Factory farm facing furor

Here's a story that condemns the decision to end environmental protection in the chemical toilet, sacrifice zone, perpetual welfare state and permanent disaster area that is South Dakota. 

Dwayne Beck is a soil scientist who manages South Dakota State University's Dakota Lakes Research Station. He has taken on irrigators and the main stem dams killing the Missouri River but now he has taken aim at food giant General Mills who developed a 30,000 acre factory farm in the center of the state. 

Breaking West River ground for the Keystone XL pipeline will end with the same result. The same geology that thwarts railroads and forces engineers to rebuild I-90 between Reliance and Rapid City and I-94 between Mandan, North Dakota and Billings, Montana every year also makes construction of the Keystone XL pipeline untenable.

Take Gunsmoke Farms, a vast property that covers 53 square miles just northwest of Pierre, S.D. "It scared me, because normally organic [farming] entails lots of tillage, and those soils are very fragile," he said. He collected photographs of the damage: small drifts of wind-blown soil in a roadside ditch, and a country road that disappears into a brown cloud of blowing dust. General Mills doesn't own Gunsmoke Farms or control it directly. It signed a "strategic sourcing agreement" with an investment firm called TPG, an early investor in Uber, which acquired the land to supply General Mills with organic wheat, peas and other crops. TPG then spun off another firm, Sixth Street, which currently owns Gunsmoke. [Dan Charles, NPR]