Bigger, denser farms vex nearby residents

About 6.8 million. That was the number of farms in the U.S. at their peak in 1935. Today, the number is 1.9 million, a bit over a quarter of that high. Yet when it comes to farm-raised meat, the country is producing a whole lot more now. In 2022, the U.S. produced over 47 million tons of meat.

That’s thanks in part to the rise of mega factory farms, which raise hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of animals at a time.

“A sense of scale is 7.5 million egg-laying hens at one farm in Malcom, Iowa. That is 90 times larger than what the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency considers a large egg farm,” said Kenny Torrella, senior reporter at Vox.

And some people who live near these massive farms say the overpowering smell has degraded their quality of life.

Torrella wrote about the rise of mega factory farms and what it’s like to live near one. He joined “Marketplace” host Kai Ryssdal to discuss his reporting. The following is an edited transcript of their conversation.

Kai Ryssdal: We all know the phrase, I think, “factory farms,” but “mega factory farms” was a new one for me. Give me a sense of scale here, would you?

Kenny Torrella: So a sense of scale is 7.5 million egg-laying hens at one farm in Malcom, Iowa. That is 90 times larger than what the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency considers a large egg farm.

Ryssdal: The thrust of this piece is the people living near these farms, and we’ll get there in a second. I do want to talk, though, about regulation of these things because with all 50 states, as you say, having “right to farm” laws, regulation becomes a little, a little challenging.

Torrella: Yes, that’s right. The agricultural industry kind of benefits from something called agricultural exceptionalism, where they’ve been carved out of a lot of key laws. So just as an example, the EPA enforces the Clean Air Act, and yet the agricultural industry is generally exempt, and when it comes to the Clean Water Act, only about a third of large animal farms have to get clean water permits. So, the laws that we should have in place to prevent agricultural pollution just aren’t doing the trick.

Ryssdal: Let’s get then to the air and the water. Part of this, you spend a good amount of time, I gather, meandering around sort of the Midwest and the Upper Midwest near some of these farms. First of all, you get close to one. Give me a sense what it smells like.

Torrella: It’s overwhelming, especially on days when they’re moving the manure. It just stings your nose, and you want to get inside as fast as you can.

Ryssdal: And in fact, there are people you talk to who basically stay inside. This one woman bought a grill and can’t use it because she doesn’t want to go outside. Tell me about her.

Torrella: That’s Jennifer McNealy in Decatur County, Indiana, and she has one farm near her that has 8,000 cows, and then she has about 13,000 hogs on a number of different farms around her. For her, the stench is just overwhelming when she gets home from work. Many days she has to cover her nose with her T-shirt or with a scarf and run indoors. She even has to take the long way to work because she doesn’t want to drive by these factory farms and get a whiff of them.

Ryssdal: She and others call and complain, and yet it doesn’t seem that they get much traction. How come?

Torrella: From the local to the state to the federal level, regulators have really dropped the ball, whether it’s at public health authorities or environmental regulators or departments of agriculture, and that’s not across the board. There are some exceptions. There are some states that are trying to do better on this, but generally, the problem is one that the industry is exempt from a lot of key environmental regulation laws, so regulators’ hands are tied. But the other problem is that policymakers have really enabled this kind of the growth of these mega factory farms by not putting safeguards in place to protect people from this pollution. The ag industry has put an incredible amount of money into getting ag-friendly candidates elected, and as a result, that means that people who live near these factory farms and suffer from the pollution, the air and water pollution, they don’t really have a lot of people standing up for them.

Ryssdal: One is obliged to point out here that we American food eaters, we like our eggs, we like our chicken, we like our pork and we like our beef.

Torrella: Yeah, that’s right. This is not just all on the corporations or on the policymakers. Some of it comes back to us. You know, Americans have been pretty quickly increasing their consumption of meat, milk and dairy and eggs over the years, and that has helped give way to these mega factory farms in order to meet the demand.