Jeanne Gramstorff was a farmer and banker in the north Panhandle town of Farnsworth, Texas, who helped organize and operate the non-profit group, ACCORD (Active Citizens Concerned Over Resource Development). ACCORD has been seeking to improve operations among the region’s confined feeding operations (CAFOs), chiefly hog facilities. Mrs. Gramstorff and other ACCORD members were concerned about wastewater runoff, aquifer contamination, nuisance-level odors, increased flies, and airborne diseases emanating from these facilities. Also, given their large size (handling as many as 250,000 hogs), efficiencies of scale, vertical integration, and remote ownership, these new facilities threatened many family-run, locally-based businesses. Finally, Mrs. Gramstorff and others within ACCORD were concerned about the erosion of due process rights to protect their communities’ health, the local ecosystems, and their land values from the effects of these facilities under recently streamlined administrative procedures, which largely eliminated CAFO permit hearings.
Region: Panhandle
Marie Killebrew
Marie and her husband, Walter Killebrew, operated a cattle ranch that had been in their family for more than 100 years, located near Canadian, Texas in the sand-sage country of the Panhandle’s Canadian Breaks. In an area that typically gets less than 20 inches of rain, and is highly dependent on agriculture, they grew concerned about plans to export groundwater from the Ogallala aquifer to cities to the south, including Amarillo and possibly San Antonio. In the year 2001, they filed in opposition to neighbors’ permits for high-production water wells, drawing as much as an acre-foot per acre per year, for sale and export. A settlement resulted with some conditions on the wells’ siting, flow, and production sales, but Mrs. Killebrew remained concerned about the long-term effects of such groundwater mining, and the general impact of the rule of capture.
Larhea Pepper
Together with her husband Terry Pepper, LaRhea Pepper farms 960 acres in dryland organic cotton near the Panhandle town of O’Donnell, Texas, avoiding genetically-modified seed and chemical fertilizers and pesticides, and relying on crop rotations, cover crops and compost to maintain soil fertility, naturally-occurring lady beetles and lacewings to control pests, and North Texas’ hard freezes to defoliate cotton plants for harvest. Mrs. Pepper has also been active in helping create the processing, distribution and markets to support organic cotton farmers, which still represent only 1/10 of 1% of all cotton planted in the U.S.. In the early 1990s, she co-founded the Texas Organic Cotton Marketing Co-op, to ensure an adequate supply of raw fiber to the industry, and organized two firms to convert this fiber into finished products ready for sale: Cotton Plus and Organic Essentials. Cotton Plus exists to buy back farmers’ ginned cotton and to contract spinning and weaving into prints, plaids, flannels and other fabrics. Organic Essentials sells organic cotton personal care products, such as cotton balls, swabs, rounds and tampons.
Jim Schermbeck
Mr. Schermbeck is an environmental organizer, activist and filmmaker in North Texas. From 1977 to 1988, he focused on nuclear power and waste issues, helping to found the Armadillo Coalition of Texas, the Comanche Peak Life Force, the Lone Star Alliance, and the Comanche Peak Citizen Audit, in opposition to the construction and operation of Texas Utilities’ Comanche Peak nuclear power plant in Somervell County, near Glen Rose, Texas. His efforts ranged from preparing legal and financial arguments against the plant to organizing civil disobedience and occupation of the plant site. From 1989 through 1993, he served as director of the North Texas office of Texans United, the regional affiliate of the National Toxics Campaign. In this capacity, he organized for cleanup of an aluminum and zinc smelting and casting plant in Crowley, a lead facility in West Dallas, and incinerators in Dallas and Midlothian. During the 1990s, Mr. Schermbeck has also been staff organizer for Downwinders at Risk, a group focused on reducing emissions from the upset-plagued Chaparral Steel facility and the hazardous waste incineration at the TXI, Holcim and North Texas cement kilns. Recently, he has made video documentaries, including the 2003 piece about drug-testing in schools, titled Larry v. Lockney, which has aired on PBS, and a 2006 segment, The Big Buy, regarding Rep. Tom DeLay’s fundraising and political organizing.
David Schmidly
Trained as a biologist with a special interest in the taxonomy and natural history of mammals, David Schmidly has taught at Texas A&M University and Texas Tech University, and served as President of the Texas Tech and Oklahoma State University. Dr. Schmidly recently published Texas Natural History: A Century of Change, an annotated reprinting and updating of A Biological Survey of Texas, the landmark 1905 study of the state by Vernon Bailey and a team of 12 other federal biologists. Dr. Schmidly notes that the pressures on wildlife at the turn of the 20th century were basically limited to overhunting; impacts now include habitat fragmentation, introduction of non-native animals (such as feral hogs) and plants (such as Chinese Tallow), ignorance of wildlife among a burgeoning urban human population, and reductions in free-flowing surface water. Dr. Schmidly has not only looked at this historical change, but has also considered the future ecological challenges that face the state. He coordinated a 2002 report entitled Texas Parks and Wildlife for the 21st Century, which concludes that Texas state and local governments must acquire a great deal more public land, on the order of 2 million acres, in order to give the public sufficient access to outdoor recreation and to ensure the long-term viability of wildlife populations.
Kenneth Seyffert
Kenneth Seyffert is an Amarillo resident who worked for many years in the trucking industry, but his hobby and passion has involved birding and nature study. He has cooperated with other Panhandle birders by serving as vice-president of the Texas Ornithological Society, president of the Texas Panhandle Audubon Society, founding member of the Texas Bird Records Committee, and as a regional director of the Texas Breeding Bird Atlas Project. Building on over 40 years of field notes, he produced the illustrated 520-page book, Birds of the Texas Panhandle: Their Status, Description and History (Texas A&M University Press, 2001) to share his knowledge with a new audience. His work celebrates the surprising diversity of birdlife that the Panhandle hosts, including some 400 avian species, ranging from the red-headed woodpeckers of the Canadian River bottomlands, the cranes, ducks and geese of the central Panhandle’s playas, and the western scrub-jays and bushtits that have found homes in the canyons of the High and Rolling Plains.
Andy Wilkinson
Andy Wilkinson brings a varied background of college and graduate school, of a dozen years as a policeman, and an equal stretch as a businessman to his work as a full-time writer and singer of contemporary western folk music, as well as a poet, playwright and teacher. He has recorded four albums of music and poetry on the Grey Horse label: “Charlie Goodnight” (1994), “The Road is Still the Road” (1996), “Storyteller” (1998), and “An Ordinary Christmas” (2000), written two plays, “Charlie Goodnight’s last Night”, and “My Cowboy’s Gift”, and taught song-writing and multi-disciplinary creative seminars at Texas Tech University. His creative work recounts the long human occupation of the Panhandle from Native American days to that of the modern cotton farmer and oilfield worker, and celebrates the unique character and special value of the High Plains’ shortgrass prairie, open skies, and deep Ogallala aquifer.
Darryl Birkenfeld
Darryl Birkenfeld is a part-time farmer, educator, writer and former priest based in the small Panhandle community of Nazareth, Texas. As a farmer, he helps manage the Paidom Meats grass-fed beef, lamb and poultry operation. As a priest, he ministered for over a decade to congregations in Cactus and Stratford, struggling agricultural towns in the Panhandle, and grew to understand the need for a sustainable agriculture that would support human communities and natural ecosystems over the long-term. Towards that goal, he helped found and operate the Promised Land Network in the late 1980s, and sponsored the Southern Plains Conference, as efforts to educate Panhandle residents about Staked Plain land uses and resources. In recent years, he has returned to school, received his Ph.D. in agricultural ethics, and is currently working on a book considering Americans’ changing relationship with the land.
Alan Birkenfeld
Mr. Birkenfeld is a progressive third-generation rancher based in the Panhandle community of Nazareth, roughly halfway between Amarillo and Lubbock. There he operates Paidom Meats, where he raises grass-fed beef, lamb and poultry in a low-stress environment, without the use of antibiotics, dewormers, hormone implants or pesticides, yielding a cleaner, leaner and more nutritious meat. In another contrast to conventional meat, he also sells these products direct to consumers, providing Paidom Meats with both a better margin on its sales and more accountability to its his customers.
Mavis Belisle
Ms. Belisle is an environmental and peace activist. From 1979 to 1991, she was involved with the Armadillo Coalition of Texas and the Comanche Peak Life Force in legal research, organizing and nonviolent civil disobedience in opposition to construction and operation of the Comanche Peak nuclear utility plant near Glen Rose, Texas.
Since 1991, she has served as executive director of the Peace Farm, a non-profit organization located in Panhandle, Texas, northeast of Amarillo. The Peace Farm is a permanent facility dedicated to raising awareness of the nuclear weapons role and hazardous waste contamination impacts of the Panhandle-based Pantex plant. While the Peace Farm supports the Pantex facility’s post-Cold War work on disassembly of nuclear warheads, the group remains concerned about the 3000-acre site’s stockpiling of some 15,000 triggers or “pits”, the equivalent of 50 tons of plutonium, and the evidence of groundwater contamination by solvents and munitions.