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by Seth Slabaugh

MUNCIE – Opponents might turn the Hound loose on concentrated animal feeding operations (CAFOs).

More than 70 residents of Blackford, Delaware, Wayne, Jackson, Rush and (Ohio's) Darke counties met at the Springwater Park labor hall Monday night to learn how to fight dairy and swine CAFOs, also known as factory farms and industrial farms.

Consultants advised the residents to buy organic food, to vote, to not trust the government to protect them, to file lawsuits, to carry a camera at all times, to take water samples and to take air samples.

The consultants from New York-based GRACE (Global Resource Action Center for the Environment) offered to lend local citizens one of the organization's five UVHounds, a portable monitoring device that uses ultraviolet light to detect airborne threats from CAFOs, such as hydrogen sulfide and ammonia.

GRACE lends the monitors only to activists who are planning to sue CAFOs – not to activists who are just curious – because the devices are expensive ($30,000 each) and in high demand.

Retired teacher Helen Reddout, a cherry grower and a GRACE Factory Farm Project consultant from central Washington, showed the audience photos and video of dairy cows caked in dried manure and standing in liquid manure, of farm fields flooded with manure, and of waterways polluted with manure and dead cows.

If the milk industry is so proud of CAFOs, why doesn't it show such images in its advertisements instead of broadcasting ads featuring cows in pastures? Reddout asked.

Karen Hudson, another GRACE consultant, lives on a fifth-generation family farm in West Central Illinois and is president of FARM (Families Against Rural Messes), a grassroots organization that organized when livestock factories targeted Illinois for expansion.

She distributed studies showing that CAFOs generate antibiotic-resistant bacteria that can be deadly to people. Antibiotics are routinely given to factory farm animals to promote growth and compensate for the stress of being raised in confinement, according to GRACE.

CAFOs are a threat to people who live near them or near fields on which CAFO manure is applied, the consultants said.

Hudson travels with a suitcase full of brochures, studies, buttons, exhibits and other material, including a drawing of Abe Lincoln with a clothespin on his nose. She tells audiences she lives in "The Land of Stinkin'."

After the presentation, Delaware County resident Richard Morris, who is trying to keep CAFOs out of the Shideler area, said, "The more you find out, the scarier it is."