By Rachel Atcheson, Founder and Executive Director of Food Policy Pathways
In 1995, Republican Cindy Watson arrived in the North Carolina House of Representatives representing a rural district in hog country. She came as a believer in free enterprise and limited government, ready to champion the farm economy.
Early in her tenure, her constituents started calling: families whose well water had tested positive for E. coli, parents whose children developed asthma downwind of open-air cesspits holding the waste of millions of hogs, and small farmers whose contaminated land could no longer safely grow food. Watson listened, and she realized this wasn’t the free market she’d come to defend.
Then, a single hog operation spilled 25 million gallons of waste from its cesspits into a major river, more than twice the volume of the Exxon Valdez oil spill.
Watson could have looked the other way, leaving intact exemptions that industry-friendly legislators had carved into state law, shielding large hog operations from the rules everyone else lived by. Instead, she did what a representative is supposed to do. She stood with her own people and championed legislation to phase out the waste pits and pause new construction.
It passed, but at a cost. Watson received death threats for challenging the pork industry. The following year, the state’s largest corporate hog producers bankrolled a brutal smear campaign to remove her from office, spending what would be nearly $3 million in today’s dollars to unseat a single State House incumbent. She lost her party’s primary by fewer than twenty votes.
“I am no ‘tree hugger’; I am certainly no zealot for a cause,” Watson said. “I am simply ‘my kid’s mom’ who loves Mother Earth and made a decision to do the right thing to protect her.”
Three decades later, the system Watson confronted has only grown more powerful and concentrated, and those in government willing to scrutinize it remain rare.
Watson’s story is why a Republican conservation agenda must involve rethinking industrial animal agriculture – and backing the public servants willing to do just that. As she discovered, those bearing the highest costs of this system are the very people a conservative agenda should protect: rural communities, family farmers, and taxpayers forced to fund the failures of private business.
Change could not come soon enough for Americans under Big Ag’s thumb. Ask a family who lost their newborn to blue baby syndrome after their well was poisoned by waste. Or the farmer whose creek, the one his great-grandfather fished, now sees fish kills leave thousands dead in the water.
About 99 percent of the meat, dairy, and eggs produced in America come from heavily subsidized, industrialized operations. The largest operations generate waste on par with a small city’s sewage output, but with almost none of the treatment infrastructure. Those toxins end up in the water table, the soil, and the air the neighbors breathe.
Meanwhile, the independent farmer down the road raising animals the way his family has for generations must compete against an operation that treats its waste as someone else’s problem – or raise animals under contract for a corporation whose demands bury him in debt.
Contaminated waterways, property values cut in half, and an epidemic of farmer suicide are not hypotheticals in these counties. They are the terms of a deal rural America never agreed to.
The harm doesn’t stay in farm country. Packing animals together at industrial density requires dosing them continuously with pharmaceuticals just to keep them alive. Synthetic hormones and growth drugs, some so dangerous they’re banned or restricted in over 160 countries, push animals to grow faster than nature ever intended. It all ends up on our plates and in our bodies.
An alliance is forming around these problems. Whatever brings people to this issue, whether health, dignity, land, or faith, MAHA moms and regenerative-ag environmentalists alike are arriving at the same conclusion: Washington should not be subsidizing a system that poisons our land and our children. Get the government’s thumb off the scale, and let responsibility fall where it belongs.
Conservatives are natural leaders here, because the strongest solutions are simply conservative principles applied.
One solution is to take a hard look at corporate welfare. Subsidies, liability protections, and checkoff programs that tax every farmer to fund generic marketing overwhelmingly benefit the largest corporations — some of which are not even American. Smithfield Foods, which produces a quarter of America’s pork, answers to a Chinese parent company while marketing itself in the American family farmer’s image. Meanwhile, the real American family farmer pays the checkoff, absorbs the runoff, and watches his margins disappear. No free market would ever have extended these favors.
A second approach is to restore rural Americans’ property rights. A family’s land and water are theirs, but so-called “right-to-farm” laws shield large-scale industrial operators from the nuisance claims of the families next door. These laws pervert a principle conservatives spent generations defending: no theory of liberty includes the freedom to fill your neighbor’s well with your waste.
A third step, and a matter of basic federalism, is to stop Washington from overriding pro-farmer, pro-conservation standards that voters have already chosen. Over 40 percent of Americans now live in states with voter-approved minimum farm animal welfare standards, including bans on gestation crates: narrow metal cages that prevent a mother pig from turning around or avoiding her own excrement.
Beyond basic dignity for animals, these laws offer a market in which independent producers can finally outcompete the industrial machine by growing healthier, cleaner, more conscientious meat.
But due to outside influences on Washington’s top pork lobby intent on disrupting that market, it has spent this Congress pushing the “Save Our Bacon” (SOB) Act, which would nullify those laws and thousands of other state farming laws.
This fight is playing out right now and has split conservatives in two. Last fall, independent hog farmers circled the Capitol in tractors to protest the SOB Act. A vocal minority of Republican legislators backed them up, while others sided with the pro-SOB pork lobby that funds their campaigns. The House passed its Farm Bill with the provision intact, while the Senate has so far left it out of its version.
As the bill moves toward final passage, Washington conservatives face the choice Cindy Watson made 30 years ago: to stand with Big Ag’s checks or their own constituents.
These projects and many others put to work the values conservatives have always championed: stewardship of the land, property and states’ rights, and skepticism of concentrated power financed by public money.
Conservation was never a partisan project of the left. It was a project for all who felt a duty to creation and our children’s futures. It was Cindy Watson’s project, and she sacrificed her career for it.
Watson lost her seat because she stood alone against consolidated money. But the lesson is not that the fight is unwinnable; it’s that a single determined public servant nearly won it, with a campaign budget smaller than what her opponents spent in a month. Imagine what a generation of Cindy Watsons could do.
The most important challenge in food and agriculture policy today is not messaging or money. It’s talent. We need conservation-minded conservatives in the offices where farm bills are drafted, checkoff programs are overseen, and rural water is defended - public servants who answer to the American people rather than the corporations degrading the legacy of American farming. My organization, Food Policy Pathways, exists to help those public servants get a seat at the table.
The next Cindy Watson is already out there, looking for a way in. The question for conservatives who care about the land is whether, this time, she won’t have to fight alone.
Rachel Atcheson is the Founder and Executive Director of Food Policy Pathways. The views in this piece do not necessarily reflect the American Conservation Coalition’s organizational stances.
I understand the author’s intent with this article and I agree with the sentiment: farms should have environmental and ecological standards that they are upheld to. 100%.
But it was clear very quickly that this author has no education in, nor has ever worked in agriculture. (Which was confirmed with a quick LinkedIn search)
Like “synthetic hormones and growth drugs” — which have been banned in pork and poultry since the 1950s.
And pitting family farms vs “industrial farms.”
They’re one and the same.
95% of American farms are family owned. Yes, even the chicken houses that say Tyson or the hog houses that say Smithfield. They are family operations that contract and sell to those corporations.
Corporate influence absolutely needs to be reined in. But there is a lot more nuance in this industry on all angles and I don’t think anyone benefits from regurgitating tired, old, outdated misinformation.