Within the last 20 years, Lynn Henning’s family farm in Lenawee County has become encircled by a dozen new corporate animal agriculture factories. They dump manure into open lagoons that drain into the headwaters of Lake Erie, causing massive algae blooms. Henning has reported many violations of environmental regulations, yet the state has never enforced these laws.
Instead, the answer to her activism is direct and frightening: She says she’s found dead animals in her mailbox and on her porch, and that someone fired a gun and shattered her granddaughter’s bedroom window.
The factory farms are heavily subsidized by the federal government — a massive yet rarely publicized form of corporate welfare that keeps meat cheap in Big Macs and KFC buckets. The powerful agribusiness lobbies in Lansing and Washington have made it very hard for her small farm to compete.
There are about 300 factory farms in Michigan, with the number skyrocketing in recent years. They are officially called CAFOs — concentrated animal feeding operations. Besides the environmental damage to land and water resources, they are major sources of greenhouse gas emissions.
Henning recently gained new allies with a very ambitious agenda. Michiganders for a Just Farming System (MJFS) is a newly formed coalition of sixty environmental and animal rights organizations working for a state moratorium on CAFOs, a new federal farm bill that does not so heavily subsidize corporate animal agriculture, and better enforcement of existing Michigan regulations on factory farms, which are currently hamstrung by a legal challenge backed by the powerful Michigan Farm Bureau, says Bee Friedlander, president of the group Attorneys for Animals, which is part of the MJFS coalition.
At the federal level, a new farm bill is enacted every five years, and work on it has begun. A national CAFO moratorium has already been introduced by Sen. Cory Booker, a New Jersey Democrat who is a vegan. Given the current political landscape, it’s a longshot. But efforts for state moratoriums are already underway in Oregon and California. And the more states that enact such bans, reform on the federal level begins to seem possible.
State Senator Sue Shink (D-Ann Arbor) is in discussion with MJFS about introducing a bill here modeled on the Oregon legislation. Given that Democrats control both houses in Lansing for the first time in 40 years, “now is the time” to launch this uphill battle against the farm lobby, says Thomas Progar, president of Veg Michigan. This is the first time that group has worked openly toward a common goal with others whose members aren’t all vegans or vegetarians.
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