Poweshiek CARES receives the Family Farm Advocacy Award

At its state convention, the Iowa Farmers Union presented a FamilyFarm Advocacy Award to Poweshiek CARES and to our president, JoyceOtto, in recognition of our efforts to preserve the quality of the air andwater of Poweshiek County and the health of residents by opposing theexpansion of hog factories.

The Family Farm Advocacy Award honors organizations and people who publiclysupport family farming and advocate values and policies that advance it.

The president of the Iowa Farmers Union, Whitney Davis, expressed thosevalues at the convention:

Iowa Farmers Union members have been longtime opponents of the corporateindustrial model of livestock production.

We believe that independent family farm agriculture and strong values ofenvironmental stewardship are the best way to preserve a high quality oflife in our rural communities.

At the award ceremony, Donna Winburn described the origins of PoweshiekCARES and praised Joyce Otto for her resolve and determination to help ourcommunity:

I want to tell you about a woman I know. I have only known thiswoman for about eighteen months.

This woman lives in a close-knit community five miles from one ofour many rural towns. She also lives near five thousand hogs inconfinements that she mistakenly thought belong to a family farm neighbor.

One day she woke up and said “What is that smell?” Shesoon learned that smell was coming from corporate hogs, not a familyfarm. Not only that, that corporation was planning to put five thousand more corporate hogs withinhalf a mile of herhome, next to the five thousandalready there.

That smell from those corporate hogs was making her and her mother both sick.This woman had to close her business of caring for elderly people and smallchildren in her home.

When she found out these were not family farm hogs, but instead werecorporate hogs from North Carolina coming to Iowa because someonetold their owners Iowa had very lax environmental laws governingfactory farms, this woman called her neighbors. She called ameeting; she called another meeting and invited the DNR. Shechallenged the county supervisors to do the right thing. She challenged theEnvironmental Protection Commission to do the right thing.

(You all know how that goes. We need to name them the Corporate ProtectionCommission because they certainly aren’t protecting the environment.)

She reached out to the county health department and the Iowa Department ofHealth and was turned away. She contacted Iowa State University and theUniversity of Iowa. She solicited the help of the Iowa Citizens for CommunityImprovement; she partnered with Jefferson Farmers and Neighbors. She got inthe face of those corporate bosses.

As more people got involved, she led the building of an organization that came tobe called CARES (Community Action to Restore Environmental Stewardship).Poweshiek CARES is now a 501(c)4 corporation created to educate and advocatefor the protection of our air, water and soil from the destructive practices ofindustrial agriculture. CARES is one of three community organizations to bechosen by the University of Iowa Environmental Health Sciences Research Centerto receive backup support in their efforts to protect our communities from thisonslaught.

This woman and a few other neighbors filed a lawsuit and were successful inrunning Prestage Farms Corporation out of their neighborhood for thenext twenty years.

And that is the reason that the Iowa Farmers Union is honored to begiving this Advocacy Award to Joyce Otto of Grinnell, Iowa andPoweshiek CARES.

Announcementof the award at the Iowa Farmers Union Web site