• Seaboard Farms, Inc. on Friday announced that it has chosen Barton County as the site for its 4 million hogs per year processing plant. Seaboard officials are now saying that they do not expect much production in the immediate vicinity of the plant. However, in earlier meetings with Barton County citizens they indicated they would be putting under contract some 2 million finishing hogs within 100 to 150 miles of the plant. This move comes after citizens of Great Bend voted in four new members of the city council, by write-in, who subsequently withdrew the city’s invitation to the company.
• Southwest Pork, L.L.C. plans to double the size of their Gray County operation to 38,400 head, 14 miles due east of Garden City. The draft permit for this facility is now out for comment. If approved, this facility will equal in size two Seaboard complexes in Morton County as the largest in Kansas.
• Murphy Farms, Inc. has permits pending for 14,700 head in Hodgeman County and 29,400 head in Lane County. The 34,000 breeding sows at the two facilities will produce some 670,000 piglets per year for nurseries and finishing facilities in the region. The Lane county facility will generate wastes equivalent to a city of 90,000 people. Last year Hodgeman county voters rejected corporate hog farms even though Murphy Farms campaigned vigorously for their project. After the Hodgeman County vote Murphy announced they planned to go in anyway under a loophole in the law.
• The state of Oklahoma recently imposed a one year moratorium on large hog farms, giving incentive for these operations to move into Kansas.

For further information contact Charles Benjamin, Legislative Coordinator, Kansas Natural Resource Council and Kansas Chapter of Sierra Club at (785) 232-1555.

Contact Governor Graves or your state representative via e-mail.
Read the full text of the bill (321 KB, from http://www.ink.org)
Read a critique of the bill by Craig Volland, an environmental engineer and technical consultant to the Kansas Sierra Club and Stewards of the Land.

• There is no excuse for being uninformed on this issue! - HOG FACTS home page
• Rural America - An online magazine published by the Missouri Rural Crisis Center, this has a lot of useful facts and publications.
• Farm Crisis Net - an excellent resource for facts on various aspects of the problems facing family farms.
• Further afield, read about corporate hog factories in Virginia, and how volunteers can help monitor and report violations - The EIEIO home page.
• Pork, Pollution and Pig Farming: The Truth about Corporate Hog Production in Kansas - An article by Eric Voogt, from the Kansas Journal of Law and Public Policy, Spring 1996..
• Families Against Rural Messes (FARM), an Illinois group fighting mega hog operations. Includes the invaluable article, "ARE LARGE HOG OPERATIONS GOOD FOR RURAL COMMUNITIES?", by Nancy Thompson of the Nebraska Center for Rural Affairs.
• Write a letter to the editor of the Great Bend Tribune
• P.O.W.E.R. - a grass roots effort to stop corporate piggery in Great Bend
• America's Animal Factories - A report from the Natural Resources Defense Council, Dec. 1998, with a state-by-state update, including one for Kansas.
• Factory Farm WebSite - "Our goal: to eliminate factory farming in favor of a sustainable food production system which is healthful and humane, economically viable and environmentally sound."