By Bob Vilt Austin Daily Herald.

Tuesday, March 14, 2000

By Bob Vilt

Austin Daily Herald

I don’t understand farming.

Dwight Ault, an area farmer, called the other day. He is one of few farmers I know. He didn’t call about farming, he called about a 1988 Volvo he saw at a car lot south of town wondering if I would be interested. He sold me the one I have been driving the past few years.

He picked that one up at Carney’s. There had been an engine fire that destroyed the wiring and hosing.

Ault put the car in the trusty hands of Brian Clingman, a mechanic at Zrucky’s who restored the hoses and wiring. Ault and I both agree Brian to be one of the most amazing mechanics in the land. It’s like magic, the way he solves car problems, we’ve decided. And with Ault around there will be work for Brian to do.

Ault is giving some thought to purchasing older Volvos, restoring them and making them available to the Hmong in the cities. Apparently Ault’s daughter works with some of the families through the Minnesota Food Association Project.

Ault is a dissident.

My introduction to Ault came many years ago at a League of Women Voter’s annual dinner. I admired him for being one of the few male members at the meeting, along with his wife Becky who, you might say, "helps steer him along."

If you’ve ever talked with him you know Ault is a thinker. And he is a storyteller. He’s not afraid to ask hard questions.

Ault is a Lansing Township hog farmer and a member of the Land Stewardship Project. He was featured in the Herald March 2000 addition of the Southern Minnesota Ag Monthly in a story by Lee Bonorden on the pork checkoff.

According to the story, Ault’s pasture – farrowing makes him a dissident of sorts. His old fashioned method is different from the confinement operations where the pigs are confined to a small area – captive in their pens. Pens that are most often entirely slatted.

Because he does it the old-fashioned way, that alone makes him a maverick to the confinement operations.

Czech dissident and President, Vaclav Havel, says of the dissident: "The dissident does not operate in the realm of genuine power at all. He is not seeking power at all. He has no desire for office and does not gather votes. He does not attempt to charm the public, he offers nothing and promises nothing. He can offer, if anything, only his own skin – and he offers it solely because he has no other way of affirming the truth he stands for. His actions simply articulate his dignity as a citizen, regardless of the cost."

When I see how these huge confinement operations are flooding the market with pigs, keeping the prices down and the profits up I am disturbed and no doubt the pigs are too who have no dignity in their own lives.

As one who has little time for television I was probably one of the last to hear about the horrible effects of the huge pig confinement operations in the Carolina’s – a result of a recent hurricane – flooded pig confinement operations. Hundreds of pigs drowned and the sediment spilled out polluting the rivers – no doubt raising health concerns to humans beyond the destruction of the pigs.

A magazine in the Main Street Coffee House tells the story. May I suggest you stop and read it – over a cup of coffee.

The article describes a push to relocate in northwest Texas where there is limited precipitation, and dry lands where the water runs deep beneath the sand. Where there is less chance of harming the water. Where they will still stand on grates.

It was a joy to ride around Ault’s farm one Sunday as he explained his operation. Showing me the sunflowers, an alternative crop, seeing the little baby pigs laying aside their mothers – outside, perhaps the deepest and tenderest experience in a sows life.

Would I feel the same enjoyment in a confinement operation where pigs are apt to bite off each other’s tails from stress?

Ault’s mission: "To convert old dairy barns that aren’t being used to farrowing facilities based on the Swedish deep-bedded system."

If you want to know more about this, call either Dwight or his son Grant.

Bob Vilt’s column appears Tuesdays