America’s Industrial Dairy Wasteland

Jim Lundstrom at the Peninsula Pulse in Door County has an excellent piece on the poisoning of Wisconsin by the industrial CAFO, the too-bad-you-don't-like-pollution, modern agriculture model, or factory farm.

Lundstrom's compelling lede: "Scott Dye, a Missouri farmer who works as a field coordinator for the Socially Responsible Agriculture Project, said America’s Dairyland may soon have a new motto:  'America’s Industrial Dairy Wasteland.'"

Writes Lundstrom:

Speaking at a press conference in Green Bay on June 10, Dye and Kewaunee Cares co-founder Lynn Utesch outlined ways in which state leaders and the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources have let its citizens down by allowing industrial-sized dairies – which go by the euphemism of Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations, or CAFOs – to pollute Kewaunee County and Lake Michigan by not regulating and enforcing CAFO operations.
"We should not mince words about this. This is nothing short of a public health emergency," Dye said.

Wisconsin can blame former Gov. Jim Doyle (D) (2003-2011) and many legislative Democrats for bringing us the Livestock Facility Siting Law, an innocuous-sounding law that gives CAFOs the power to trump community anti-pollution measures, thereby dissolving community control and local democracy and handing these rights to Big Agriculture from whom Doyle took in lots of money.

The myth of the noble Wisconsin small farmer lives on used by CAFOs as Doyle's successor, Scott Walker and legislative Republicans, have become baleful instruments of Big Ag, taking money and poisoning their constituents.

Scott Walker has made Big Ag's pollution more dangerous, and Walker now takes aim at the DNR and science (virtually wiping out the public interest science regulatory regime) as Wisconsin's waters, air and land are being toxified.

One wonders if Jim Doyle regrets his decision enacting his obscenity into Wisconsin law, as Walker, has directed the DNR to abandon the Wisconsin Constitution's Public Trust Doctrine in Walker's budget before the gerrymandered legislature.

Even Chequamegon Bay of Lake Superior, an environmental treasure and popular tourist and recreation destination, is imperiled by a proposed CAFO. (Slater, Duluth News Tribune)

The least Jim Doyle could do is offer a few words.

I know Scott Walker has no regrets, wherever he is today.