For more than a year, Investigate Midwest and the Flatwater Free Press have reported on Gov. Jim Pillen and the pork empire he created, Pillen Family Farms. Here’s what we’ve found so far.
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As he set up CAFOs in local communities over the past three decades, Pillen made sweeping promises that have not materialized.
At a 1997 gathering in a high school gym, Pillen told community members worried about his incoming concentrated animal feeding operation, or CAFO, that the odor would not disrupt their lives. “The fact is if it’s handled correctly, the odor is not offensive to people a few feet away,” he said.
But community members today often complain of the facility’s smell. One described herself as a “prisoner” in her own home.
Pillen also said the hog business would revitalize rural economies, including stopping the population loss many rural counties have experienced. Most counties with Pillen Family Farms operations have continued to lose population, census data shows, despite the company’s presence.
The value of Pillen’s family business has grown exponentially over the past 20 years.
In 2005, his company secured a $4 million loan with the properties he owned at the time. In 2023, the same lender extended Pillen Family Farms $286 million — much more than the annual budgets of many of the counties that Pillen businesses operate in.
A Nebraska rancher said Pillen was much more willing to take risks to expand than others. “Others were afraid of the future,” the rancher said. “Jim was full speed ahead.”
Drinking water wells near Pillen Family Farms hog operations have recorded high levels of nitrates.
Ingesting nitrates have been linked to a variety of health conditions, including cancer. Pillen Family Farms owns or has owned more than a hundred livestock facilities in Nebraska, but only 27 are required to have wells that are monitored for nitrate.
Of those, 16 have recorded levels higher than 50 parts per million.
One operation recorded a nitrate reading of 445 parts per million — about 45 times the federal standard for safe drinking water. Experts said the high levels are a “huge, huge, huge human health concern.”
The governor has not sold his business holdings.
One of the best ways officeholders can avoid conflicts of interest is to sell their assets, but Nebraska law does not require it. One possible conflict of interest is that Pillen now oversees the agency that regulates the hog farms he set up.
According to his latest financial disclosure, released March 1 and covering his first year in office, he remains invested in Pillen Family Farms and its related businesses.
He has also advocated for policies that would benefit the entire pork industry. In 2023, Pillen led a trade mission, his first as governor, to Vietnam, an emerging U.S. pork market. A pork processing company that Pillen used to sit on the board of has sold its product to Vietnam, according to shipping records.
“That doesn’t look good,” one ethics expert said.
Pillen’s administration backed legislation to streamline the process for approving CAFOs, including eliminating public hearings on requested permits.
The legislation also would have banned local communities from factoring potential water contamination into whether to allow CAFOs to be built.
Before he was governor, Pillen often dealt with local communities that had to permit his hog facilities. In 2002, after a permit was denied, he called it a “major defeat” for Nebraska agriculture.
Last year, a policy adviser for Gov. Pillen discussed the permitting issue with industry stakeholders. In a later email, the adviser said, “I would like to move the bullet points into a draft bill and see if that can’t sneak through this year and get us poised for something else next year.”
Gov. Pillen’s office and Pillen Family Farms have not responded to specific questions.
In a statement, Pillen Family Farms said: “Our business has always been guided by our core principles: 1) Do what is right; 2) Do the best you can; and 3) Treat others the way you want to be treated. These commitments will never change.”
In a statement, the governor’s office said: “It is evident from the questions posed … that this is the latest in an ongoing anti-ag media campaign, designed to use the Governor and the family business he launched with his father, as the focal point. As the first farmer-governor to lead the state in over 100 years, Gov. Pillen is strongly committed to advocating for and defending the livelihoods of Nebraska farmers and ranchers from those whose sole and constant agenda is to attack and denigrate their way of life, as well as undermine every time-tested crop, livestock and food production practice that has made Nebraska agriculture as strong as it is today.”
The post What to know about Nebraska Gov. Jim Pillen and his family business appeared first on Investigate Midwest.