Transcripts

text | pdf |

---

[SIDE CONVERSATION] MARK STEIL: Minnesota Public Radio's Mainstreet Radio is supported by a major grant from the Blandin foundation, strengthening rural Minnesota's communities through grant making, leadership training, and conferences. Good afternoon, I'm Mark Steil and this is a special Mainstreet Radio broadcast on hog production. We're at the Chuckwagon Restaurant in the community of Cleveland, Le Sueur County.

The farmland around Cleveland is a proposed site for a large scale hog operation. Yesterday, though, the County board meeting in the center placed a moratorium on feedlot construction-- a moratorium, which will last at least until the fall. So that means the large hog unit will not be built, at least for now, in this part of Minnesota. This sort of debate on large farms is going on all over Minnesota and the rest of the country.

Proponents of large farms say they're efficient and deliver a consistent supply of economical pork products. Opponents, though, contend the large feedlots can cause environmental damage and economic hardships for family farmers and small towns. The FM News Station's Todd Moe reports.

TODD MOE: Dave Krenik owns and runs a hog farm near the South Central Minnesota town of Cleveland. He raises some 6,000 pigs a year and says his livelihood as a pork producer isn't threatened by large hog farm networks. His main concern is running an efficient operation, raising his hogs at a profitable level, and keeping production costs low. He says, a large hog co-op like the proposed Pheasant Run, a five site feedlot in Le Sueur County just outside of Cleveland, probably wouldn't have a major impact on his farm.

DAVE KRENIK: Because they're going to either build in some other states. The pig-- and pigs do-- they do go on trailers and are mobile and they can move to other, you know, to markets. And so we're looking at a nationwide industry, not just a Minnesota industry. So that's who we're really competing against are the producers in the other states, whether they be independent or corporate.

TODD MOE: Krenik represents Le Sueur County on the State Board of the Minnesota Pork Producers Association. He's talked with farmers in nearby Martin, Blue Earth, and Nicollet counties and has found the idea of farmer networks to be, for the most part, non-controversial. But in his home County of Le Sueur, large hog co-ops are a new trend and are being met with opposition.

DAVE KRENIK: It is something new and something that people aren't familiar with. And so I think the people opposed to it are a little bit, like I said, unknown-- have a little fear of the future, of the unknown future about these larger operations and how they'll affect the local community.

TODD MOE: Opponents of large hog feedlots are concerned about the pollution they create and about the social and economic changes that could cause in small towns across Minnesota. Christine Hartsfield, a community activist who lives along Lake Emily near Saint Peter, is opposed to the Pheasant Run operation. She's not sure the Minnesota Pollution Control Agency has carefully considered the ramifications of building large feedlots near residential areas and natural areas such as lakes and watersheds.

Hartsfield says, a lot of residents in the Saint Peter community were stunned when Pheasant Run received a building permit. Even though the PCA has ruled that hog feedlots don't pose a serious threat to the environment, Hartsfield says, she's concerned about the proper management of the large hog operation and its potential for expansion.

CHRISTINE HARTSFIELD: In speaking candidly with people on the citizens board, and staff, and employees at Minnesota Pollution control, they are basically saying that they don't believe this is agriculture. They believe this is industry, but that's beyond their scope to make any kind of, you know, changes or definitions there that should be left up to state government as a whole to redefine this whole thing. So even Minnesota Pollution Control knows that this is not agriculture as we know it. This is something newer and bigger and needs to be addressed. And there have to be revisions made.

TODD MOE: Hartsfield acknowledges that some farmers need to join cooperatives to remain economically viable in a competitive global Ag market. But she says regardless of whether the feedlot is run by a co-op or an individual farmer, hog operations that are much larger than most farms today could cause economic damage to small farms and rural communities.

CHRISTINE HARTSFIELD: When farmers plead, let us do this because we need to be able to make money, they are asking the community to make a sacrifice on their behalf, which is to sacrifice clean air, to sacrifice maybe some potential pollution, and so forth. So the whole community is being asked to make a sacrifice. And then I would ask what portion of that community is really going to benefit.

TODD MOE: One of the proponents of networking among hog farmers is the Minnesota Pork Producers Association. Dave Preisler of Le Center is executive director. He supports large hog operations as long as they're managed by farmers who understand the needs of rural communities. Preisler says, farm networking is a growing trend in the hog industry of the '90 as farmers strive to meet their economic goals. He says the new feedlot operations can vary. Some are large farms run by one or two people who control the hogs from breeding to market. Others are cooperatives set up among several farmers.

DAVE PREISLER: I mean, all farming, no matter if you are a small farmer or a medium sized farmer or a large farmer, and again, looking within the context of the corporate farm laws that we have in this state, is a business. And if you're not profitable in that business, you're not going to last very long. But it is a business.

TODD MOE: On the issue of land usage, Preisler says, he understands the concerns of environmentalists and rural residents over air and water quality and zoning ordinances for farms. But he says locating large hog operations in areas that are zoned for agricultural use makes the best sense. For now, Le Sueur County commissioners say, they want to study the issue of farmer co-ops. The County Board has placed a moratorium on large hog farm networks in the county. For the FM news station, I'm Todd Moe.

MARK STEIL: You're listening to a live Mainstreet Radio broadcast from Cleveland. We're at the Chuckwagon Restaurant. And the owner of this restaurant would like it to be known that she does not take a position on the issue of hog production, large scale or otherwise, but has simply furnished this restaurant and made it available to us as a site for this discussion.

We have a couple of guests with us here in the studio in the Chuckwagon restaurant in Cleveland. Linden Olson is a hog producer from the Worthington area. We'll hear from him first of all. Linden, you've joined a large scale hog venture, the Green Prairie Co-op. Tell us about that and why you felt it was right for you to do that.

LINDEN OLSON: Certainly, Mark. First, we've not defined what large scale is, and it seems to me that a lot of people that defining large scale as anybody that's got 10 sows more than they do. So relatively speaking, Minnesota does not have very many large scale hog operations. They have larger scale ones than they've seen. There's a couple of counties in Northwest Missouri that have 80,000 sows in two counties.

In Minnesota, we're not talking anything like that. There's places in other parts of the world, like Yugoslavia and Hungary, where they have 30,000 or 40,000 sows basically in one site. We're not talking anything like that in Minnesota. We've got two counties in North Carolina, Monroe and Sampson Counties, where they've got hundreds of thousands of hogs. We're not talking anything like that in Minnesota.

So first, let's define what large scale is. Is it a thousand hogs in a barn? Is a 1,200 sows? What is large scale? Because there are people that would say, yes, I don't large scale hog farming, particularly if they've got 80,000 sows in a few buildings in one county. I don't have a problem if we've got a few farmers go together and have 1,200 sows in one site. I don't think that's large scale hog farming.

As a member of Green Prairie, one of the things that we looked at was we got a group of us got tired of seeing our corn and our kids and our soybeans being shipped to North Carolina or Oklahoma or other parts, and our kids too, and raised hogs for somebody else. So we were looking for a way in which that we could be competitive and keep our families on the farms, keep pork production in Minnesota, keep the churches and the schools and the towns working because we kept the families there.

So we joined together, about 70 of us, in the Green Prairie as a network to build F1 gilts that our members and other peoples in the area could take back to use their farm to get the best genetics and keep the whole farm economy in Minnesota clicking a little bit.

MARK STEIL: Paul Sobocinski, a farmer from the Wabasso area. You take a position that large scale hog production is not something that benefits the state and that there are alternatives to it. How so? What are some of the things that can be done?

PAUL SOBOCINSKI: Well, first of all, I want to make clear for this program is that I'm here today representing the Land Stewardship Livestock Concentration Committee. And in that general sense, when you asked the question about what are the alternatives, I think it's first important to understand some of the aspects about sustainable agriculture. I mean, land stewardship supports sustainable ag because we feel it's more continual, renewable. We feel it's more in harmony with nature.

We look at a thing called holistic resource management in which we get the operator and the family to sit down and look at their goals, set their goals. We call it engaging the brain. And what we believe too is in less capital intensive operations. We asked three key questions when looking at a livestock operation or looking at any particular type of operation. Is it profitable? Is it environmentally sound? And then how does it affect the community?

Looking at some of the basic alternatives, we think there are some real good, viable alternatives in which that need to be looked at. For example, the Jim Vanderpool farm up at Kerkhoven, Minnesota, he used pasture based farrowing. It's an operation in which the whole family enjoys taking part of, and they're doing very well. What's coming new on the line that's being done, that's being put together right now at this phase?

Marlene Halverson from the University of Minnesota is working on a piece with straw based farrowing. And the straw based farrowing doesn't involve odor. It takes care of some of the problems that we're talking about with some of the larger scale units and the problems that are happening in the community. And that looks to be very viable. That's the Swedish model. And so that is some of the things that we think producers need to take a look at.

MARK STEIL: I don't think there's any doubt that, you know, small producers can stay in business for the time being. At least, you've heard the economic arguments, though, that larger units of production will be needed to meet demand, to meet the type of hog that meatpacking plants are calling for. Do you buy that argument, or is that something put out by somebody?

PAUL SOBOCINSKI: No, no, I don't buy that argument. I look at the goal of industrial ag is to control the market by eliminating-- through the process eliminates open markets. I think a good example is North Carolina, where the hog price is substantially less to independent producers. And that kind of aspect of that occurs here in Minnesota and across other states across the Midwest is going to be real damaging in terms of what happens.

And I think the other part, when you look at industrial ag, you have to look at what are the total costs. What are the costs to the community? What are the costs to the environment? And when you look at all those aspects, I think people are going to see that sustainable ag is a much more viable alternative.

MARK STEIL: Linden, how about that, the argument of industrial agricultural versus family farms?

LINDEN OLSON: Well, I think you have to look at what are the driving forces behind the changes in pork production. I think first of all, one of the driving forces has been that historically that pork production has had a 20% to 25% return on investment, particularly, in some cases, well run hog operations, even higher. And as interest rates dropped in the '90s and late '80s, the investors were looking at places where they could get more than 3% or 4% return on their money.

And there were some very enterprising people that put some other things that were happening together and said hog operations, we can expect to get 20% to 25%. Coupled that with the changing eating habits of our American consumer over the past years, where over 50% of our meals now are eaten in restaurants like this, and fast food restaurants, in schools, in institutions like hospitals, military, a whole changing place of where we're eating. And those types of institutions want a more uniform product than was coming.

So by combining some large scale with genetic changes, technological changes, they could get a more uniform product which the hotel, restaurant, institutional trade demanded. Another thing was that the technological things that came along that made it possible to raise hogs in larger numbers without the threat of disease.

And fourthly, I think as this began to happen, smaller producers said, hey, we've either got to make some changes and get on the bandwagon or we're not going to be around to survive. And as they looked at the lowering returns for number of animals and the number of pigs that a person could raise under alternative systems, some of them decided that they would rather go along that direction than do something else.

And so the networking concept of producers banding together came along. And the last factor I think, was that really gave us was a push was the NAFTA and GATT where we realized to a larger extent that we're now in an international market. And to be competitive in an international market, we've got to band together in bigger volumes.

MARK STEIL: We're going to go to a caller right now. Rebecca from White Bear Lake is on the line.

AUDIENCE: Hi. I question the concept that making farmers more efficient is really an issue. We've been saying this to farmers for years and years and farmers have become more efficient and a lot of small farmers are still not profitable. And I have two questions for either of your guests. One is, are large scale systems really more efficient than family sized farms? And also, what is really keeping small producers from being profitable? Is it that they're not very efficient or is it problems with the marketplace?

MARK STEIL: Let's take those one at a time. The question, first of all, of efficiency, Linden, are they really more efficient?

LINDEN OLSON: Well, I think Paul made a point. It depends on how we measure efficiency. And we in this country have several different ways in which we can measure efficiency. We can measure efficiency by cost. We can measure efficiency by energy usage. So the way-- one of the ways in which we can measure efficiency on hog production is how many pigs do we get out of a sow in a year. Because to a large extent, whether you have a sow on pasture or you have it somewhere else, you have a certain amount of cost that is going to be involved--

MARK STEIL: How about on that issue? How does the Green Prairie Co-op do?

LINDEN OLSON: Well, we're just getting started, but we estimate that we will have about 21 or 22 pigs out of our sow per year. The National average is less than 14. When you pull that down and spread it across all the cost of the pigs, the large units that are going up, very few of them will ever be under 20 pigs per sow per year. And right now we can-- we're raising about 100 million hogs in about 7.4 million breeding herd. Talk about efficiency, we can raise the same number with less than five.

MARK STEIL: How about that, Paul? Are they more efficient?

PAUL SOBOCINSKI: Well, when we look at it, for example, one of the things that we have engaged right now in the Land Stewardship Project is currently doing a case study on a family sized hog farm in southeastern Minnesota, which uses low cost, environmentally sound methods to produce hogs. $0.79 a pound cheaper than the top producers in the region.

This one example, this one farm is 50 south faired finish operation, which minimizes cost of production using naturally ventilated low maintenance buildings and sustainable cropping practices. The cost of production averaged around $0.24 a pound. I don't think they can beat that.

MARK STEIL: So you're saying that--

PAUL SOBOCINSKI: Well, the top-- yeah, well, the top producing--

MARK STEIL: --small farms can match large operations farms efficiency.

PAUL SOBOCINSKI: The top producers were doing $0.41 a pound. In this particular case, the pigs produced per year were 12.85 versus the 13 highest farms in the area were producing around 15.13 versus the 22 that Linden is talking about.

MARK STEIL: Linden, you had one quick comment on that.

LINDEN OLSON: Well, several. Records from the University of Minnesota pig champ, which thousands of farms all over the country, the top 5% or 10%, are hitting up close to 24 pigs per sow per year. The other thing, none of the large producers that I know of are telling the small producers or the kind of people that Paul is talking about that they shouldn't raise hogs that way. I think what they do resent is that people are raising hogs this way, are trying to tell other people that they shouldn't raise hogs the way they want to.

MARK STEIL: Let's take the second part of her question real quickly. The question of why are small farms continually going out of business through the decades since the '30s, and does not that point to the inevitability of larger farms coming on the scene, Paul.

PAUL SOBOCINSKI: Well, I think when you look at the issue of smaller farmers going out of business since the decades of the '30s is that the mindset of the farmers in the leadership in agriculture and particularly, I would fault to a certain extent the University system and the extension system for pushing industrial model of agriculture. That's not going to support rural communities and not going to support the environment and doesn't measure all the cost. And when we look at that aspect, we started-- we have been substituting more and more agribusiness inputs--

MARK STEIL: Even if that's true, is there time now to change that tide?

PAUL SOBOCINSKI: Absolutely. There are numerous farmers across the state that are engaging in those practices that are learning those practices. Just at Montevideo, Minnesota-- I mean, at Vista, Minnesota, there were 17 producers. This is my first time I happened to attend a holistic resource management course. When you start to look at these total aspects, these total costs and look at some viable alternatives.

There's Michael Hartman farm over at Gibbon, Minnesota, that's doing extremely well. So it's a matter of education, getting the information to the public. And part of that's happening, too. So there's some-- well, I'm seeing a few shots at the University, there's some good things because there is sustainable ag program at the University of Minnesota that's helping advance this.

MARK STEIL: Linden.

LINDEN OLSON: Well, one of the things that smaller producers can't do is when you get into multiple enterprises to keep up to date on everything that's going on in hogs, and dairy, and beef, and corn, and soybeans, and grain production, and hay, and marketing, and all that kind of stuff. It's almost impossible for one people-- one person or even a family to keep up on all those things. So part of the reason for the larger scale and the networks that we're in is that you can allow people to specialize and take advantage, so everybody doesn't have to know everything.

MARK STEIL: You're listening to a special Mainstreet Radio broadcast from the Chuckwagon Restaurant in Cleveland. I'm Mark Steil. And our guests this afternoon are Linden Olson, a farmer from the Worthington area, who is a member of a large scale hog operation, and also Paul Sobocinski from Wabasso, a farmer who would rather not see the large scale operations on the scene. We have another caller on the line. Jim from Chippewa County, go ahead.

AUDIENCE: Yeah, hello, and thanks for letting me on. This is Jim Vanderpool. Just called in with a couple of comments. One, I'd like to say to the caller that called in just ahead of me that because I seem to sense some concern there or a willingness to try to help out if there was something that could be done. The public is very influential in what kind of agriculture we have because the public, all of us, are the people who support one kind of agriculture or another by how we spend our food dollar. So that's something for her to think of.

I wanted to call in just to say that I have a pasture based operation here. We're building a building this fall or this summer for finishing, and it will be a deep straw bedded kind of a situation also usable for farrowing. But our main emphasis is pasture and also pasturing the gestating animals. In doing that, in the past two years, we returned $350 an acre to the pasture. That's in terms of the gestating animals. I don't have figures on the farrowing.

The other thing I could tell you that you might be interested in is that, well, in my opinion, agriculture is extremely over capitalized. And that's the place for the so-called family farmer, the smaller operator. You know, we're making a living here, undercutting the rest of the hog industry on capital. Our capital investment is-- we've been able to push it down now to about a third of what the industry average is in terms of what I read in the papers.

MARK STEIL: OK, well, Jim, thanks for your call. And another, I guess, a vote in favor of the small farmer. But he raised a very interesting question about does the consumer affect the type of agriculture are out there, Linden?

LINDEN OLSON: Well, yes, they do. But I'd like to comment on one other factor of what he said. I was raised and came up through the '40s when there was an awful lot of pasture farrowing operations. And what happened was every time these pasture field hogs came to market in the fall and winter, the market went down $7 to $10 to $15 100. There was a price increase when there was no hogs ready. The packing plants had to close down.

Part of the reason, and my father happened to be involved in trying to move away from strictly the farrowing operations to having the farrows out-- to sell his farrow twice a year so that they could more readily utilize the facilities and the packing plants and everything within the state of Minnesota. So if everybody did what Mr. Vanderpool did, we'd go back to the '40s where we had the boom and bust price cycles and it was not profitable for anybody.

MARK STEIL: Paul, how about that?

PAUL SOBOCINSKI: Well, I think that's spells out clearly Land Stewardship's thought about looking ahead when we're talking about the other alternative, which is using adopting the Swedish model. So that through that combination of doing pasture based farrowing out on the pasture and then the opportunity to do-- to farrow during the wintertime using the straw based model provides for an even flow.

But I think more important that you raised the issue about the consumer. And if I was the consumer today, I'm looking at what's going to happen in a choice between both systems. First of all, I would be saying that, first of all, that if I was a consumer, I wouldn't want to have to pick up the liability of these proposed industrial models of agriculture, and specifically limited liability. Senator Charlie Bird from Chokio has been proposing and hammering this for the last five to six years in the Minnesota legislature.

MARK STEIL: Limited liability, what would happen in your view?

PAUL SOBOCINSKI: Limited liability limits the operator's ability-- sense in terms of not having to pick up environmental risk and also some other bills. And when--

MARK STEIL: So you're saying, basically if the operation goes out of business, there may be a heck of a mess for the public to clean up.

PAUL SOBOCINSKI: That's correct. And if the public is stuck with that cost-- and right now, that's why the issue and why this is so heated in communities and towns all across the state in Iowa is the issue with that liability. Because right now, it's the it's the County system. It's the taxpayers in the County.

And this is borne out in corporate farm task force hearings by Paul Strandberg of the attorney general's office that the liability right now would be picked up by the taxpayers in the County. And we don't think that that's good public policy when there's an alternative that's cheaper. And so you measure total cost about which system is going to survive or compete, we have to have an equal playing field and giving limited liability protection to that type of enterprise does not make sense for the consumer.

MARK STEIL: Linden Olson.

LINDEN OLSON: First of all, the issue of limited liability is kind of a red herring because we have limited liability in all the corporations in the state of Minnesota. By general nature, a corporation is limited liability. What Paul is talking about and what Senator Berg is talking about is the limited liability company, which grants-- would grant farmers the same limited liability that 3M has, plus the tax advantage of a Subchapter S or an individual. That's what the limited liability.

The liability is not the environmental liability that Paul talking about at all. There has been almost zero problems with environmental liability in the state of Minnesota. And those problems that have surfaced recently is particularly in this area along the Minnesota River have been of the small pork producer. It hasn't been a big one.

So this limited liability and the environmental damage and all that, to me, I think is a red herring. When units of any size and whether it be International Paper, or International Falls, or Pheasant Run, when they are well cited, when they go through the proper procedures for review by the Environmental Quality Board of the Minnesota Pollution Control, the possibility of environmental damage is not too great.

MARK STEIL: Let's go-- we're going to have to go to Dan in Minneapolis. We have a lot of callers on the line. Dan, your question.

AUDIENCE: Hi, I'd like to preface my comments, first of all, so that your farmers listening in the audience don't judge my comments too severely. I'm not your average city slicker. I grew up in a rural area and worked on farms throughout my youth. And in fact, I consider the farming business to be among the most honorable professions.

But I would like to open up the scope of this discussion a little bit further and make three arguments in support of the contention that this form of agriculture is immoral and unethical. And the first argument would be that it generally results in what most people would consider if they were exposed to it and not desensitized to it as unethical treatment of animals.

Beyond that, the second argument is that the general effects that it's having on the diminishment of family farms is also unethical. And then thirdly, there has been considerable scientific studies done showing that the consumption of meat in the manner in which the American Society is doing it is unsustainable, that if the rest of the world were to consume meat products at the rate that we do, that the Earth would run out of resources in a matter of about-- I don't know the exact figures, but it's an alarmingly short period of time.

And rather than-- I support the arguments that your guests are making and the idea that banding together in small cooperatives is the way to challenge this competition. But rather than try to meet the competition head on, I would suggest that they consider a different approach.

And that would be one of rather than going head on, doing an end run and abandoning the meat producing idea altogether and start to form collectives to generate vegetable food products which will in fact result in higher efficiencies through-- when you consider the efficiency of conversion of vegetable protein into consumable proteins for humans.

MARK STEIL: OK, there's a lot there in that question. Let's start with the third point first of all, the idea that there's too much meat production. I mean, for our guests here, both are in favor of livestock production. Is there anything there that you can see turning around any time soon? I mean, meat seems to be pretty popular.

LINDEN OLSON: Well, I think that meat has been a food from the beginning of time. From the biblical times, clear back, there was hunting. And then Abraham kind of had his flocks. And so it's been all through history. And if people choose not to eat meat, that's-- I think that's their choice.

For those people that wish to do to eat meat, what we're trying to do in our cooperatives and I think most pork producers in the state of Minnesota and basically around the world are to convert corn, and soybean meal, or grains, and other form of protein into a more edible, nutritious, delicious type of product that people want to eat. It's a food of choice. It's not something they have to eat.

Pork producers don't have to produce pork. They can raise corn. They can raise carrots, if they feel there's a market for it. I don't think any place that the large pork producers that I've talked to, whether it be in North Carolina, I've been to Denmark and across the country, nobody is telling people that they have to eat pork. And consumers have a choice. And when they have the information they want, I think they ought to have the choice to eat the kind of products that they want.

MARK STEIL: Paul.

PAUL SOBOCINSKI: Well, let me say, first of all, I appreciate the caller's call. And I certainly don't take issue with the choice of having the opportunity to eat vegetable food products. But I think it's important to point out in terms of meat consumption, that meat consumption and having livestock connected with agriculture is what we call sustainable. It's a very important to have livestock involved in the farming operations.

For example, if you take highly erodible land and you put it into pasture, and for example, one of the biggest things that's been very, very well moving, particularly in the dairy industry, has been rotational grazing. And it's even now being used in the hog industry. Jim Vanderpool is doing that out in his farm. And that's land that's erodable, that's in grass production. It's not going to blow. It's going to stay there.

So I'd really like to point that out. The other part about that, that's really unique when you look at rotational grazing. One of the things that's been advanced by Land Stewardship Project is it's a new concept. It's called what I call engaging the brain. Instead of taking the tractor and taking-- using all the fossil fuel and going out and bringing the hay and sticking it in the sow, bringing it in, taking the animals to the land, and it's a lot cheaper.

MARK STEIL: Let's go to the second part of the question real quickly, unethical treatment of animals. Is confinement livestock production unethical?

LINDEN OLSON: Well, in my viewpoint, it's not. I was raised and we did raise hogs on pasture back in the '50s. And to me that some of the treatments that-- things that happened to me are just as unethical as when we put them in buildings and take good care of them. I can remember times in which we had 6 inches of rain in a short period of time. And we drowned 10 litters out on pasture. To me, that's not unethical.

I can remember days-- I can't remember what year it was, but when we had days like this, only hotter, It was, I think it was 100 and-- 101 or 2 degrees. And we didn't have any wind. We lost a lot of pigs out on pasture from heat exhaustion. We should have been able to get out there and sprinkle them. We didn't have the equipment at that time. It was kind of an unusual deal.

We put hogs in confinement. We can take care of these hogs the way they need to be taken care of, no matter what the weather is. I can remember I think it was the winter of 1970, what was it, '74, when we had the big snowstorms. There were hogs lost in outside lots because the snow covered up their ventilation systems. So to me, as a person who looks at raising hogs, I have to take care of that hog when it's 102 degrees outside and when the wind chills 80 below.

And I can do a heck of a lot better job taking care of that animal in a confinement situation where if they need heat, I can give them heat. If they need ventilation, I can give them ventilation. If they need to be sprinkled with water to keep them cool, I can do that. I can't always do that under other situations. So to me, the way we raise hogs I think is a highly ethical system.

MARK STEIL: Paul.

PAUL SOBOCINSKI: Well, I think the key aspect of whether engage any type of system is management and what's being used. If you're not using management in a sustainable system, sure, you can have problems, but you're going to have huge problems in a confinement system, if you're dependent upon fossil fuel and electricity fails. And you don't have your generator all ready to go, those kinds of things always can happen too.

I think the biggest probably the difference here between industrial ag and probably sustainable ag as it relates to this issue probably has to do more with the working more in the natural state of events with animals, working with the animals nature, rather than trying to substitute high tech equipment to deal with those kinds of things.

And I guess that a good example of that is I was thoroughly impressed with Marlene's Halverson's field thing that took out at Lake Lily in Minnesota on the Noel [? Juglas ?] farm in which happened to look at a straw based system where they had systems set up where the animals could choose where they farrowed and that type of thing. And really working in nature with animals. As a hog producer myself and one who has split between both systems, I can really see some value to that. And that's something I'm definitely going to be looking at in the future.

LINDEN OLSON: So I think a lot of the large pork producers feel that they're in a sustainable system too because they've taken the corn and soybeans and putting them through a pork product and they're putting the waste product back on the land to recycle that back to more corn and more soybeans. So the definition of sustainable, I think, is also open to debate. We have about probably as many definitions of sustainable as we might have people in the room.

But people in the large hog operations and being a part of Green Prairie that's one of the things that we wanted to do was to make sure two things we put in our mission statement. One, we wanted it to be environmentally friendly, and secondly, we wanted to be socially responsible.

And environmentally friendly, we try to build and locate and site units, which we're not going to cause odor problems, in which the waste can be put back on the land to be used as fertilizer. And secondly, we want our members to be members of the community so that the profits that we generate from any hogs being raised, they're going to stay in the communities to support the schools and the churches and the communities.

Part of the, I think, disagreement over large scale hog operations is who controls them and where the money is going to go. In a large number of cases, and it's not true in Minnesota, that money is going to Ivory towers somewhere and it's going out of the state. With the corporate farm laws in the state of Minnesota, the profits that's made in the pork production business is going to stay in the state of Minnesota.

MARK STEIL: Let's go to the next phone caller. We have Mark from Wisconsin dialing in with a question. Go ahead.

AUDIENCE: Yeah, I got a quick question to either gentlemen there to address. Maybe both would like to respond. It's in regards to when you have a higher concentration of hogs or whether it's dairy or whatever within a specific area, what would the risk be that would be involved as far as disease.

In the interim now, large production facilities may foster lower food costs, but what about long-term, say, like pseudorabies or some type of epidemic or something hits and goes through these areas, it could potentially wipe out a large, vast numbers of animals in a real quick sweep.

And just another quick comment regarding with the other question that the caller had called in with the Ivory towers. I was fortunate enough to grow up on a dairy and a swine farm in FFA. Got initially started with one hog farrowed, save the little ones, bred them back, eventually had a herd going, which paid for my college education.

And without the hogs, I probably wouldn't be doing what I'm doing today, even though I'm not in ag business per se. But it is good to keep the money into the community local or at least to have people that can work on these farms to, you know, try to achieve future success.

MARK STEIL: OK. Thanks for that question. Let's try to keep the answers short, if we can. We have a lot of callers. We'd like to get to as many as we can. But Linden tell me how you handle the disease concerns at your operation?

LINDEN OLSON: Well, first of all, when he talks about concentration, we don't have concentrations of hogs in the United States like they do in Europe. You have some places in Europe where hogs literally are in the backyards of people's houses within 50 or 100 feet. We were in Denmark and the house was less than 50 feet away from totally enclosed hog operation.

When you get into Holland and some places in Germany, they have large hog operations, and they don't have disease problems. So I think the disease problem is overrated. New technologies now in the Disease Control that we have, if there's a disease coming through, it's going to go through all the herds in an area. It doesn't make any difference whether they're inside or outside.

Pseudorabies has gotten into biosecurity units. TGE has gotten through anywhere. I think that that's an overrated point, that what we have now will control most diseases. We've got international diseases like PRRS. And it doesn't make any difference where they're coming from. So I think it's a question not of size or concentration, it's a question of management and some climatological conditions and other things.

MARK STEIL: Paul.

PAUL SOBOCINSKI: Well, I guess my sense when I look at the total system of industrial ag, I think of it naturally back as it relates to me just as a human being and how we affect our natural environment and how we deal affects our health. And look at an animal, if it's stressed, if it's not in a natural environment, I think it makes it much more susceptible. And I think there's less possibility of disease problems-- and this is my premonition about it-- on sustainable farms then there's going to be in hugely confinement operations.

MARK STEIL: You're listening to a special Mainstreet Radio broadcast here on Minnesota Public Radio. I'm Mark Steil. And joining me at the Chuckwagon in Cleveland are Linden Olson, a farmer from the Worthington area, and Paul Sobocinski, a farmer from the Wabasso area. Sharon from Minneapolis is on the phone line with us. What's your question?

AUDIENCE: My question has to do with the work that's been done in Iowa, looking at counties where there were large hog production and those counties that did not have it. And in those counties without large production, there were stronger rural communities, more people living in the county. And it just seems to me we've been talking about the land and the air, but not a lot about the communities. If that Iowa study is correct, it's just another way to decrease the strength of our rural communities when the bottom line being dollars rather than people.

MARK STEIL: Question about the rural community, the social structure, economic structure. Linden.

LINDEN OLSON: Well, first of all, Iowa has a different corporate law structure than Minnesota, which allowed outside people to come in. And I think in the cases of Iowa, a fair amount of that was true. What we have in Minnesota, that the people in Minnesota are going to have to do this.

The corporate farm law outlaws people from outside the state from doing what happened in Iowa. And I think what we're trying to do at Green prairie is an example of that. We've got 70 local farmers involved in this rather than somebody from the outside with outside capital come in and tell us what to do. We've raised the capital within and we're going to do what we want so that things do stay in our local communities.

MARK STEIL: Paul.

PAUL SOBOCINSKI: Well, I guess I look at it when I think about the example of Iowa, two people who went over and visited North Carolina, Dr. Thu and Dr. Durenberger, anthropologists from the University of Iowa. They come up with a number of striking things that affected in terms of the community, and they found loss of jobs, declining, number of independent farmers, animosity in rural communities. We certainly have that going on. Property values decline, decreased tax base environmental problems, and nuisance problems, and odor problems. So these are just a number of pieces of that generated by this style of agriculture.

MARK STEIL: We have another caller on the line. Ralph, from Scott County, go ahead with your question.

AUDIENCE: Yes, I'm an ag journalist. And I write a weekly farm issues column that appears in local newspapers across Minnesota and Iowa. I'd just like to make a comment and ask your panel to respond. It seems to me that what's missing here in your discussion is a clear view of the impact of large hog operations on farming and on rural economics.

The truth is that when giant volume hog operations enter the picture, the economics, the incomes of family sized farms, small towns, rural Minnesota generally decline. Farms disappear, schools disappear, local businesses disappear. And young people, you know, our greatest resource and investment leave for the city and don't come back. And until recently, hogs been profitable for farmers.

MARK STEIL: Thanks for that question. That's a big issue. It's one that comes up a lot. Linden, is there any evidence that large hog operations drive small operations out of business?

LINDEN OLSON: Well, I think you could look at the statistics and make an argument on either side any way you wanted to. I think some of the old thinking was that packing plants and industries will be built where the hogs are raised. But just in the last four or five years, that thing has gotten turned around. And right now, packing plants are being built where people want them come in there.

One built in Guymon, Oklahoma, basically, they're going to build a whole hog industry around Guymon, Oklahoma, where there were no hogs because Guymon, Oklahoma went around and solicited. Basically, it was seaboard who had a plant in Albert Lea, and they closed the Albert Lea plant and moved to Oklahoma. There are a couple other examples. I won't take the time to do it. But if we move the packing plants out, there's going to be any pork production and all Minnesota is going to be is a place to grow grain and shipped it somewhere else, so they can feed hogs.

MARK STEIL: Paul.

PAUL SOBOCINSKI: And I guess I look at the key to not moving people out is to keep as many people involved in production agriculture as possible. And that's what I look at in terms of the family farm system. If you look at Iowa statistics between 1989 and 1993, the most profitable large herds in Iowa were generating a profit of 1,232 a 100 and the most profitable small herds earned 1,293 a 100. So profitability and having livestock connected with family farms is key. Once you lose that connection, that's when rural communities suffer the impact of the loss.

LINDEN OLSON: And I agree with Paul that the idea is to try and keep as many people on the land. We've got different opinions on how we're going to do it in the state of Minnesota.

MARK STEIL: Stephanie from Dundas is on the line with us. What's your question?

AUDIENCE: I have many, but we-- I'm surrounded by dairy farms over here and we were concerned that in addition to the problems with hogs that we've experienced in our county, that it would open it up to the huge dairies. But at the moment we're holding in our legislature on that. I've heard there's a big dairy near Cleveland. And is that where you folks are? That has not been able to live up to terms of its permit and that does make people uneasy. Do either speaker know about that project? And in the second case, in the Worthington area, there's been some coverage of problems absorbing workers coming in to work for low wages, sometimes under poor conditions over there. Can you fill me in any on that?

MARK STEIL: I think both of those are a little bit outside the scope of the discussion and the expertise of the panel here. On the meatpacking question, there's no doubt that there's a lot of jobs in Minnesota and that maybe we could follow up on that just a bit. Linden kind of broach that question that packing plants, if they don't get the type of hog they want from a large operation, may move out, meaning that small operators will not have a place to sell their hogs either. Paul, do you place any credence in that? Is that possible?

PAUL SOBOCINSKI: Well, when I look at the meatpacking industry, I look at the Packers and Stockyards Act. The Packers and Stockyards Act was started-- was put in back during the Depression in the 1930s because there was monopolies by the meatpacking-- by a number of large packers taking control of the market with a captive supply. Industrial agriculture that's being advanced calls for a captive supply.

Down in my area in Springfield, Minnesota, one of the proposed operations that was going up when the hog price was $26 a 100, which I was getting for my hogs right at that time. Those people indicated that they had contracts in the neighborhood of $43 to $45. So what they're doing, the packing industry, is simply working through producer networks, setting up so they can buy a captive supply.

And so what they buy on the open market can be just like North Carolina, buy it cheap from independents. And that's what's going to put independents out. And that's why those of us who are involved in sustainable agriculture don't believe that sustainable agriculture, industrial ag can sit by side-- sit side by side because it's about control. They intend to eliminate the independent family farm system and replace it with theirs.

LINDEN OLSON: There are some interesting thing that's happening to go-- to carry the pork production farther than just the farm. [? ORI ?] Utilization and Research Institute is looking at the feasibility of farmer owned packing plants. It seems to me that the future of particularly pork in the profits where it used to be in the production, now it's going to be in the marketing, in branded pork products, and things like this. It seems to me that in some way the farmer, rather than just being a supplier, is going to have to have some control of that pork farther down the pork chain or share in the profits some way with the packer if they're providing the profit they want.

MARK STEIL: We have another caller on the line, Phil from New Brighton, go ahead with your comment and question.

AUDIENCE: Hi, I was wondering if there is any information out there on as far as the environment from these large hog operations in North Carolina or Missouri. I'll hang up and listen. Thank you.

MARK STEIL: That's something that you hear a lot from Minnesota producers that watch out it happen in North Carolina, the same thing is going to happen there. What has happened in North Carolina? Is there any evidence of significant damage, environmentally or otherwise?

LINDEN OLSON: Yeah, there is some evidence that there are some environmental problems, particularly in odor. I think we have to realize the difference between North Carolina and Minnesota. The Eastern Coast of North Carolina, Sampson and Monroe counties, where the hogs are concentrated, is a low, flat area. It's an extremely humid, hot, hot area, and the concentration is very high.

In Minnesota, we do not have that kind of a climate. We have hills, and we have trees, and we have a lot more land, a lot more distance between our operations than they do out there. So I would agree that if we're not careful where these units are sited, how they're managed and so on, there can be problems.

The other thing that we have difference, in North Carolina, has a lot of lagoons. And in that kind of a climate with humid, I think the odors carry a lot farther than they will here where a drier climate, they don't work quite that many months of the year and we're probably not sizing those particular lagoons if we want to use them as lagoons properly.

PAUL SOBOCINSKI: Well, my experience in regards to the environment, I started working on this issue back in 1990. And the type of lagoons size at that time in terms of compacted clay liners was 9 inches. That's what the NPCA was allowing to take place. Now they've moved up to 2 and 1/2 feet of compacted clay. That's only come because of citizens demands that the government take an environmentally sound policy. If people are dependent upon the Minnesota Pollution Control Agency to protect the environment and the quality of water, they're in big trouble, in my opinion.

The other aspect about lagoons, why we don't have very much on it is that we haven't done very much in terms of monitoring, and most of these operations monitoring wells are not being required or some type of system that's going to assure that we're not causing a problem. And until we do that, I don't feel that society can bear the cost of what that potential might be without taking care of those things first hand and first up.

MARK STEIL: Let's hear from Vern in Northfield. If you have a real quick question, we can get it in. Go ahead.

AUDIENCE: Yeah, sure. My name is Vern. I'm a hog farmer here in Rice County. And as I sit here trying to map out my hog future, I listen very carefully to when people talk about alternatives and that kind of thing. And my experience has been I've checked out some of the things that the Land Stewardship people have brought up and I've even talked at Mr. Vanderpool who called in and looked at some of his data.

And I find basically the things they're trying to map out for me are the data and stuff is so very unsophisticated that I really have a tough time trusting it. And it's kind of in the wrong form, too. Mr. Vanderpool even mentioned, he talks $350 per acre return on gestating sows. And I need data that is not in a per acre as I want to compare it to other systems. You know, I don't want to compare it to raising hogs.

So I think I've got a kind of a challenge to Land Stewardship to maybe not dangle these carrots out here of all these alternatives that really aren't, in my opinion, all that well documented yet. I even went so far as to check out the Swedish system pretty carefully. And the system I compared was really a lot less capital intensive. And it didn't really--

MARK STEIL: I'm sorry. We're going to have to go to a comment here. Paul, go ahead with your comment for about 30 seconds.

PAUL SOBOCINSKI: Briefly, Land Stewardship piece in this whole process has involved a number of people in the process. For example, we've been part of the Northwest area foundation report better road to whole. It's an economic, environmental study of the social impact of sustainable ag. It's involved the University of Minnesota. It's involved North Dakota State University, Northern Plains, Sustainable Ag Society, Montana State university, University of Montana, a number of organizations that are directly involved working on this.

MARK STEIL: A quick closing thought.

LINDEN OLSON: Yes, I don't want to see Minnesota lose its hog operation like it has its feedlot operation, its poultry operation. California is now the number one dairy state. I think we've got to have all kinds of alternatives in order to keep Minnesota from becoming just a grain producing state.

MARK STEIL: And that will bring to a close our broadcast here from the Chuckwagon in Cleveland. I'd like to Thank our guests, Paul Sobocinski and Linden Olson for joining us here for this discussion. A reminder that Mainstreet Radio's coverage of rural issues is supported by the Blandin foundation, providing leadership training through the Blandin Community Leadership Program. And it's been an interesting hour. Thanks again to both of our guests. This is Mark Steil from the Chuckwagon in Cleveland.