Editor, Times-Union: Unless the intrusion of a CAFO affects you personally, you are probably thinking it does not deserve your concern. Think again, when you no longer have clean air to breath or clean water to drink. Think again, when you can’t be out of doors because your area didn’t believe in rules and regulations for these big industrial-sized operations that slipped in under the very same rules your small family farmer must obey. This is not a new problem, it is an ongoing legislative nightmare. By the time a bill is ready to pass, it is so watered down that there is no use endorsing it. As far back as 2007, Thomas P. Healy, a journalist from Indianapolis wrote, “The cumulative effect of these recent news reports undermines contentions that CAFOS are merely agriculture operations. In truth, they are operations of industrial scale and magnitude in the amount of water they use the amount of untreated excrement discharged and the amount of toxic gases generated. The wear and tear on rural infrastructure is as substantial as that inflicted on neighboring residences, businesses, schools, parks and waterways. Because of the scale of the damage CAFOS can render, it makes no difference if huge corporations or individual families operate them. Calling them family farms is as disingenuous as calling a 10 million gallon manure pit a lagoon.” You can check this statement out at www.bloomingtonalternative.comnode/8278 My family and my community has been threatened, by an area farmer, telling us he is just trying to save his family farm by putting up four of these huge, 4,000 hog CAFOS, far away from his own breathing space but right out our front door. He knows what this will do to the health of our family, and our community but chooses to be in denial of the ill effects. Our whole community has signed a petition against this industrialized business. Our tiny farms and our space is just as precious to us as his large farm is to him. His business is not welcome in our community. Marjorie Vance Claypool, via e-mail
