As the Huffington Post’s David Kirby wrote as news of the outbreak first broke:

For years, leading scientists around the world have worried that large-scale, indoor swine “factories” would become breeding grounds for new pathogens that could more easily infect humans and then spread out rapidly in the general population – threatening to become a global pandemic.

We know that hog workers in Europe and North America are far more likely than others to be infected with potentially lethal pathogens such as MRSA (Methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus), drug-resistant E. coli and Salmonella, and of course, swine influenza. Many scientists also believe that people who work inside CAFOs are more at risk of contracting and spreading these and other “zoonotic” diseases than those working in smaller-scale operations, with outdoor pens or pasture and far lower animal density.

But until now, hog workers with swine flu have rarely gone on to infect other people, save for close family members. And that is why this new strain of swine influenza virus is so vexing – and alarming. It seems to spread quite easily through casual human contact.

It bears repeating that the jury is still out on the source of the swine flu outbreak, and Mexico’s hog industry denies responsibility.  It does appear, at this point, that the virus migrated from a pig to a human, but we do not yet know where or precisely how.  Still, Kirby follows up with some additional reporting that seems to suggest that CAFOs had something to do with it.

Depending on how the public health investigation being undertaken by U.S. and Mexican officials turns out, it could have a significant impact on how we regulate agriculture in Iowa.

Gestation crates, also known as farrowing crates or sow stalls, are metal enclosures measuring 7 feet long and 2 feet wide. Although pork producers continue to use such crates in Iowa, they have been banned in several other states as inhumane.

A New York-based livestock advocacy group is using news of a blaze at a central Iowa hog confinement to speak out against industrialized agriculture.

Fire officials continue to investigate the April 1 fire at Tamco Pork, located in central Iowa between Marshalltown and Grinnell. Eight fire departments spent more than four hours fighting flames in high winds. Although the incident did not result in a loss of human life, 600 hogs died in the blaze.

“The tragic deaths of so many pigs in the fire that swept through the Marshall County hog confinement facility is a testament to the folly of factory farming. Had these animals been given access to the outdoors, they would likely still be alive,” said Gene Baur, president and co-founder of Farm Sanctuary, the group behind efforts to publicize the story.

“Modern factory farms pack as many animals as possible into as small a space as possible. Often wallowing in their own waste, these animals are barely able to move. Breeding sows spend most of their lives squeezed inside crates that are barely larger than their own bodies. These two-foot wide metal enclosures, known as ‘gestation crates,’ keep the sows virtually immobilized for their entire lives. The animals cannot walk, turn around or engage in basic natural behaviors, and they suffer both physical and phychological disorders.”

Baur added that although the deaths by fire must have been horrible, “these animals suffered long before this fire at the hands of an industry that views and treats them as mere production units.”

Key to Baur’s complaint is the use of gestation crates in Iowa, the largest pork producing state in the nation. While it is still legal to use this type of confinement in the Hawkeye State, it has been banned throughout most of Europe as well as in California, Florida, Arizona, Colorado and Oregon. Legislators in Illinois are also currently debating if gestation crate confinement is appropriate.

Baur and the Farm Sanctuary organization, although located in New York, are quite familiar with Iowa agriculture. In June of last year the group was invited by the Iowa Department of Agriculture  and a coalition of animal rescue groups to help 68 pigs stranded on a levee in southeast Iowa due to flooding. The floods destroyed a number of hog confinements that had been built on the Mississippi River flood plains. Several of the rescued hogs continue to live at the organization’s national headquarters in Watkins Glen, N.Y.

Baur will return to eastern Iowa on April 28, April 29 and May 1 as a part of a book tour.

Mertz, a rural legislator whose voting record is towards the conservative end of the Democratic spectrum, has family ties to factory farming.  According to CCI’s press release:

Rep. Mertz has family ties to the factory farm industry, as her sons Peter and David own a 4,000-head hog factory in southern Kossuth County. They have owned a operated the site for at least ten years and have been cited for five violations in the last five years. She also has financial ties to the industry — Mertz allows her sons to spread factory farm manure on her farmland and rents those acres to them. Mertz counts her farmland as a main source of income.

House Speaker Pat Murphy defended Mertz in a statement issued this afternoon:

“As an Iowa farmer who has spent over two decades in the Iowa House, Rep. Mertz has the experience and knowledge to lead the House Agriculture Committee.  She knows the problems faced by Iowa farmers today and understands the agricultural issues facing our state.  As chair of the House Agriculture Committee over the last three years, no one can surpass Rep. Mertz’s expertise on agriculture issues.”

Though filing ethics charges is serious, a source in the statehouse tells the Iowa Independent that it is not likely to result in the removal of Mertz from her chair of the Agriculture Committee.

While Vilsack has promoted respectable policies with respect to restraining livestock monopolies, his overall record is one of aiding and abetting Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations (CAFOs) or factory farms and promoting genetically engineered crops and animal cloning. Equally troubling is Vilsack’s support for unsustainable industrial ethanol production, which has already caused global corn and grain prices to skyrocket, literally taking food off the table for a billion people in the developing world.

The group has started a petition that they hope will receive 100,000 signatures opposing Vilsack.

Tom Vilsack interviewed outside Mineos pizza in Pittsburgh (Photo: Vilsack for President/Flickr)

On matters of agriculture, Vilsack was a pragmatic centrist, content with incremental changes and reluctant to take steps to significantly disrupt the status quo. When he successfully ran for his first term as governor in 1998, the generally pro-Republican Farm Bureau decided not to oppose him, choosing instead to endorse both him and his opponent. That was an impressive feat for an underdog Democrat running for governor — especially for a trial lawyer who had never farmed a day in his life.

He has clearly thought about what he would do in his new position. In an interview with a Minnesota college newspaper just before Election Day, Vilsack said Agriculture is “a department that impacts every American.”

In the interview, he cited the international food crisis as an opportunity to use America’s “soft power.” He suggested promoting renewable energy was part of the job. “How do you accelerate the research and development that gets you to second-generation bio-fuels?” he asked.

He also mentioned the school nutrition program, saying “you have to be focused on whether we are doing right by our children in schools across America in terms of nutritious food that we subsidize and we provide in school lunch programs.”

He even spoke of controlling forest fires which, it turns out the Agriculture Secretary has a role in.

While he was governor, Vilsack remained largely above the fray of ongoing feuds over the placement of confined animal feeding operations (CAFOs) near rural communities. Groups on the left who would like to give local communities stricter control over where the CAFOs are allowed felt betrayed by their governor’s unwillingness to help, but his stance kept agribusiness interests relatively quiet.

Vilsack’s most noticeable impact on rural Iowa did not involve changes to agricultural policy or stricter environmental regulations, but rather tax credits and business incentives. His economic development efforts — most notably the Iowa Values Fund, which was designed to create grants, loans, and tax incentives for businesses who choose to locate in the state — have been credited for short-term successes in many corners of the state, but critics in his own party argued that they amounted to corporate welfare.  In any event, the long-term benefits remain difficult to measure.

Vilsack was a pragmatist by necessity. For all eight of his years at Iowa’s helm, he faced a Republican-controlled legislature.  His allies on the left say his record might have looked different if Democrats won control of the statehouse a few years earlier.  He chose not to run for a third term in 2006 despite his relative popularity, opting instead to explore a presidential bid that quickly flopped.

As a presidential candidate in a crowded Democratic primary, Vilsack, who served as chair of the centrist Democratic Leadership Council until only months earlier, seemed to move farther to the left on environmental issues, embracing an ambitious but seemingly arbitrary requirement that, by 2020, all new power plants constructed must be carbon-free. His campaign even bought carbon credits to offset its campaign activities.

Vilsack also subtly tempered his enthusiasm for corn-based ethanol over the course of his candidacy, shifting to a more tenable position in favor of all forms of cellulosic ethanol and other biofuels, using corn ethanol merely as a “transitional fuel.”

From the few glimpses we have gotten of Vilsack’s federal agricultural policy positions, it is clear that he supports stricter limits on farm subsidies than Congress was able to pass in the 2008 Farm Bill. That puts him in line with the President-elect and Iowa Sen. Tom Harkin, Chairman of the Senate Agriculture Committee. Perhaps unfortunately for Vilsack, it will likely be another four or five years before Congress passes the next farm bill, and that is longer than a typical cabinet secretary has to wait.

In the interim, Vilsack will be tasked with many administrative and regulatory responsibilities, and he seems intent on pushing other policy goals in line with the Democrats’ agenda.

Expect the incoming Secretary of Agriculture to achieve tangible results that are easy to explain, because that is Vilsack’s style. He will immerse himself in a few specific issues, come up with a few policy ideas, and set to work building a political consensus, diluting the original ideas when necessary.

Don’t expect Vilsack, a consummate pragmatist, to turn America’s food system upside down anytime soon.

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.”

Capt. Barry Thomas, chief deputy of the Story County Sheriff’s Office, told Iowa Independent that someone went to the Struthers family farm near Collins and — under the cover of darkness — released hundreds of hogs from their enclosures, then began running over them with a car or truck.

“The initial report that we took on Monday indicated that there were 15 hogs that were either dead or injured after someone released the hogs and began running into or over them with a vehicle.”

Thomas said that investigators know no motive and have no suspects at this time. “We are currently pursuing several leads, and our investigation continues,” he said.

Eric Finch, who is a caretaker of the hogs at the farm, said he made the discovery on Sunday when he arrived at the farm to do chores. When he arrived he found approximately 500 hogs had been turned loose. “These pigs are all raised in large-pen, deep-bedded hoop buildings, so there’s just one gate per building and they’ll run right outside if you open that gate,” he said.

“We immediately started rounding them up. They were in the road, across the road, behind the building. They were kind of strung everywhere,” said Finch. “And then we found when we were putting them back that the latches had been misplaced in a manner that it was evident that it was humans that had opened the gates. That’s when we called the sheriff’s department.”

When a deputy arrived they followed the tire tracks and made the first of several gruesome discoveries. “It looked like a pig was probably trapped under the vehicle and dragged about a thousand yards through the field before it finally got up and walked out. You could follow the footprints right back to the building. At that time there was two pigs laying there dead, several others that had deep scrapes and gouges, several with busted legs.”

Finch said that there were initially 15 hogs that were killed or injured. “But since that time we’re probably closer to 30 or 35 head now. Injuries or internal bruising has shown up since then,” said Finch. “Several of those have had to be euthanized today.”

The Struthers farm is a relatively large livestock operation, marketing approximately 16,000 head of hogs annually, according to Finch. But Finch said he knows of no one who bears any ill-will toward the operation. “Really, most of our neighbors know we’re in the livestock business and have been real considerate and we haven’t had any problems with the neighbors or the community,” he said.

Valued at approximately $100 each, the total losses will amount to about $3,000 for the Struthers farm. But Finch said it’s not about the money. “It’s one thing to turn the animals loose, that’s just an inconvenience for us. But then to take a vehicle and purposefully and willfully injure animals like that, that’s pretty awful animal abuse and it shouldn’t be tolerated,” said Finch. “At first, we weren’t going to make a big deal of this, until we saw more and more. When we had to start putting them down because of this, then that’s when we drew the line.”

A group of Story County agricultural organizations have come together to offer a reward for information in the case. The Story County Farm Bureau has joined with the county pork producers and cattle producers associations, as well as feed supplier Mid-State Milling, to offer a reward of $1,500 for information leading to the arrest of individuals responsible for the crime.

The Story County Sheriff’s Office can be reached at 515-382-6566.

Approximately 55 people braved icy roads to attend the “Tough Issues, Let’s Talk” forum and share their views on the various types of livestock feeding operations in Iowa.

Featured speakers at the event included Aaron Putze, the executive director of the Coalition to Support Iowa’s Farmers, and Francis Thicke, an organic dairy farmer from Fairfield.

This Iowa Independent video is an excerpt of Thicke’s presentation at the forum:

This video is an excerpt of Putze’s presentation:

The “Tough Issues, Let’s Talk” forum will be moderated by Bob Leonard of KNIA radio and will feature presentations by two outspoken agricultural leaders: Aaron Putze, the executive director of the Coalition to Support Iowa’s Farmers, and Francis Thicke, an organic dairy farmer from Fairfield.

The forum’s sponsor, the Marion County Democratic Central Committee, is inviting the public to attend and participate in the discussion.

In a telephone interview with Iowa Independent, Marion County Democratic Party Chair Phyllis Weeks said the event will provide the public with an opportunity to share its concerns and learn about this often-contentious issue. “We’re sponsoring a forum, not a debate, but a forum, where people can come and express their views,” said Weeks. “Hopefully, we can get some dialog going. It’s been hard to get a meeting of the minds on this issue.”

The forum will be held Thursday, Feb. 28, at 7 p.m. in Pella at the Central College Vermeer Science Center, Room 180.

The Coalition to Support Iowa’s Farmers is an organization that seeks to help farm families who raise livestock to grow their farms successfully and responsibly. The organization has assisted nearly 850 livestock operations to identify sites for animal feeding, safeguard environmental resources and enhance relations with neighbors.

Thicke owns and operates a 75-cow, grass-based organic dairy near Fairfield. He holds a Ph.D. in agronomy and soil fertility from the University of Illinois and is a former national program leader for soil science with the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) extension.

The proposed plan, presented by Iowa State University, the Iowa Department of Natural Resources and the state agriculture department, would create a voluntary program to provide incentives to livestock farmers who utilize new odor-reducing technologies.

“Odors associated with livestock facilities has been a divisive issue for far too long in our state," said Iowa DNR director Richard Leopold in a press release. "It is time to re-direct our efforts into finding effective, long-term solutions."

Early next year the Iowa Legislature will decide if the five-year, $22.7 million plan should be approved. If implemented, the program would provide cost-share incentives to livestock producers to use odor-reducing biofiltrationand other new technologies in their livestock operations.

ISU would monitor and conduct research on the operations as a part of the program.

Iowa Secretary of Agriculture Bill Northey said the plan would provide solutions to the public concerns about livestock odor. “We are at a point where there are effective odor-reducing practices and technologies that have been developed," said Northey. "It's time to take that next step that places these practices on-farm as applied research to further document efficacy and implementation costs.”