In flooded north, locals tell DNR hog CAFO is hogwash

The same DNR Secretary who tried to sell the Northwoods on the environmental merits of 35 years of open-pit mining, clear-cutting, blasting and acid percolating in the Bad River watershed was confronted by pig masks to convey this message of sanity:

Penning-up and fattening 26,000 hogs every six months to fatten the common lien of an Iowa-based mega-CAFO operator within smelling and manure flooding distance of Ashland's water supply and Lake Superior's vital Chequamegon Bay  is another horrible plan that cannot possibly pass a fair, publicly-interest permit review.


Good for those grassroots activists. They are doing the work of a real DNR.

And note the destructive effects of a hog operation one-seventh of the size in Illinois as chronicled by The Chicago Tribune:

When the sickening odor swept across Matt Heissinger's farmstead, his daughter would sprint from their home to the car. Clinging to the girl's clothes and hair, the smell drove her to tears as she feared becoming a high school outcast.

Heissinger's wife often was forced to stay indoors, suffering from headaches and congestion, while the soft-spoken farmer worked his cows and crops with smarting eyes and a raspy throat.

On the field next door, pork producers had erected a 3,600-hog confinement facility, where hundreds of thousands of gallons of manure emit gases that have ruined the Heissingers' quality of life. The assessed value of their farm was cut in half because "breezes from the hog confinement across their property are awful," the state tax board concluded.

Then again, the afore-referenced DNR Secretary, former developer and current DNR Secretary managing the dispirited, once-proud agency with the "chamber of commerce mentality" that Governor and WMC water-carrier Scott Walker installed atop the DNR these days is a just a cog in the Walker administration's larger corporate war for fatter profits and against science, and the people.