Something Smells With the Feedlot Trend, and It’s More Than Just the Manure

A mention of farm country beckons images of quaint houses, big red barns, grazing cattle and sun-soaked crops. That’s how I recall farmsteads of my youth in west-central Minnesota, and how Sonja Trom Eayrs sees her family’s farm in Dodge County, west of Rochester, Minn.

That was then, and then sure ain’t now.

In three decades, much of southern and central Minnesota’s farmland has been transformed, mostly out of sight and little noticed, with look-alike, elongated buildings where tens of millions of hogs, cattle and poultry live short lives in crowded crud, guzzling feed for fattening in prep for a one-way trip to slaughter.

The Environmental Working Group, a research and advocacy organization, says that more than 23,000 feedlots now dot Minnesota’s farm country, annually producing 49 million tons of manure — a waste-equivalent 17 times the state’s entire population. On-site pits store the accumulated slurry that, when pumped out and spread onto nearby fields, fills the air with stench so strong that downwind, outdoor activities are impossible, even unsafe.

Folks living near feedlots have objected to the odor and water filth, but are overwhelmed by well-organized Big Ag interests.