Trespassing: Dirt Stories and Field Notes Book

Janet Kauffman's Trespassing: Dirt Stories and Field Notes combines short stories (Dirt Stories) and nonfiction essays (Field Notes) to illustrate the impact of confined animal feeding operations, or CAFOs, as well as other environmental issues, on rural Michigan communities. Janet Kauffman is a resident of rural Michigan, and in fact, has lived her whole life on farms. As a result of this, she approaches the environmental issues she writes about as an informed participant.

While the CAFOs produced great quantities of meat and diary products, they have some very real negative effects on the environment that are far reaching. While many people don't live in the country near a CAFO, you may very well live down stream from one. These issues actually should concern not just those living in Michigan, but everyone.

This fight concerns Kaufman personally. She lives daily with the effects of a CAFO. In the article "Farmer Turned Activist Fights Manure-Spreading Faults"
we read that: "The farms are home to 20,000 cows and produce as much waste as a city of 200,000 people. Waste from the barns where the animals live -- a stew that includes antibiotics, blood from births and cleaning solvents -- is washed into lagoons, where it sits until it can be pumped into trucks and spread on fields. When too much manure is applied to fields, it forms puddles that run off into streams."
If you've ever been in the area where a lagoon from a large farm operation is located, you know how awful the stench can be.

Janet Kauffman hit several hot buttons from some of my past personal crusades in several different areas of the country.

At one time, while living in a rural community still full of small family farms where cows did graze in fields, I personally experienced a community fighting against allowing a huge hog operation to start up in the area - and it was a fight. As Janet Kauffman would well know, the owners who wanted to start the hog operation weren't "farmers." They came from out of state. They didn't live on or even near their operations. They already had operations stinking up rural landscapes in a nearby state that was causing environmental problems. They also had some well paid lawyers on their side.

During that time we also were attending county commissioner meetings trying to keep a huge cell phone tower from being erected right by us. The representative from the company that wanted to erect the cell phone tower was from Boston. He had a condescending attitude toward those of us opposing the tower, not realizing that most of the neighbors were well educated. (It was a pity we never had a say about the new guy who moved out there the summer before we moved away and put in a high-watt night light, ruining the night sky.)

I've experienced a city (small town outside of the city) engineer (not trained) deciding a road needed to be straighten which resulted in the removal of two beautiful maple trees in our front yard. And, why, no, their actions did nothing noticeable that improved the road or the drainage; all it accomplished was the removal of several healthy trees and a whole bank of irises.

Finally, I have a real hang-up about watering grass. I especially refused to plant large areas of grass and water it when living in the high desert, where rain and water are not plentiful and people fight over water rights. I always found it absurd that many HOAs required a high percentage of grass in the landscaping. When we landscaped our front yard, our plans made it clear we were using xeroscaping.

I Highly Recommended Janet Kauffman's Trespassing: Dirt Stories and Field Notes.