Pig Farm Could Sell for 75 Million

Those of you who know me know that I occasionally rant or write about agriculture on this blog. I'm working on a book that addresses the public rhetorics of agriculture, so I constantly watch the news for stories about the ag world.

Well, this one was out through the Associated Press. It hit the Syracuse paper, too. This one is about a pig farmer in Las Vegas who is being offered 75 million for his land so that homes can be built on his farmland. This is a common enough story: farmland sold off to developers, yet it has some interesting twists and turns. The money alone is astounding.

North Las Vegas has grown up around this farmer's swine operation (he raises 3,500 pigs). The folks in their nice air-conditioned homes with their patios and watered lawns really don't like the smell of the swine barns wafting across their subdivisions. Now these folks probably like their bacon, pork chops, pork tenderloin, and barbequed pork as much as the rest of the world. but they probably reason that their pork is not supposed to be rolling around in their neighborhood. Pork is supposed to be in vaccumed sealed packages in the local supermarket. Never mind how it gets raised--just NIMBY (NOT IN MY BACKYARD).

I can tell you from experience (yes, I did help raise a couple of pigs in my farm days) that pigs do smell. But so do cows, chickens, and all other domestic farm animals. 3,500 animals--well, you can imagine what the manure yields are on a daily basis.

Guess what--this intrepid farmer does NOT want to sell. He wants people in the neighborhood to see his farm as a public good, not as public nuisance! He feeds his pigs recycled food from the local casinos, so he actually has an environmental argument for remaining on the land: he's performing a public service of feeding people and actually helping the environment.

There's a lot to say about this story--the beleagured farmer, the greedy developers, the lack of zoning and city planning, the environmental angle (feeding pigs recycled casino food). Even though I want to root for this farmer and I am rooting for him to stay and defy the development of his land, he's running a factory farm, essentially. Yes, it's a family farm, but the size of the operation makes it a CAFO and along with that do come real environmental concerns about the release of ammonia, manure lagoons, etc. We don't get details about how he runs his operation, but an operation that size is usually always highly industrialized (antibiotics, huge confinement sheds, manure lagoons or pits).

So how does one read this story? David (the little guy) fighting Goliath (the developers)? The yeoman farmer making his stand? The industrialized farmer fighting suburban sprawl?
The durn fool who won't take the money and get on to Florida?

See the story at

http://uk.biz.yahoo.com/060925/323/gn11x.html