Pigs on a Hill: The Final Act
Images from Uproot Meats website (still up today) that portray earlier times. The photos of pigs and poultry were fake from the start: grass has never grown on the barren hillside Krista Vegter “farms.”
When I moved from Brooklyn to Ashland five years ago, I never imagined I would get caught up fighting a pig farm on a denuded slope near our house. Nor did I imagine that my initial engagement would grow into a four-plus-year campaign to prod Jackson County officials to enforce the ordinances that governed agricultural land and to uncover the harmful practices Uproot Meats, hidden from view and visitors, pursued with impunity.
I have described in two prior posts the first and second chapters of this twisted saga, what I’ve come to call “Pigs on a Hill.” Here I offer what may be the last.
For those who haven’t read the previous installments, I offer a reprise. For those familiar with the saga, you can pick up it up here.
A circus on wheels
What does it take to move from ultra-urban Menlo Park and Santa Clara, California to start a pig ranch in the high desert of Central Oregon? Chutzpah, it turns out.
In February 2014, Krista Vegter and her partner, Sonia, both in their 30s, hitched a trailer to their Toyota Tacoma and left California for Northern Oregon. “We picked up 3 pigs, tried getting turkeys but the lady couldn’t catch them, collected 9 rabbits…We had a circus on wheels” Krista recalls.
Ten months later, on a nine-acre ranch in Bend, Oregon, the two women started a coffee roasting and pig raising business, with the we-mean-business name Gunpowder Ranch and Roasting. Another 14 months and they were gone, amid neighbor complaints from “pigs running down the street” to “never did anything good.”
The twosome headed to Ashland where they purchased 24 acres of low-value property just outside town, on a steep slope with no water rights or electricity. They set their sights on growing weed, though never applied for the required permit, and excavated the slope, again without a permit.
When the marijuana operation failed, they returned to pigs and, soon, chickens. They doubled their excavation of the slope and built a slaughterhouse and pens, less than 50 feet uphill from the Ashland Canal that provides water in the summer to nearby farms and gardens and drinking water to the city when drought threatens the municipal supply.
The dangers lurking behind Uproot Meats’ soft opening — operating before filing the required paperwork— burst into view when its application to the Jackson County Planning Commission (our county) was made public in late November, 2018, along with the Commission’s decision to award provisional approval to Uproot’s plans to “humanely raise” and slaughter 45 pigs and up to 20,000 chickens.
In a state where land designated as “exclusive farm use” — as is the Uproot Meats’ land — is largely unregulated, the particulars did not matter.
Don’t Uproot Ashland
Neighbors downhill from the planned hog farm reacted immediately, led by the abutting neighbor, a farmer herself, and a retired Mississippian public health researcher who had just bought a ranch south of Uproots. In a public hearing in early January 2019, the citizen’s group, assuming the name “Don’t Uproot Ashland,” focused its efforts on challenging the unpermitted slaughterhouse the County had approved. The hearing officer sided with our group and a stop work order soon followed.
Undeterred, Vegter continued with her “plan.” We quickly learned that she was not only an inexperienced farmer but also a serial violator.
For three years, Uproot Meats’ infractions gathered like a storm: no grading permit, no marijuana grow permit, no building permit for planned home site, un-permitted barn and electrical, violations of stop-work orders, no land mitigation as required by law, a hog and chicken processing plant where runoff pollutes water and land, no legitimate septic system, pending investigations from the Department of Environmental Quality, and more — including failure to appear in court to answer these violations.
Meanwhile, Vegter attempted to woo customers to her weekly stand at the local Rogue Valley Farmers Market, advertising USDA approved “fresh free range chicken and pork”and declaring “our meat is good medicine.” In practice, the animals mostly roamed dirt pens and met their death in a mobile slaughter truck (pigs) or slowly bleeding to death in an uninspected concrete block (chickens). An investigator from the national organization Certified Humane declared Uproot Meats “certifiably inhumane.”
If threatening neighbors with rifles, lighting bonfires in fire season, smashing gates on adjacent property and more were punishable offenses, the list of violations would be longer still. Six years earlier, an explosive wildfire had sent flames and smoke down the same slope Uproot Meats occupies and forced neighbors within a two-mile radius to evacuate.
Jekyll and Hyde
From the start, our group worked to draw public attention to the conditions at Uproot Meats, but the small, local newspaper had no appetite for investigative reporting. I lanched a Facebook page to get the word out and an online petition to raise community alarm, gathering 235 signatures in two weeks.
When we learned that the County had issued three new violations against Uproot Meats (bringing the total to 15, with most fines unpaid), we wrote the Jackson County Board of Commissioners, asking for their attention. We noted that Uproot Meats’ story was a Dr. Jekyll and Ms. Hyde affair, presenting a fiction to the public with little basis in fact.
We offered drone footage that suggested Vegter had withdrawn from farming almost entirely and had turned to renting rooms and trailers on her property to those with no other housing options. RV’s and storage containers now stretched across the denuded hillside.
We also presented testimony from renters — few lasted more than six months — decrying the living situation as unsanitary and exploitative.
There was no running water, septic, or power. I paid $100 a month for shower privileges. We had to find our own place to dump blackwater.”
“In exchange for a small reduction in rent, Vegter asked me to clean what remained of the chicken coop. I’m not a poultry expert, but the birds still standing appeared ill. Filth covered their feathers.”
Not willing to testify publicly but eager to share what they knew were a handful of contractors and a part-time “office manager,” alarmed by what they had seen. Indeed they, along with tenants, were the source of much of our information.
We ended our letter to the Commissioners with one question: Who, if not the County, can and should hold Uproot Meats accountable?
No one, it turns out.
An April 2022 hearing resulted in new fines against Uproot Meats, never to be fully collected, and no action.
More discouraged than ever, I abandoned our “Don’t Uproot Ashland” campaign and my epidemiologist-turned-farmer colleague changed tactics and decided to run for Jackson County Commissioner. (A Democrat, she was unable to break the Republican lock on this body.)
In the fall of 2022, we learned, however, that Vegter had filed two new land use applications, on the heels of her April 2022 “pass go card.” Both had the same goal: to legalize the multi-unit rental she had built with a single family house permit the previous year and the unpermitted slaughterhouse she had erected when she first started business — which now housed three tenants on the first floor and Vegter on the second, on land zoned exclusively for agriculture. (I know this is complicated.)
Vegter continued her claim that the rental “housing” was for the half dozen or more farmworkers who tended her nonexistent pigs, chickens, and orchard. The tenants, in fact, were largely service workers down on their luck.
Vegter banked, no doubt, on her ability to keep code enforcement at bay and the County’s dysfunction. The County had a prescribed number of days to render a verdict on her applications, but there was a loophole: if the County didn’t render a timely decision — which it didn’t — she automatically got what she asked for. There’s a legal phrase for it: writ of mandamus
As standing intervenors in Vegtor’s plunder, the Jackson County Planning Department should have informed us of these applications and its failure to respond. It didn’t.
The week before Christmas, our “Don’t Uproot Ashland” group, re-invigorated and thirty strong, stood before a new hearing officer for the County, a hearing we had demanded. Ten of us gave testimony, including neighbors living on properties adjoining Uproot Meats (e.g. a woman who runs a riding program for breast cancer survivors) and former tenants.
A week after Christmas, to our delight, the officer produced a 36-page review that took apart Vegter’s case, piece by piece, recommending that the County rescind the Writ of Mandamus.
Despite the hearing officer’s scathing report, the County said no.
Legal descent
We stepped up our campaign, challenging the writs of mandamus in Circuit Court. Meanwhile, Vegter filed a suit against the County should it reconsider its earlier decisions. Counsel for the County Planning Department joined our offense (defense?) as partners.
The June 2023 Circuit Court hearing got off to an ominous start. It wasn’t clear that the judge was familiar with the case and when he looked at the three lawyers before him — Vegter’s, the County’s, and ours — he asked ours, an older woman whose body trembled, whether she was a “mentally ill person who had slipped into the courtroom.”
Our team took the stand first, with our lawyer asking questions to draw us out. Once again, the testimony from former renters, who decried in detail the living conditions and Vegter’s bullying behavior, stood out. Photos of the more than half dozen recreational vehicles (RV’s) and storage containers stretched across Vegter’s property, taken by a photographer with a telephoto lens from the periphery, provided ample evidence of the extent to which land use at Uproot Meats had turned from agriculture to substandard housing. (When asked about this during her testimony, Vegter said that she restored RV’s and storage units as a hobby.)
At every opportunity, Vegter’s lawyer stood up and asked that a comment or piece of evidence in a testimony be struck from the record. More often than not, the judge acquiesced. We quickly learned what we hadn’t gleaned from Court TV: comments or explanations that went beyond a simple answer to a lawyer’s question could be declared inadmissible. Our lawyer, clearly over her head, remained silent.
For my part, I found myself in trouble twice. My contribution as an appellant was to show the short video I made of clips from the next door neighbor’s surveillance cameras. Over a 24-hour period, it showed a dozen tenants opening and closing the Uproot Meats’ gate, heading out to work or returning — clearly not the farmwokers Vegter claimed she was housing. Vegter’s lawyer demanded that video not be included as evidence because I was not a traffic engineer. In this case, the judge disagreed.
Later, when Vegter took the stand, she focused on me, suggesting I was a pointy-headed, Eastern intellectual determined to bring her down. When she added that I had been stalking her customers (what customers?), I let out a quiet gasp. The judge warned me that if I did that again, he would ask me to leave the courtroom.
After two days of testimony, the lawyers-only deliberations moved to the ante chambers.
Denied, but ….
Almost five months later, it is not clear where the dust has settled.
We were never able to get the County to revisit the pass it gave Vegter’s first application, allowing the permitted single-family residence she’d built to become a multi-unit rental.
With regard to the second application (turning the unpermitted slaughterhouse into multiple residences), we learned at the end of August that the judge had ruled in our favor. Mirabile dictu. He ended his “opinon letter” saying:
“Based upon the testimony at hearing, the exhibits, and the record as a whole, the Court does not believe that Veter would remedy the violations, even if she could. Nothing at the hearing or in the submissions suggests tot he Court that Vegter would suddenly alter her long standing conduct and remedy the code violations.
“The writ of mandamus is denied.”
But if past is prologue, nothing will change at the former “pigs on the hill” except the tenants.
Sorting through the pieces
Recounting this history, there is so much that ignites my mind and heart. The betrayals emanating from Uproot Meats are minute compared to those that unfold daily on the national or global stage, but in this case they are up close and personal. For the “next door” neighbor and farmer who must put up with Vegter’s profound incivility, they have been devastating.
I am still sorting through the pieces.
To be sure, there’s nothing really new in this saga. Serial violators playing “catch me if you can” have been around since time immemorial, though perhaps none have displayed Trump’s extraordinary talent (or House member George Santos’ lack thereof). Krista Vegter was my first run-up with a serious local imposter, holed up in view two miles from my house.
Lying and concealing are integral to the deception. “People only know what you tell them,” Frank Abagnale Jr. says in the film Catch Me If You Can. Vegter, through her stylish website with staged photos, Google images, and fabricated reviews, knows this well. Online and in print she presents a fairy tale, with animals “free ranging” on nonexistent grass and love in the air. Her customers never saw the “real deal” — she delivered orders personally insuring that consumers never set foot on the property.
The vagaries of enforcement abet the deceit. In the case of Uproot Meats, it took our cajoling to prompt County code enforcers to seek entrance to the property. They wrote up what they saw — an ongoing stream of unpermitted activity — as if it were a minor traffic violation. They never followed up on multiple stop work orders.
(I am reminded of a wrinkle in the the tragic story about the mass shooting in Lewiston, Maine. Reportedly several weeks prior to the massacre, the shooter’s Army unit, along with his family, warned the local Sheriff’s office about Robert Card’s mental condition and fears about his and others’ safety. A sergeant visited his home twice but left when Card did not answer the doorbell and dropped the pursuit.)
Then there is the scourge of bureaucratic dysfunction. Postponed hearings and communication failures litter our citizen group’s press to get the County to do its job. Its failure to block Vegter’s two hugely code-breaking applications in a timely matter — whether an oversight or willful — is inexcusable.
Finally, there’s the matter of consequences. It’s simple: if there are no consequences to getting caught, why stop? In Vegter’s case, a stack of fifteen small fines, with payment stretched over multiple years, amounted to a slap, at a best. The County, in theory, could put a lien on Vegter’s property. Indeed, it could bulldoze the unpermitted slaughterhouse turned residence. But this could ignite its own sort of firestorm. The mix of Wild West and libertarian culture here in Southern Oregon renders landowners off limits, even more so when the land is zoned for agricultural use. One can imagine rifle-carrying sympathizers guarding the gates to Uproot Meats.
When Tony and I hike in the forest behind us, our destination is most often a bench in a clearing that looks out on Vegter’s domain, a mile away as the crow flies. The surrounding view is gracious, but the sight of Vegter’s denuded hillside with its illegal RVs, repurposed slaughterhouse, empty greenhouse, and dead orchard still makes my heart sink.
So much for the public trust.
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