With the recent approval by the Greene County Supervisors for two new Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations (CAFO), that brings the number of CAFOs in the county to 100.

When a new CAFO or an expansion of a current CAFO happens and it meets a threshold of number of hogs or cattle, the project then has to go through the master matrix. District 24 State Senator Jerry Behn was one of the people that originally created the matrix some 17 years ago. He explains that their original intent for creating the matrix was to address both family farms that were site specific and companies from out of county and/or state.

“If a son or daughter wanted to come home and they wanted some hogs, we wanted a process where they could do that without causing any problems with the neighbors. We also acknowledged that if you have an out of state company coming in that they are not site specific. They don’t have any property yet and oftentimes they’re going to buy some land and they can pretty much purchase it wherever they need to.”

Behn describes why they decided to give the Iowa Department of Natural Resources the final say for whether or not a hog confinement can be built or expanded instead of that decision lying with the county supervisors.

“The thought at the legislature at the time was, it should be a uniform statewide process. And there was some concerns that we didn’t want a hodgepodge variety of regulations.”

He says if there are people who don’t believe the matrix is regulating confinement suitably, to bring their ideas of how they want it changed to his attention by emailing him at jlbehn@msn.com.