Hog confinement focus of Prichard town hall

By Thomas Nelson, tnelson@charlescitypress.com

Despite a small crowd, the Floyd County Farm Bureau office hosted a lively discussion at a legislative forum Saturday morning.

Rep. Todd Prichard, D-Charles City, was the only area legislator able to attend.

About seven members of the community were there, including Prichard, but that didn’t prevent several residents of Floyd County and one from Waukon from making their cases about the Master Matrix.

The Master Matrix is a scoring system used to decide whether to approve permits for animal confinement feeding operations bigger than a certain size. Counties can use the matrix to recommend approval or denying approval of sites to the state, although the state can overrule county objections.

Prichard was one of four Democrats who voted for a new water quality bill in the Iowa House of Representatives.

Other than the water quality bill, the Iowa Legislature has had a slow start, Prichard said.

“Something was better than nothing,” he said Saturday. “It’s a controversial bill in a lot of ways.”

Prichard said that he has been on record for wanting to review the Master Matrix. It’s been 16 years since it was last reviewed.

“It’s got to be a balanced approach,” Prichard said. “This shouldn’t be a partisan issue.”

Monti Marti from Waukon presented his story to Prichard about how he thinks hog confinements from Reicks View Farms have damaged his family’s land.

“It was legal, but it wasn’t right,” Marti said. “It’s time for the EPA to get involved.”

Marti owns a farm near a concentrated animal feeding operation or CAFO in Allamakee County.

He brought a presentation that he wants to take to the Natural Resource committee.

“There are more stakeholders than there are pork producers,” Marti said. “Everyone of us who are not raising a whole lot of pigs are subsidizing this industry.”

Marti made a point to say that he wasn’t against agriculture.

“Our farm has been in the family for 150 years,” Marti said. “I own the farm — it’s across the creek from the building that Reicks (View Farms) built last year.”

Marti brought a map of Iowa with all of the CAFOs and it listed those which had more than 1,000 animals.

It listed more than 6,000 CAFOs in Iowa, half of which had over 1,000 animals.

“Last year they found 5,000 more,” Marti said.

The information on the map was cited as coming from the Iowa Department of Natural Resources.

“If I had an opportunity to present to your committee, I’d share it,” Marti said. “We need to change the law and it begins with supporting this in the House.”

Marti pressed Prichard to revisit the master matrix.

“We gotta get it changed,” Marti said.

Marti also had a map of the polluted waterways in Iowa.

“Iowa isn’t, ‘I owe water an apology,'” Marti said as he held up a board that showed the same statement with the word “Coincidence?” printed at the top.

“There’s a reason why these laws need to be changed,” Marti said. “For many of us, it’s a very personal thing. For all of us it’s an economic thing.”

Prichard responded that several bills that have been written on this subject have been assigned to a “kill committee,” a committee that will never meet, he said.

“That’s the power of the majority,” Prichard said.

Prichard went to say that he was in the minority party in the Iowa Houe of Representatives.

“If I have a good idea, the first thing that happens to my idea is I have to be willing to let someone else put their name on it,” Prichard said. “That happens about two or three times a year and I’m happy for it.”

Prichard said he thinks this is the year to review the master matrix.

Gail Swartzkopf spoke about her own property’s problems with nearby CAFOs.

Swartzkopf lives between Rudd and Floyd and said she and her family have suffered health problems, including rashes, because of nearby large animal confinements.

“At first we tried to make the best of this,” Swartzkopf said. “Then the hogs came in and within a few months of that we no longer able to open our windows, hang up the wash, go outside, enjoy the fresh air.”

After six months Swartzkopf’s outside cats began to lose lots of fur, she said.

“We started coming up with unexplained rashes,” Swartzkopf said of her, her son and her husband. “These rashes almost look like a burn to your body and then they become bumpy.”

Swartzkopf recalled a story of when she slept and left her window open, she woke up choking.

“The wind had changed and the smell was coming into our house,” Swartzkopf said. “Eyes water, we shut all the windows to help keep the smell away.”

Swartzkopf brought photos of a waterway and her home to illustrate the change to her property since the CAFOs moved near her home. Marti jokingly suggested she make her photos “scratch and sniff.”

“The well they dug for their first CAFO is five feet deeper than ours so that they make sure they get the water,” Swartzkopf said. “We would love for the Master Matrix to be revised.”

BUDGET

Prichard also discussed the state’s budget.

“There’s a budget crisis when you can’t fund education appropriately,” he said.

Medicaid and mental health are also in crisis as well, Prichard said.

“We’ve got a lot of problems and we’re having to make a lot of cuts,” Prichard said. “To me, it’s just silly that we’re having to make all these cuts across the board for important services when the economy is good.”

“We’re in a budget mess,” Prichard said. “It’s what you call in baseball an unforced error.”

Sen. Waylon Brown, R-St. Ansgar, who represents Floyd County as well as other Northeast Iowa counties, was not able to be present at the forum.