What are CAFOs?

CAFOs are "Confined Animal Feeding Operations": basically, factories for producing animals or animal products like eggs or milk. The term "CAFO" was coined by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to identify agricultural operations posing a significant risk to the environment and requiring regulation under the Clean Water Act. CAFOs are often called "factory farms," but they bear about as much resemblance to farms as a nuclear power plant bears to the fireplace in your living room. You probably wouldn't want to live next to a nuclear plant. You don't want to live near a CAFO, either.

CAFOs concentrate lots of animals in a small space: from hundreds in a "small" hog barn to hundreds of thousands in a large chicken enclosure. These animals eat en masse, and they excrete en masse. Any animal produces many times its own weight in excrement over its lifespan (think about your own case, and do the math), so any CAFO produces far more animal excrement than it does animals. Thinking of CAFOs as "shit factories" will give you the picture.

As you might expect, your typical CAFO does not exactly keep its doors open so that members of the general public - who after all are supposed to eat the stuff CAFOs produce - can stop by and see what's happening. Most CAFOs are downright secretive about how they operate. You can search the EPA's Enforcement & Compliance History Online (ECHO) database for information about your favorite CAFO, but it only covers CAFOs EPA regulates directly, and you have to know exactly what you're looking for. EPA does not regulate Kentucky CAFOs directly; the Kentucky state Division of Water does. They are doing such a fine job that several citizen's groups, including Kentuckians for the Commonwealth and the Sierra Club, have asked the EPA to take over the job itself.

Where government oversight fails, citizens must step in. Citizen groups have formed around the country with a mission to find out what CAFOs are up to, and to shut them down if they are breaking the law. Finding out what they are up to can require some serious sleuthing and not insignificant risks. Here are some resources to help you get started:

"One woman takes a brave stand against factory farming" tells the story of Lynn Henning's transition from CAFO neighbor to Goldman Environmental Prize-winning CAFO investigator. Originally published in Oprah Magazine, November, 2011.
The Environmentally Concerned Citizens of Central Michigan, a group formed by Lynn Henning, tracks air pollution events, raw sewage releases into streams, and other activities of the local dairy CAFOs, with lots of pictures.
"Hogs - The high cost of greed" takes you on an air and ground tour of CAFOs operated by Smithfield Foods, the world's largest pork producer. The opening photo shows a mountain of several hundred dead hogs, rotting in the open air. Originally published in Rolling Stone, February, 2007.
Indiana Cafo Watch keeps an eye on CAFOs in neighboring Indiana, and provides an archive of news articles and other information.
The Michigan Chapter of the Sierra Club maintains an excellent Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ) page on CAFOs.

CAFO business relationships.

Like other businesses, the CAFO business involves tangled and convoluted relationships among many kinds of entities: large and small corporations, limited-liability companies (LLCs), partnerships, and their human owners, partners, members, contractors and employees, all sometimes "doing business as" (DBA) various other named entities. Privately-held corporations and LLCs are often created to shield individuals from legal liability, as well as to garner various tax advantages. One individual may operate through multiple business entities of different kinds, each using multiple "DBA" names.

Some CAFOs are independent small businesses, owned and operated by a farmer and located on a farm, usually a grain farm. Often, however, this only appears to be the case. The land, buildings and animals composing the CAFO may be owned by a third party, with the "farmer" merely a tenant operator. The land and buildings may be owned by the local operator, but the animals owned from cradle to grave by a third party. Often these third parties are residents of other states, and hence out of the reach of Kentucky law. Even when the local operator owns the entire CAFO, its products may be contracted in advance to a third party that effectively calls the shots. The often-advertized idea that CAFOs are "independent family farms" is largely a myth; as Voltaire said of the Holy Roman Empire, most CAFOs are neither independent, nor family-owned, nor farms.