Jefferson County Farmers and Neighbors, Inc.

There are businessmen that are willing to do these things to all of us who call Jefferson County, Iowa our home. They are creating this threat by building Large Scale Swine CAFOs, or Confined Animal Feeding Operations. We prefer to call them Factories, because that is what they really are. They are NOT farms. To add insult to injury, the owners of the hogs and the owners of the facilities almost never live near the site and as a result it is our opinion that the developers reap the profits while the local neighbors subsidize the operation with their misery.

A CAFO Factory is a building that can contain from 1,000 to over 5,000 hogs or sows, each held in small pens. The animals remain in this building their entire lives, while excreting through metal grates in the floor. Their raw sewage is stored immediately below the pigs in a concrete waste pit. These untreated sewage pits can hold 500,000 to 1,000,000 gallons of noxious, disease bearing waste for months before being spread on surrounding fields.

Research studies by the Centers of Disease Control, renowned universities such as the University of Iowa, and the opinion of experts show that when CAFOs come into a community:

Quality of life decreases
Health problems increase, and
The environment deteriorates

As these problems increase, we can expect our property values to decrease and our friends and neighbors to begin moving out. Ask the folks in Davis County to our southwest or Washington County to our north. They will give you an earful.

And here is the really bad news: Jefferson County is NEXT – unless we do something right now.