This article by the Missouri Rural Crisis Center appeared in the Daily Star Journal on May 28th, 2019.
The 2019 legislative session came to an end and clearly demonstrated how willfully out of touch Gov. Mike Parson and our state legislature are with Missourians from every corner of the state and all walks of life.
Thousands of Missourians took action, from all over the state —Democrats and Republicans, rural and urban — generating tens of thousands of emails and phone calls into legislators to stop Senate Bill 391 and this attack on their rights to local control and the ability to protect their property, air and water and communities from the negative impacts of corporate industrial agriculture.
Senate Bill 391 strips Missouri counties of their right to enact commonsense safeguards to protect their communities from the pollution, health impacts and environmental damage caused by corporate-controlled concentrated animal feeding operation.
Twenty Missouri counties currently have health ordinances. Many of them have been in place for decades protecting property rights, health and communities of rural Missourians because DNR rules are totally inadequate to protect them. These ordinances will remain in effect but, after Aug. 28, no future health ordinances dealing with CAFOs can be enacted.
House Bill 951, a bill which sought to ban local elected representatives from inspecting corporate CAFOs in order to enforce local ordinances, was ultimately defeated in this session.
Legislation like Senate Bill 391 is part of a long campaign by corporate agribusiness to corporatize Missouri’s livestock industry.
(Read the rest of this news story at its original source HERE.)