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August 28, 2010
Egg Factory By VERLYN KLINKENBORG
On Friday, most of the country’s major newspapers, including The Times, featured reports from a small town called Clarion, Iowa. Just outside Clarion are the egg operations, owned by the DeCoster family, at the heart of the salmonella outbreak. The factory — no point calling it a farm — called Wright County Egg, is the source of 380 million of the more than 500 million recalled eggs. I grew up in Clarion. My family lived there from 1954 to 1963 during what now looks like a golden era for American farming. When I was back a couple of years ago, I noted the most evident change, a significant population of Mexican workers. I hoped that they were able to love Clarion as much as I did. It’s unlikely, because I also saw where they worked. When I was young, I thought I grasped the immensity of the Iowa landscape. The immensity of the soybean and corn fields has only grown because so many smaller farms have vanished as a result of government farm policy, which rewards economic concentration. As I turned off Highway 3 east of town, I saw that there was a newer immensity, the egg factories — an endless row of faceless buildings, as bland as a compound of colossal storage units but with the air of a prison. It wasn’t simply that the operation is out of scale with the Iowa landscape. It is out of scale with any landscape, except perhaps the industrial districts of Los Angeles County. What shocked me most was the thought that this is where the logic of industrial farming gets us. Instead of people on the land, committed to the welfare of the agricultural enterprise and the resources that make it possible, there was this horror — a place where millions of chickens are crowded in tiny cages and hundreds of laborers work in dire conditions. It takes only a little investigation to learn how bad things have been inside those buildings.
The list of offenses for which the DeCosters and their farms have been fined in Iowa and Maine MORE IN OPINION only begins with hiring children and illegal immigrants.
Opinionato
In 2000, Jack DeCoster, the operations’ founder, was named a “habitual violator” of Iowa’s Novel Scor environmental laws. His egg factories have been cited by OSHA for deplorable working Read More » conditions. In 2003, Mr. DeCoster paid more than $1.5 million to settle an employment
discrimination suit charging that 11 women working in the Clarion plants had been subject to sexual harassment, including rape and threats of retaliation. There have been nearly 1,500 illnesses as a result of the salmonella outbreak. Every one of the billions of eggs produced this way has been tainted.
