They spoke up about factory farming. Now, they’re being threatened by their neighbors.
BLOOMING PRAIRIE, Minnesota — In 2014, Lowell Trom hit a breaking point. For two decades, he had watched as his small farming community in Blooming Prairie, Minnesota, was taken over by hog factory farms. The first one was built in 1993. Five years later, another one went up. By 2014, there were 10, housing around 24,000 pigs within a three-mile radius of the 760-acre property where he grew corn and soybeans. Many were raising hogs for Holden Farms, a midsized pork company, according to his daughter, Sonja Trom Eayrs. The millions of gallons of waste that the pigs generated each year stank horribly and polluted the air and water, turning an otherwise pleasant town into a pigsty. The trucks that brought in feed for the hogs or loaded them up for trips to the slaughterhouse tore up the town’...
