Big Meat is spoiling Missouri’s water. Jeff City, the people are paying attention | Opinion

When the campaign bus hauling the new Republican supermajority pulled into Jeff City, the driver was Big Meat. Meet Big Meat: a global monopoly of four companies (and their enablers) who build meat factories in rural counties for mostly out-of-state buyers.

Frozen meat manufactured in Missouri and shipped to Asia leaves behind heartbreak: 4-acre toxic waste lagoons, noxious spew from slaughter factories, vast and nasty feedlots and waste-puking concentrated animal feeding operations, aka CAFOs.

Filthy meat factories have ruined almost every lake, river and thousands of water supplies in Iowa, with an estimated 20 billion gallons of toxic animal waste dumped on the ground each year. The owners behind Big Meat needed new lands for their oceans of waste.

So they bought Missouri. Specifically, they now own the right to build wretched, stinking meat factories without limit in every county in the state, along with the right to leave unlimited waste behind on our private property and waterways. New laws target watersheds such as Stockton Lake that deliver clean water to millions of people.

Then they bought protection against neighbor nuisance complaints. Then they bought laws to prevent elected county commissions and health departments from protecting their residents. Then they packed the Clean Water Commission with Big Meat hired hands. Then they crippled our Department of Natural Resource with budget cuts.

And today, right now, they’ve introduced new bills to strip out the last protections we have for intermittent streams and wetlands.

Missouri has one of the greatest aquifers in North America, right under rolling topography that rises higher than any land mass between the Appalachians and the Rockies. The Ozark Mountains cover this vast resource, but with karst: a rocky structure that resembles Swiss cheese because it allows waste on the surface to poison the waters below.

In a world where most aquifers are dead and dying, our Ozarks aquifer is a treasure. And the tragedy? We’ve got a stone colander for cover. That’s great when clean water carves out springs, caves, rivers and deep blue lakes. And it’s terrible when Big Meat buys laws to dump unlimited amounts of toxic waste on top.

The bad news: We’ve already lost control of our land and water. Big Meat’s nasty new laws aren’t the “right to farm.” They’re the “right to ruin,” and they are enforced by men with guns. Restoring our clean, mixed economy will be prolonged, expensive and noisy.

The good news: The big losers are real estate, home builders, tourism and water districts. Big Meat has a butcher knife to the losers’ throats, and one dark night, these sleeping economic giants with everything to lose will awaken from the sheet-soaked nightmares of Iowa: crashing land values, dead lakes, poisoned water supplies and stinky new subdivisions filled with furious, litigious homeowners.

So, do the math: One hundred percent of Missouri residents drink water in our $300 billion-plus annually balanced economy. Millions own property. Ninety-eight percent of us work in jobs that have nothing to do with meat factories. Then, throw bright light on Big Meat and you see outsiders using a tiny economic engine to spew oceans of manure with only one major asset: the Missouri General Assembly.

And these guys face cranky voters every two years.

“Right to farm” laws pollute state constitutions and lead to terrible outcomes as we see in Iowa, with dead zones across the Midwest. So, a group of Ozarks property owners have formed a project to protect our way of life: Missouri Guardrails at missouriguardrails.org. We speak for the 100% when we say we have the right to clean water.

Raise a glass to clean water — and then join us.

Dan Chiles is co-founder of Missouri Guardrails, LLC. He and his brother Mike own and operate a 250-acre family farm that has raised cattle for 43 years and is certified as a Missouri Tree Farm. He is a former Springfield mayor pro tem and City Council member.