Factory Farms, CAFOs—It Doesn't Have to Be This Way

O’Dovero-Flesia farm in Mellen, Wisconsin, Ashland County
This is the way things could be, if only Republicans listened.

Decency, kindness and courtesy in rural Wisconsin

"Rural America once had strong communities. It would have been very difficult for anyone who built a CAFO in a rural area in earlier times. It wasn’t socially or morally acceptable for one person in the community to benefit at the expense of others."
 —John Ikerd, Rural Communities of Necessity


Madison, Wisconsin—Thinking of our neighbors, the environment, our communities and families generations into the future is human decency.

You won't find such commitment from the CAFO, Confined Animal Feeding Operation, aka the polluting and dangerous factory farm. The CAFO is rapacious, heartless and will devastate entire communities without remorse.

For many multi-generational residents of Wisconsin fighting for their homes, the corporate officers of the odious Wysocki company in central Wisconsin, the Reicks View corporation working to devastate northern Wisconsin are in many day dreams made to swim in a pool of the liquid cow and pig manure they produce before beginning operations that destroy the dreams of 10,000s of Wisconsin families.

The last five years have seen the people rising in Green County, in central, northern and northeastern Wisconsin, as each new election cycle presents the question can clean-water and sustainable-farming activists get a victory against the GOP-backed CAFOs and other Big Ag operations that are the scourge of rural Wisconsin. [Sen. Tammy Baldwin, are you listening?]

The Sustain Rural Wisconsin Network is a "statewide coalition of individuals and organizations dedicated to preserving the environment while maintaining the health and economic vitality of rural communities."

Today, the sustainable O’Dovero-Flesia farm in Mellen, Wisconsin in Ashland County is featured in stories from the heartland. Mellen is way-up north, and is breathtaking.

The O’Dovero-Flesia farm is the way things should be, the way it used to be, the way it is now.

Five generations of O’Doveros have called these thousand acres at the base of the Penokee Hills home, and as I pulled into the driveway, I could understand why: it’s beautiful. Framed by a mixed hardwood and pine forest, the undulating pastures blend into the rising Penokee Hills. Two barns with fieldstone foundations (built in the late 1920s or early 1930s) wear the weathered patina of eighty-some years of Wisconsin rain, wind, snow, and sun. 

Recommend the piece for feel-good reading in a state anxious about what Scott Walker and the Republicans will do next.

As our friend Patt Pisellini of Rome, Wisconsin wrote in 2014:

I spent my summers in Clark County, on a dairy farm. We never had a [manure] 'lagoon,' and we took our cows out to pasture each morning.

Our milk was safe to drink, and our water did not test positive for nitrates.

Responsible dairy farmers would NEVER let such things happen - AND we knew the names of every cow, because they came when they were called. Our cows didn't recoil from human touch.

Those were the days.

Below John Ikerd, academic, speaks in Madison, Wisconsin in 2008 on kindness and decency in farming operations.