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Former Internees Still Out of CAFO Debate

By Nathaniel Hoffman, 2-24-07

The remains of the entrance to the Minidoka Internment Camp in Hunt, Idaho near the town of Jerome.

I used to listen to KQED’s Pacific Time on my evening drive over the Bay Bridge into San Francisco. It’s a public radio show that takes the issues of the day and explores them from an Asian American perspective. My favorite part of the show was the way the former host, Nguyen Qui Duc, would transition from one segment to the next, mashing two seemingly unrelated stories, say Japanese punk music and Mongolian foreign policy, into a cogent radio program.

So when I heard that a former Japanese internment camp in Idaho is under threat from a 20,000 cow heifer operation planned nearby I thought is was a perfect subject for the show. The story presented a host of seemingly impossible themes inside one basic development conflict.

You can listen to it here.

But the story continues.

One of the topics that came up in my reporting, but did not make it into the story was this: the Japanese community here is not unanimous about keeping a huge feedlot away from the Minidoka Internment Center National Monument. Many Japanese Americans who came out of Minidoka in the 1940’s settled in southern Idaho and became farmers.

As Gov. Butch Otter put it after signing a proclamation last week decrying the 1942 Japanese internment order: “Those folks, when those gates were opened they went out and they went to work on the farms, and they went to work on the ranches and you can number in the hundreds today those workers that walked out of those gates with only freedom, now own those ranches, now own those farms, now own those businesses.”

Otter sounds better on tape than he looks in print. But I was hard pressed to find anyone in the older generation of Japanese at the Statehouse that day who would openly criticize a feedlot, just for being a feedlot.

Even though the deleterious effects of large scale, confined animal operations are well documented, and even though CAFOs have changed the face of agriculture in very sinister ways in the communities where they are built, people within agriculture are hesitant to criticize them.

Enter Dean Dimond.

Dimond farms for two fairly large dairies. He sprays manure from feedlots on his own farm. He owns a small herd of beef cows. He is a member of the farm bureau and the son of a farmer.

And he is the guy fighting the feedlot west of Minidoka. In part because it is literally in his back yard, but also because he realized Jerome County is full of feedlots already. There is no place left to spread the cow shit, or manage the nutrients, as they like to say.

The Idaho Legislature seems poised to approve a measure aimed at opening up testimony on feedlots to more folks, including most of Dimond’s neighbors. Testimony at county hearings is currently limited to people who live within a mile radius of the proposed feedlot.

But people who care about Minidoka, or who care about the soils in Jerome County, but don’t live around the corner, will still have no say in the use of the lands around a national monument.

And that’s the part that really stinks.

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