Journalism
What Corporate Welfare Costs You: The Empire Of The Pigs (Part 4)
Other costs began to pop up. By 1997 the Guymon schools bulged with new students. All grades exceeded the state-mandated teacher-pupil ratio. And enrollment is expected to jump one-third by the year 2000. Adding to the turmoil of overcrowding was the confusion about language. The district was compelled to add English-as-a-second-language classes. This year about 450 students, or 21%, were judged to have limited proficiency in English.
Some parents began to complain that their children were getting no education at all. But when the school district proposed $ 1.6 million in bond issues for new classrooms, equipment and buses, voters said no. The reason? A general anger directed at the huge hog farms. And a belief that Seaboard Corp. was not paying its way. Which, of course, it was not.
In 1997 the Oklahoma legislature agreed to spend $ 700 million on state roads and bridges. Of that figure, Guymon's and Texas County's share amounted to $ 37.3 million. That worked out to a per capita highway spending in Texas County of $ 2,200—or some 10 times what was earmarked for the rest of the state. Needless to say, most of the roadwork benefited Seaboard.
In addition, $ 47 million—a disproportionate amount—of the state's five-year capital-improvement program was set aside for Texas County for highway work to accommodate Seaboard truck convoys, which in time would haul 10,000 hogs a day into Guymon from all directions.
Then there was the local tax relief. For the 1996-97 fiscal year, Seaboard's Texas County tax bill totaled $ 1,118,000, according to John DeSpain, then county assessor. The state tax commission excused Seaboard from $ 700,000 of those taxes—on the grounds that the new hog farms and slaughterhouse qualified as "manufacturing." The state, in turn, sent Texas County that sum from a special fund. In short, all other Oklahoma taxpayers picked up 63% of Seaboard's tax bill.
There's more: the company didn't even want to pay all the remaining $ 418,000, so it appealed. It won, and the state agreed to absorb an additional $ 193,000. In other words, the state paid 78% of Seaboard's real estate taxes.
As for the 1997-98 fiscal year, DeSpain said, Seaboard's tax bill increased to $ 1,580,000. The company was immediately excused from paying $ 1,090,000 of that—again, money that all other Oklahoma taxpayers must pay. Once more, Seaboard was dissatisfied and appealed. And again, the state consented to pick up $ 226,000 more. The bottom line: Seaboard was obliged to come up with just 17% of the taxes owed.
It should be noted that Seaboard did agree early on to contribute $ 175,000 to the Guymon schools each year—on the grounds that the old plant it replaced in 1992 had been taxed that amount. Even with that donation, its payments fall far short of what the company really owes. And it doesn't come close to providing the schools with the revenue needed to pay for Seaboard's presence in the community. One might think that would discourage other school districts from negotiating similar agreements. One would be wrong.
In December 1997 Seaboard promised to pay $ 125,000 to the Keyes schools in Cimarron County, which adjoins Texas County to the west. The money would allow the school system to replace the wiring and reopen a shuttered elementary school. In turn, Keyes agreed it would not oppose company plans to build a feed mill and 400 barns to house an additional 400,000 hogs.
Besides ballooning school costs, Keyes also may look forward to another set of rising statistics: crime. From 1991 to 1997 in Guymon, serious crimes went up 61%. Larcenies increased 50%, assaults jumped 96%, and auto theft shot up 200%. Rapes went from none to five. And for the first time, youth gangs appeared on Guymon streets. A resident says that "some students have expressed fear of even going to the rest room in the high school."
Hog Heaven? Try Hog Hell
In a way, Guymon is fortunate that it has little available housing. If it did, the social costs it is paying for Seaboard's presence would have been worse. As it is, Seaboard workers often must settle in distant areas, like Liberal, Kans., another meat-packing center and magnet for immigrant workers. When Seaboard proposed establishing a hog farm in Seward County, where Liberal is the largest community, residents voted 3 to 1 to block construction. Nevertheless, Kansas state officials reportedly have assured Seaboard that the referendum is not binding.
The company already operates huge hog farms in five southwestern Kansas counties, where it accounts for more than one-quarter of the state's 1.5 million pig population. The pigs are raised in Kansas until they are ready for slaughter and are then trucked to the processing plant in Guymon. Kansas issued $ 9.6 million in industrial revenue bonds to help Seaboard develop the farms.
Actually, the term farm is a misnomer, for corporate hog farms bear no resemblance to traditional family farms. Instead, they are massive industrial operations. Call them pig factories.
In a long barn that houses about 1,000 animals, the hogs spend their days jammed next to one another, eating constantly until they grow from about 55 lbs. to 250 lbs. They stand on slatted floors so their wastes drop into a trough below that is flushed periodically into a nearby cesspit. The number of cesspits is exploding. From 1990 to 1998, the Oklahoma pig population soared 761%, jumping from 230,000 to 1.98 million, with Seaboard accounting for about 80% of that number.
It is not pleasant living amid this. Just ask Julia Howell and her husband Bob. The couple live on a farm near Hooker, about midway between Guymon and Liberal, where four generations of Howells have grown wheat and raised families. Now feisty Julia Howell, 69, talks about her "40,000 neighbors" and explains why she seals the farmhouse windows, stuffs pillows into the chimney and seldom ventures outdoors without a face mask.
It's the ever present stench—the overpowering smell from Seaboard's 40,000 hogs closely confined in 44 metal buildings, where exhaust fans continuously pump out tons of pungent ammonia, mixed with tons of grain dust and fecal matter, scented with the noxious odor of hydrogen sulfide (a poisonous gas produced by decaying manure that smells like rotten eggs), all combined with another blend of aromas wafting from five cesspits each 25 ft. deep and the size of a football field. They are, in effect, open-air sewage ponds, and 75 ft. below lies the Ogallala aquifer, which provides drinking and irrigation water for much of that part of the country.
Think of all that waste this way: imagine that you are sitting on the front porch of your farmhouse on the prairie, surrounded by four Washington Monuments, each filled to the top with pig manure. And then there are all the dead pigs lying about. By law, the carcasses are supposed to be deposited in Dumpsters with the lids tightly closed, and the contents disposed of daily. But with hundreds of thousands of hogs dying before their time each year, Seaboard often falls behind in disposing of them. Sometimes the overflow from Dumpsters is stacked nearby. Sometimes dead hogs are piled up beside barns, sometimes at the side of the road. And sometimes they lie about so long that the flesh rots away.
After issuing repeated warnings to Seaboard, the Oklahoma agriculture department fined the firm $ 157,500 in December 1997 for improper disposal. After an appeal, the company paid the state $ 88,200 for the infractions. In all, the Seaboard death toll reached 48 hogs an hour in 1997—420,000 for the year. And the carcasses are picked up only once a day—assuming the dead-pig truck is on schedule. Sometimes it isn't. Which is why at any given moment during the day there are hundreds of dead hogs lying about the fields of Texas County.
For the past two years, Julia Howell has recorded in a diary life with the blended smells from rotting hogs and cesspools and the breezes from hog barns:
Monday, July 1, 1996: "80[degrees]. Calm. Tried to sit outside a while. Impossible without a mask. What a life!!"
Monday, July 8, 1996: "Had a storm at 70[degrees]. It rained toxic fumes 7:30 p.m. Horrible during rain!!!"
Wednesday, July 24, 1996: "Calm. 80[degrees]. 9:30 p.m. It would take two masks tonight."
The smell has forever altered the Howells' way of life. "We celebrated our 50th anniversary here this year," she says. "But, you know, when the hog fumes come rolling in, you can't plan on anything. I haven't had people in for dinner [for two years] because I'd probably have to meet them out on the driveway with a mask for them to get to the house.
"We thought we were at the point that we could retire. And, of course, the rhetoric from Seaboard is, 'Well, my goodness, your land, your home, it's worth more than you ever dreamed because of us coming in next to you...' Our kids couldn't sell this if they needed the money to bury us with. It's just devaluated to nothing as far as the market's concerned."
The story is much the same for Vancy Elliott and her husband Delmer, who live about three miles from Guymon and whose land abuts a Seaboard hog farm. "We have to put flytraps out in the summer," says Elliott. "But we even have flies occasionally in the winter now, and we've never had that before. Rats and mice are a real problem because they have so many pigs that are dying."