Secretive push to build new Florida slaughterhouse endangers Lake O • Florida Phoenix

America has had a long love affair with cowboys. We picture them riding, roping, and ranching and just swoon. But we don’t like thinking about what happens to the cattle they’re tending, and how these critters wind up as the millions of burgers sold by McDonalds.

To go from cows on the hoof to burgers on the bun, you need a slaughterhouse. A new one has been proposed for the edge of Lake Okeechobee, and it’s creating a lot of waves.

“A proposed slaughterhouse in western Martin County will bring more pollution and further generate toxic algal blooms in Lake Okeechobee,” the Treasure Coast newspapers reported last week. “Blood, feces, oil, grease, ammonia and antibiotic residue from the proposed slaughterhouse would contribute to harmful algal blooms.”

Oh, what a lovely stew! I’m surprised Campbell’s doesn’t sell that flavor.

Seriously, though, dumping all that offal is an awful thing to do to Florida’s largest lake, which has already been named the most polluted lake in America.

Fortunately, Martin County officials are right on top of this and — wait, what? They can’t do anything to stop it? Says who?

Says Agriculture Commissioner Wilton Simpson, that’s who.

According to Simpson, local governments are preempted from regulating farm and farm-related operations such as this one by the state’s “Right to Farm Act.” Only his agency can say yes or no to this.

Despite the shared last name, Simpson is no relation to the famous cartoon doofus Homer. But when I read that he believes Martin County can’t stop this project, I blurted out Homer’s catchphrase: “D’oh!”

“I’m more opposed to the idea that you can’t even ask about this than I am to the proposal itself,” said Jim Howe of Audubon of Martin County.

Hidden ranch

I don’t know if you herd (sorry!) but Florida is where cattle ranching got its start in America.

No matter what Hollywood has told you, the original American cowboys didn’t look, walk, or sound like John Wayne. They were Spanish-speaking vaqueros tending cows near St. Augustine in the 1500s.

Over the centuries, Florida cattle ranchers have played a major role in making Florida the state that it became. In fact, the most beloved novel about Florida is a ranching story, “A Land Remembered” by Patrick Smith. It recounts the history of the pioneer MacIvey family as they become cattle ranchers who try to work with nature, then (tragically) switch to land development that involves destroying nature.

Nowadays there aren’t as many ranchers as there used to be, thanks in part to all the developers converting pastures to pavement. The ones that remain often find a way to make money from more than just cattle.

Take, for instance, the 2,300-acre Chancey Bay Ranch in Indiantown. While it maintains the traditional herd of cattle, it’s trying other methods for turning a profit.

Mangos, for instance. On its somewhat wonky website, Chancey Bay brags that it’s trying to turn 750 acres into “one of the most significant domestic mango supply operations in the United States.” That’s in addition to its existing citrus groves and a nine-home subdivision.

The ranch owner, Tuny Mizrachi, is nothing like the pioneering MacIveys. Records show she’s 62 and owns a condo in Sunny Isles Beach, which is about as far from the rural ranching life as you can get.

And her Chancey Bay Ranch has been working since 2020 toward building a 56,000-square foot slaughterhouse — roughly the size of your average grocery store – to turn a lot of bovines into all-beef patties.

Mizrachi first notified Martin County she’d be seeking a permit to use 26 acres to build what the application calls a “high-end, grass-fed, Kosher and conventional animal processing facility.”

In 2022, the South Florida Water Management District issued a water-use permit at that site to a Mizrachi-run company called CBR Investors LLC. The permit allows the company to suck 6.8 million gallons of water a year out of the ground.

The water district quietly approved the permit despite the fact, Braun said, that Martin County is in a water cautionary area.

The slaughterhouse plan progressed as if the cows were tiptoeing up wearing slippers. Most people in Martin County had no idea it was being considered. The first newspaper story on it ran last June.

Greg Braun, executive director of the environmental group Guardians of Martin County, said he and his group didn’t know about the slaughterhouse until last year, when a Martin County commissioner called him to ask if they had taken a position on the project.

You’ve heard of Hidden Valley Ranch? This is just “Hidden Ranch,” period.

“They’re trying everything they can to keep this out of the public eye,” Braun told me.

Furor over both the project and the secrecy boiled over during a February meeting of the Martin County Commission.

Mark Perry, longtime executive director of the Florida Oceanographic Society, called the slaughterhouse “a terrible thing to happen to our community … . The pollution that will come from this is incredibly massive to our waterways.”

“This is an industrial site that we do not have the wastewater treatment capacity for,” warned Jim Moir, executive director of the Indian Riverkeeper organization. “Nobody in the region has the capacity for the wastewater treatment that this facility would require. …This is going to be devastating for Lake Okeechobee.”

The liquid heart

Although it’s known as “the liquid heart of Florida,” most of Florida’s 23 million residents have never seen so much as an inch of 730-square-mile Lake Okeechobee. They know it only as that blue hole in the map of South Florida. They’re aware that it’s big and full of water, that’s all.

They probably don’t know that Zora Neale Hurston once called it a “monstropolous beast” for the way it rose up during a 1928 hurricane and drowned the little towns around its southern rim.

Many of them also don’t know that it was once considered a perfect place for catching bass. Now the waters are so messed up that if you want fresh fish, you’d do better to stop by the nearest Publix than drop a line in Lake O.

The pollution in Lake Okeechobee isn’t confined to that massive body of water, either. When the lake level gets too high, its managers in the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers open the gates on either side of the lake and let the tainted water flow out to estuaries on both coasts — the St. Lucie to the east and the Caloosahatchee to the west.

Over the past 20 years, pollution-fueled toxic algae blooms in the lake have repeatedly been spread to those regions too, ruining their tourism-based economies. All those toxic blue-green blooms killing the fish chased away all the visitors with their spending green.

The algae blooms tend to be really stinky, too. I once interviewed a lady from Jensen Beach, who said the guacamole-like bloom at the waterfront smelled “like death on a cracker.”

You can see why adding even more pollution is a bad idea, right?

“A slaughterhouse will have a huge environmental impact,” Leah Kelly of the Center for Biological Diversity told me. “It’s kind of crazy to put a major cause of pollution by a lake that’s already experiencing problems with that.”

Kelly’s organization has compiled an extensive report on the impact of slaughterhouses nationwide. It did so as part of a lawsuit designed to prod the federal government to take more seriously the pollution spewed by factory farms.

She cited Environmental Protection Agency data that meat and poultry processing facilities are the second-largest industrial point source of nitrogen pollution flowing into waterways. Nitrogen fuels the toxic algae blooms, which do more than just kill marine life.

“Those are threats to public health, too,” she told me.

Yet, according to Braun, the state agency that’s supposed to regulate pollution in Florida, the state Department of Environmental Protection, has already ceded all decisions about this Indiantown project to Simpson’s agency.

Wave the flag and hide

Ranch representatives met several times with Martin County officials to go over the slaughterhouse proposal, according to Peter Walden, the county’s growth management coordinator. The county had a lot of questions about what was planned, he said.

But once the ranch owner got that get-out-of-jail-free card from Simpson’s department, the rancher withdrew the county permit application for the slaughterhouse.

“It’s just bonkers,” Howe from the Audubon Society said. Because of Simpson’s intervention, he said, the public has been left in the dark about what to expect from the slaughterhouse.

“I guess you can just hide what you want to do while you wave the flag and shout, ‘Freedom!’” he told me.

Braun called for the commissioners to hire their own expert counsel to review the letter sent by Simpson’s department telling the county to back off.

One commissioner made a motion to do just that, arguing that a slaughterhouse sounded more industrial than agricultural. After all, Martin County has a long tradition of being more diligent about protecting its natural resources than a lot of other counties.

But other commissioners were hesitant to do anything to offend Simpson. The county gets millions from his department, and they didn’t want to lose that grant money.

Adding to their worry was the news that Simpson had recently said no to a $1.9 million grant that the county had expected to receive. The implication was that Simpson said no because the county had raised questions about the slaughterhouse.

Thus, instead of doing anything that could possibly upset the thin-skinned agriculture commissioner, they directed a staff member to open negotiations with the ranch and with Simpson’s agency.

I talked to the county’s designated negotiator, county environmental resource administrator John Maehl.

“This has been a friendly engagement,” he told me. “We’re still in the planning part of the operation.”

One thing he said that got my attention was that the severity of the problem of the slaughterhouse’s water pollution would depend on the ranch’s ability to meet the agriculture agency’s “best management practices.”

A real lulu

Braun joked that the slaughterhouse is what growth management experts refer to as a “LULU.” That’s an acronym for “locally unpopular land use” projects.

Braun told me that his organization has submitted public records requests to various state and local agencies. What they got from the state was heavily redacted.

But one document showed that the ranch is not complying with the state’s list of “best management practices” for farms and ranches. Those are voluntary techniques that minimize or eliminate pollution that would harm Florida’s waterways.

The Florida Right to Farm Act says that any farm or ranch that wants to avoid complying with local regulations has to be in compliance with the agency’s best management practices.

I tried repeatedly this week to contact Mizrachi about all this, either directly or via her attorney. Neither she nor her attorney ever responded, just as nobody from the ranch showed up for the Martin County Commission meeting.

I also asked Simpson’s office how he could legally protect a ranch that’s not in compliance with what the law requires. One of his staffers asked to see the document, even though it was one of the state’s own. I’m still waiting for a comment.

Simpson is a millionaire agribusiness executive who got rich running an industrial egg production facility in Pasco County. He’s more of an expert on chickens than cows.

When he was in the Legislature, Simpson demonstrated that his only concern about Lake Okeechobee was that Big Sugar could continue using if it were a dentist’s spit bowl. He’s also the rare politician who contends that Florida preserves too much land from developers.

In other words, he’s never been someone to prioritize protection of the environment over allowing a supporter to rake in a profit. A quick look through Simpson’s campaign contributions didn’t reveal any direct giving from Mizrachi, but of course, Florida’s once sun-drenched public records aren’t nearly as transparent as they used to be.

As Martin County gets led like a lamb to the slaughter on this project, I doubt he will care what the locals think. I just hope that someone will be brave enough to point out this truth: Simpson’s only connection with America’s romantic cowboys is how much he loves to produce bull.