Iheard from some fellow CCI members up in Hardin County that on August 6, their County Supervisors voted to approve another factory farm in the area. This isn’t good news for the folks living in Hardin County or for our ongoing water quality crisis. The only one smiling about this is corporate hog and ethanol baron, Bruce Rastetter, whose sprawling Summit Agriculture Group filed the application to build.

We stopped raising hogs shortly after the passage of House File 519 in the mid 90’s which knocked down the door to the factory farm industry. While independent producers felt the squeeze, corporations like Summit Agriculture Group got bigger and bigger. Rastetter and Summit now have an ownership interest in 172 factory farms and hundreds of thousands of corporate owned hogs across the state.

Hardin County is home to 17,000 people and over 1 million hogs confined in one of its nearly 250 corporate hog factories. These hogs produce over 460 million gallons of manure each year – about the same amount of waste as the population of Iowa. Rastetter’s latest proposed factory farm in Hardin County would be 4,999 head of hogs that would create 1,749,650 gallons of liquid manure each year. At this scale the manure is no longer a fertilizer that is absorbed into the ground, it’s a waste product that is dumped on fields and runs off into our water ways.

Current farm policy incentivizes and subsidizes the factory farm industry. Even the application process for factory farm construction is rigged in the industry’s favor. Builders are required to fill out a ‘Master Matrix’ for their application to verify all the positive steps they intend to take to protect the environment & the community. It’s essentially an open book test that applicants fill out themselves, grade themselves, and only have to get a 50% to pass. Rastetter’s recent application in Hardin County scored 455 points out of 880, or 51%.

When you look at the Matrix application the points that Summit didn’t take gives clues as to what kind of neighbors they probably are. No points for emergency containment area at manure storage structure pump-out area. No points for filter installation to reduce odors from confinement buildings. No points for groundwater monitoring wells installed near manure storage structure. No points for demonstrated support from property owners within a 1-mile radius.

The recently released Central Iowa Source Water Research Assessment from Polk County painted a grim picture if we don’t correct course soon. Not surprisingly, it pointed to factory farm runoff as a major contributor to the problem of nitrates in our drinking water and E. Coli in our recreational lakes. It pointed out that voluntary regulations don’t work when there’s no teeth to them.

So what bold actions are our current elected officials taking to address this dire situation? Trying to sweep a problem under the rug by reducing our state’s water quality sensors by 75% in the coming year. Thanks, but no thanks, State of Iowa. Taking away our only water quality sensors solves nothing!

We can have clean water to drink, swim, and fish in. We can have diversified, thriving family farms. And we can have vibrant rural communities with lively main streets. But it’s going to take standing up to folks like Bruce Rastetter and demanding government at the local and state level to work for us to hold corporate ag accountable.

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Barb Kalbach is a 4th generation family farmer,

retired registered nurse, and member of Iowa Citizens for Community Improvement. She can be reached at

barbnealkalbach@gmail.com.