Rockford, an hour north-east of Williams. “It would take a full week before we could even stand to be outside,” Lew says. ![]() Most oppressive were days when neighboring farms emptied the manure pits under the confinements and spread the waste as fertilizer on fields across the road. The smell disrupted everyday life, Kathy says. Over the decades, as hog farms surrounded their home, the Carters say the odor of manure became an eye-stinging, nose-burning nuisance. Hamilton county is home to fewer than 15,000 people and more than 1 million hogs. These facilities, which house thousands of animals in sheds, have allowed the state’s hog population to more than double since 1982 – it now raises nearly a third of US hogs. Unwittingly, Carter had settled down in the epicenter of Iowa’s explosive growth of hog farms, known as confinements.
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