In 2023, a neighbor approached Vanessa Namken about a mega-dairy they were planning to have built on their land. They both lived just outside a small town in Hamlin County, South Dakota. The mega-dairy would warehouse 12,500 cows on just 160 acres; its operator hoped that Vanessa and her husband, less than a mile away, would quietly sign off on the project.

But after touring another mega-dairy owned by the same company, Vanessa realized the proposed dairy would harm the entire community. Air quality, water resources, roads, property values — it would impact them all. And the company behind it was trying to keep it all quiet.

According to Vanessa, they told her that they were holding an informational meeting. They brushed off her concerns that no one would see the flyer they planned to post. They would not announce the meeting on social media or in the newspaper, either. 

“Ultimately, they didn’t want people to know,” Vanessa says. “They wanted it to fly under the radar before anyone knew what was happening.”

Across the United States, factory farms are following the same playbook. The industry has exploded in recent decades, thanks to a host of bad incentives and weak regulations. It’s relying on misleading messaging and dirty tactics to slip into rural communities quickly and quietly. But nationwide, family farmers and rural communities like Vanessa’s are fighting back.

Factory Farms Hollow Out Rural Communities

Factory farms (also known as CAFOs, or concentrated animal feeding operations) raise hundreds of thousands — even millions — of animals tightly confined in warehouses. 

The corporate-controlled animal agriculture industry hides its dirty, industrial reality with idyllic branding depicting animals on pasture. It claims economic and job benefits, portraying itself as the beating heart of rural communities. 

In reality, CAFOs hollow out rural communities. Local small farmers struggle to compete with industrial operations owned by megacorporations. They face a choice — get big, or get out. Many are forced out, and local networks of small businesses collapse, too.

Moreover, as Vanessa and her community learned, factory farms are noxious neighbors. They plummet the quality of life and property values for those living nearby. This makes it hard to move out, but it also makes staying a daily struggle with polluted air and water.

The 12,500-cow mega-dairy planned for Vanessa’s community would produce about 1.8 million pounds of liquid manure every single day. The stench would be nauseating, and all that manure would have to go somewhere. 

It’s common practice for mega-dairies and other factory farms to spray manure on nearby fields. Companies claim it’s “fertilizer,” but they routinely spread more than the land can absorb. Instead, the waste washes away and pollutes nearby rivers, lakes, and even underground aquifers.

All of this convinced Vanessa and many of her neighbors that they needed to stop this dairy. “It would not bring anything to the community,” she says. “It would only take from the community.”

Neighbors Come Together to Stop the Factory Farm

When Vanessa sounded the alarm about the mega-dairy on her social media, “It blew up,” she says. She soon found herself at the center of the town’s efforts to shut it down. “I started going to county commissioners’ meetings, zoning board meetings, contacting our local board members,” Vanessa recounts. 

As the information and contacts tumbled in, she got in touch with Frank James, the executive director of Dakota Rural Action (DRA). With its decades of grassroots experience, DRA was ready to help Vanessa and her neighbors organize against the mega-dairy. 

In fights like this, factory farm companies benefit from keeping as much hidden as possible. But when neighbors talk to neighbors, working together to pressure leaders or change laws, beating Big Ag is possible. 

As Frank explains, Hamlin County law requires a setback, or buffer zone, between a factory farm and residence or water source. The mega-dairy was planned in a setback zone, so it would have to secure a waiver from those in the zone to break ground. After one neighbor refused to sign a waiver, the dairy pushed its plans closer to town.

Vanessa and her community got to work informing people in town about the dairy’s impacts. Ultimately, a survey showed that 70% of residents opposed the waiver, and the town voted to officially deny it. The mega-dairy would not be built!

How We Win to Stop Polluting Factory Farms

Fights like this are popping up across the country as the factory farm industry expands. In just the past twenty years, the number of CAFOs has grown by 50%. Now there are 1.7 billion factory-farmed animals in the U.S. at any given time, producing double the amount of manure as the country’s human population.

However, there is a long history of family farmers and rural communities successfully fighting Big Ag. From Missouri to Minnesota, Iowa to South Dakota and beyond, grassroots community organizing has stopped factory farms. 

“I think in fighting this you have to have people,” says Kathy Tyler, a DRA member who organized to win concessions from a factory farm near her and helped other communities block CAFOs. “Not everybody needs to talk at a hearing. Not everybody needs to put their two cents in. Just the numbers sometimes help. Sometimes people are afraid of making a fuss in their neighborhood, but they also have to realize that once one of these things is there, it’s there forever. It will affect you for the rest of your life.”

Hugh Espey, an organizer with Iowa Citizens for Community Improvement, had something similar to say about why his community successfully stopped a hog factory farm: “Lots of people volunteered. They put in time because they knew that this was a critical fight to improve the quality of life in their neighborhood, and they weren’t about to let this bully come into their community and just do what he wanted to do for the sake of making a lot of money and making life hell for them… People power is how we win. ”

The Next Step: Fighting For Policy Toward a Fair Food System

Fights like these are essential to defending communities from the worst of factory farms’ harms. But while we work at the local level, we’re also fighting to change the top-level policies that have made these fights necessary in the first place. 

A winding web of bad policy, lax regulations and enforcement, and perverse incentives have allowed Big Ag to dominate the market. This has opened the floodgates for more and bigger factory farms. Making a living with a sustainable, small- or medium-sized farm has become increasingly out of reach. And rural communities are paying the price.

“They’re expanding so fast, so close in some of these communities,” says Vanessa. “And we haven’t even begun to see the impact that it would have, because they’re popping up almost overnight… We need better regulations, because that’s why they’re coming — we don’t have regulations, we don’t have oversight, and we don’t have enforcement.”

In addition to organizing at the grassroots, CFFE is fighting for policies that will finally rein in Big Ag and stop factory farms. In our second article in partnership with IATP, we’ll explore our vision of a fair, sustainable food system and the policies we need to achieve it.