Attacks can’t disguise or disgrace the facts

Attacks can’t disguise or disgrace the facts
By KEN MIDKIFF
Published Friday, November 9, 2007 (http://www.showmenews.com/2007/Nov/20071109Comm001.asp)

Answering the critics

Missouri Farm Bureau Federation officials - from top to bottom - have taken considerable exception to my piece disagreeing with their policies. They mostly attacked me, rather than going after anything I wrote. Their mantra appears to be "If you don’t like the message, kill the messenger."

Charlie Kruse, the Farm Bureau’s top official in Missouri, accuses me of recycling my columns. When the Farm Bureau stops recycling its positions, I’ll stop criticizing them. Neither, however, is likely to happen.

I suppose Kruse has a point that the policies of the Missouri Farm Bureau come from the grass roots. When national Farm Bureau staffers draft and present such policies to representatives of local Farm Bureau associations for approval, a "bottom up" approach might be claimed.

The president of the Boone County chapter - angered and annoyed though he was - suggested I propose a solution. Here it is: All farmers should drop their membership in the knuckle-dragging Farm Bureau Federation and join a true farmer-interest group. The Missouri Farmers Union comes to mind. Or the Missouri Rural Crisis Center.

My point is there are all sorts of organizations that represent the concerns of real farmers. Those 4,000 non-farmer members in Houston, Texas, could join some other right-wing group in favor of doing away with the U.S. Department of Education, promoting nuclear fusion and advocating continuance of subsidies for welfare queen agribusinesses.

The elected officials in McDonald County didn’t take kindly to my recitation of that county’s ills. They, too, were more interested in attacking me than in addressing the problems. One even suggested I should devote more of my attention to development problems in Boone County.

To set the record straight and to reply to the broadsides from McDonald County officials:

I have been to McDonald County many times, beginning in 1994 and most recently after this year’s ice storm. I have visited most parts of the county - including a tour of the Simmons Slaughterhouse/Packing plant near Southwest City. I have canoed, with a Missouri Department of Natural Resources director, down the Elk River from Noel to the Cowskin Conservation Access Area. McDonald County and I are not strangers. My visits were not, however, announced to elected officials, so they are forgiven for not being aware of my presence.
All information I cited was taken directly from U.S. Bureau of the Census data, from the Missouri Kids Count survey or from the State Office of Social and Economic Development. I did not make up any of it. It is what it is. Like it or not.

If anything, I was too lenient. Recently, having a rare moment of self-doubt, I re-checked the information I relayed in my column about the ills of McDonald County. In so doing, I came upon data that were even more damning. It seems McDonald County is getting worse. In 1997, it was ranked 108th out of 115 counties in terms of child issues. In 2006, the latest year for which OSEDA has information, it was ranked 112th.

My point in passing along the information was not to cast blame on the fine folks in McDonald County but to urge elected officials to do something about the rather dire problems. The county has much to commend it in terms of natural beauty, and I lamented it is too bad the area has so many ills. Instead, elected officials deny any problems exist, extol the virtues of being a one-trick-pony county dominated by the poultry industry, urge me to go away and, presumably, keep on doing whatever it is that they do.

The most strongly held opinions are based on ignorance. I humbly suggest officials of McDonald County check a few facts before revealing their opinions.

Jo Manhart, the "Egg Lady," is a very nice person when she’s not defending Tyson’s, Roseacres or Moark/Land O’ Lakes. But she goes off the deep end with her letter to the editor when she claims Missouri has the strictest rules of any state on concentrated animal feeding operations, or CAFOs. This same claim is made by agribusiness in the other 49 states. So we’re all tied for No. 1 or for No. 50.

Agriculture - the legal designation of factory farms - is exempted from most state and federal laws and regulations, so it doesn’t take much to be strictest.

Besides, rules can be and are often ignored. It is enforcement that counts - in the absence of a state trooper, there is no speed limit. There’s no cop on the CAFO beat.