In Amish Country, an Unlikely Partnership With Beef Giant JBS Roils Community

Conor here: Quite the parable.

By Keith Schneider, a former New York Times national correspondent, is senior editor for Circle of Blue. He has reported on the contest for energy, food, and water in the era of climate change from six continents. Originally published at The New Lede and Circle of Blue. 

EDON, OH – For 60 years, this one stoplight Ohio town has been known as a place where time appears to stand still. With more than 400 Amish residents settled in and around the rural community that straddles the Ohio, Indiana, and Michigan state lines, it has been common to see large families traveling by horse-drawn black buggies to and from farms where they milk dairy cows and grow corn.

Adhering to a strict religious doctrine that resists new technology, Amish farmers here spent decades largely eschewing industrial farming practices that have become common around the United States.

But that bucolic tableau of plain people earnestly cultivating the rich soil is eroding here, splintered by an industrial farm alliance between one of the area’s leading Amish farming families and JBS Foods, the world’s largest beef producer. Over the last two years, the partnership has established a mammoth vertically integrated concentrated cattle feeding operation that is confining more than 100,000 male calves and steers in large concrete, steel, and vinyl-covered feeding barns, and generating thousands of tons of solid manure each day.

The operations have prompted complaints of odor and contamination, and state investigators have found uncontained manure running off waste piles and out of barns, draining into streams and wetlands. Water samples collected by state inspectors contained high concentrations of nitrogen ammonia, a contaminant of manure. Following the inspections, regulators cited multiple farms for manure mismanagement, and issued modest penalties to some farms for failing to secure proper operating permits.

Nine Amish farms were cited for violations of manure management regulations in August alone. The state also ordered the largest mounds of manure, some towering two and three stories tall, to be removed. The cited farms are close to each other in Williams County, Ohio and are all owned by one extended Amish family.

Area residents say the manure contaminants, which are often spread on farm fields as fertilizer, are leaching into waterways, polluting streams, lakes, and the St. Joseph River. Water samples collected by two area environmental groups showed persistently high concentrations of nitrates, phosphorus, and dangerous E-coli bacteria in streams and lakes in the region. The animal waste is considered a source of the pollutants that cause an annual toxic algae bloom in Lake Erie.

Five years ago, Ohio launched a $172 million multi-year project aimed at bringing algal blooms under control by encouraging farmers to to limit contaminants coming from their farms. But with the new large feeding operations on multiple farms, the effort seems doomed, critics say.

The situation outrages Sandy Bihn, executive director of Lake Erie Waterkeeper, who has worked for decades on regional, national, and binational groups to cure the lake’s annual toxic bloom.

“How is it possible to let 100,000 animals, and all the nitrates and phosphorus that they produce, come into the watershed that we’re investing millions and millions of dollars, if not billions of dollars to protect?” Bihn said. “This just shows how meat and JBS are able to control the system.”

Neither the family farm owner, Noah Schmucker Jr., nor JBS executives, agreed to an interview for this report. Executives of Wagler & Associates, an Indiana construction company heavily involved in building the feeding barns, declined to be interviewed.

When asked about the concerns, Ohio Department of Agriculture Director Brian Baldridge said the agency would continue to “engage with all property owners to ensure they are following Ohio laws and rules.”

Nationwide Concerns

The development in Edon of what is commonly called a concentrated animal feeding operation, or CAFO, comes amid growing efforts by communities around the nation seeking to block or limit CAFOs because of known public health and environmental hazards the operations create. CAFOs are responsible for producing most of the nation’s milk, meat, and eggs, but the massive discharges of manure and other wastes from CAFOS are a primary source of serious water pollution problems, according to state and federal assessments.

Phosphorus from hog, dairy, and poultry CAFOs have been linked to annual toxic algal blooms in Lake Erie, Chesapeake Bay, Lake Champlain, and other iconic American waters. The tide of nitrates from CAFO wastes in Mississippi River Basin states are a major cause of the expansive dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico. The US Environmental Protection Agency last summer sued three big dairies to control manure wastes contaminating groundwater in Washington state, and has directed state authorities to halt pollution from CAFO wastes in Minnesota, Wisconsin, and Oregon.

California critics of CAFOs put the issue to a vote in Tuesday’s general election, seeking to make Sonoma County the first in the nation to ban CAFOs, also called “factory farms”. The measure failed in the face of stiff opposition from farm and business interests.

“Our Bread and Butter”

For those living in and around Edon, the concerns run deep. The region’s more than 100 lakes are a “legacy” now being spoiled, according to Susan Catterall, a mother of five from the area who has become a leader of an environmental coalition opposing the large cattle feeding operations.

Photo by J. Carl Ganter, Circle of Blue.

“It our bread and butter, our tourism dollars. It’s our heritage,” she said. “It’s being spoiled. We’ve got farms polluting our county with an unbelievable amount of manure.”

According to public documents outlining the business plan for the cattle feeding operations, the area Amish farms are raising male calves sired by Angus bulls and born to Holstein cows from dairies in neighboring states. Some 3,000 calves arrive weekly to be fed for several months, as 3,000 market-ready cattle weighing 600 pounds to 700 pounds leave weekly to be fattened at finishing feed yards.

Their eventual destination is JBS’s processing plant in Plainwell, Michigan where an average of 1,400 cattle are slaughtered daily. Animals with 51% or more black hides can be marketed by JBS as higher-priced, certified “choice” and “prime” Angus beef.

Competitive Concerns

Buggies, beards, and plain dress still help to identify Amish farmers in the region, but the farmers now co-exist with dozens of big concrete, steel, and vinyl cattle feeding barns and more under construction.

Trucks hauling calves and cattle now crowd the highways and the narrow dirt farm-to-market roads. And manure piles rest like sleeping beasts beside confinement barns.

The odor and pollution tied to the cattle feeding operations is but one area of concern. Some observers say that as JBS and other corporate beef suppliers increasingly establish these contracted, dedicated supply chains with certain farmers, other farmers lose their ability to compete in an open competitive market, and eventually their livelihoods.

“The cattle industry is really the last frontier,” said Bill Bullard, a former rancher in South Dakota and chief executive of R-CALF USA, an independent cattlemen’s trade association.

“We still have approximately 20% of cattle still marketed in an open competitive cash market or spot market. What’s at risk here is that these vertically integrated systems are going to extinguish the cash market in the cattle industry. Just in the last five years, we’ve lost nearly 107,000 independent beef cattle operations They’re dropping like flies.”

(This report, co-published with Circle of Blue, is part of an ongoing series looking at how agricultural policies are affecting human and environmental health.)

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15 comments

  1. tawal

    That we don’t turn this dung into natural gas and less toxic nitrogen fertilizer highlights the stupidity of our economy.

    1. t

      Are suggesting this great Christian nation based on the King James Bible let fields lie fallow (as the Bible commands) for even five minutes let alone a year or two? Blasphemy!

      1. Jana

        I don’t know many Christians who have actually read the Bible no less practice even it’s most logical, wise principles. I confess that as an actual reader, I have seriously messed up even the logical principles.
        And then there are the Scofield bible readers….and what a mess that is!

  2. Eclair

    I have been hearing casual references among Amish friends, to, ‘Oh, that Abel (or Levi, or Sam,) he has a calf-raising barn up to Lottsville (or over to Millers Stream Road) ‘ for a couple of years. This spring, I asked my Amish friend L, where exactly her great nephew, Mose, lived, as I wanted to stop by and ask him if he would do some work on putting windows in our tractor shed. Mose (and a young helper) had done most of the carpentry work on my neighbors’ house renovation and was known to be an excellent carpenter.

    Oh, said L, he is busy with his calf barn. Although he may have some time between when one batch of calves gets shipped out and the new ones arrive.

    I stopped by his house and, sure enough, there was a fair-sized wooden, Amish-built open calf barn, in the field in front of the plain, white two-story house. It would house maybe a hundred calves. We made arrangements for him to call me when he had a free couple of weeks.

    Just down the road about a mile is the local, family-owned slaughter house, where local steer, lamb and hog farmers bring their animals for processing. I know the office manager; she is one of the ex-wives of my chicken-raising neighbor a few houses down the road and they have worked out a deal where my neighbor delivers twenty to fifty dozen eggs a week. At the slaughter house, one can pick up a chuck roast, pork chops, bacon, and two dozen free range eggs for the family meals.

    The geography around here, the worn-down Allegheny mountains, precludes big agriculture and stock-raising operations: just not enough level land. So, we are still small scale, local food. But, obviously, the big producers are making their inroads.

    1. Wukchumni

      I was impressed by what I saw in southern Utah, purposeful older towns often with elegant aged orchards there in, and small ranches with 50 head of cows and growing alfalfa adjacent to where the bovines were, something I never see here in Cali, heck there aren’t any range cattle aside from hobby ranches, really.

      Instead, we have 600,000 milk cows in Godzone mostly sick with bird flu.

  3. jefemt

    The Hutterite colonies in Montana are all visible for miles… intensive ag and cafo barns.
    A pal who worked for the Federal government in helping to manage point source surface pollution and degradation had worked with them since the 1960’s.
    Sales are into local communities. Been that way for decades. And, the Colonies grow with new operations in their vicinity as opportunities that pencil arise.
    Didn’t Earl Butz say, Go Big or Get Out?

    1. bob

      They were the anabatists that were cool with industrialization. Their communal ownership is most interesting. The US courts haven’t allowed the colonies to be separated when someone leaves. Unlike any other organization that I am aware of.

  4. .human

    Reading this article, I had to do some fact checking for the staggering claims. The numbers are correct and very worrying.

  5. Fritz

    I resided on one acre in a rural area near the town of Stouffville, Ontario. There were farm fields on three sides of me and in the spring of ‘74 they fertilized those fields with raw manure, the stench and flies drove me away. The farmers may have been too lazy or ignorant to compost the manure first.

  6. Henry D

    Hopefully the newly appointment of Joel Salatin will be able to make some inroads into the problem. I thought his recent talk was really interesting, though you might want to skip the intro unless you wish to practice your
    German.

    1. judy2shoes

      Well I’ll be darned! I looked up what Joel has been appointed to and found an announcement on his website:

      Salatin is outspoken (understatement) and controversial because of that, but what’s not in question is the success his family has had in purchasing what he has described as the worst piece of property in the county and turning it into a model for small farmers across the country to emulate.

      I first heard about him in one of Michael Pollan’s books (The Omnivore’s Dilemma I think), and I’ve been impressed with his farming methods ever since.

      Someone else who would be equally as good in this regard is Gabe Brown, author of Dirt to Soil, who also practices regenerative agriculture.

      I’m excited to see that the Trump Administration appears to have Big Ag in its sights. We shall see how that pans out.

  7. Greg Taylor

    I’ve seen large Tyson CAFO chicken houses on Amish farms in North Carolina. Runoff ultimately flows into the river that supplies my drinking water. Partnership arrangements are likely similar to those described here although as far as I know, they aren’t causing problems.

  8. Jackiebass63

    Where I live the farmers spread their manure on their fields in the winter. For a short while it smells. Since there aren’t other houses nearby it isn’t a problem.

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