About CSP.
Crawford Stewardship Project was founded in 2007 by a grassroots group of local residents in response to the first industrial-scale CAFO proposed in Crawford County, an area beloved for its rolling patchwork of small farms stitched together by trout streams, floodplains, and forested slopes. That CAFO did expand, but a lot of people who love this area found common ground, learned to work together, and have kept a close eye on this facility (to date, the only CAFO in Crawford County).
Since then, CSP has built on our grassroots networks to host challenging proactive conversations about the future of our rural area, bringing together the voices and values of our small local communities to identify what we all care about and how we can protect and enhance our region, all while learning together and building engagement in local governance. CSP’s efforts to empower our communities to take responsibility for our landscape have included leading civic science projects catalyzing and augmenting institutional research on local watersheds and geology, leading educational fieldtrips into caves, streams, and pastures, and offering interactive presentations for classrooms from kindergarten through university.
CSP’s history, deeply rooted in rural place-based community organizing, has offered us the opportunity to work with incredible people, making connections across issues and political boundaries. We face upcoming challenges with the same passion and grit as ever, but now with a depth of knowledge and breadth of networks that only years of authentic engagement and good-faith collaboration can build.
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CAFO = Concentrated Animal Feeding Operation.
In Wisconsin a CAFO is defined as a livestock operation with at least 1000 “animal units" confined in one place. An "animal unit" is roughly 1000 pounds, so "1000 animal units" translates to roughly 200,000 chickens, 1000 steers, or 700 dairy cows.
One reason CAFOs are a concern is because even a small CAFO with only 2500 pigs produces an amount of manure comparable to a city of over 18,000 people, (roughly the population of Onalaska), but without comparable treatment & safety requirements.
