Hightower Lowdown

Washington is about to pass a humongous farm bill, and it's full of crop subsidies for large agribusiness operations-while 60 percent of family farmers get not a dime. However, there's another agribusiness subsidy stuck in this whopper of a bill that gets little media coverage. Under the guise of environmental improvement, it provides about $180 million to huge corporate entities that run industrialized hog and cattle operations. These factory farms keep the animals confined, feeding and medicating them in an assembly-line process.

Having hundreds of thousands of animals crammed in these factory facilities creates a special problem for industrial agriculture: waste. Hogs and cattle defecate and urinate. A lot. What to do with this excrement? Agribusiness channels it to lined ponds or "manure lagoons."

In 2002, as these massive-scale livestock operations were spreading across rural America, corporate lobbyists quietly changed a farm conservation program to make these outfits eligible for funding-and to declare that manure lagoons could be paid for with government funds as a "conservation measure."

How ironic since these lagoons are notorious for leaking into groundwater, overflowing into nearby streams, and fouling the air for everyone downwind. The factory operations also are squeezing small, sustainable farmers out of business.

For years our nation's environmental laws were based on the ethical precept that the polluter must pay. Now that's been perverted to the unethical notion that we must subsidize the polluter.