Modern Monkey Farming

The breeders are proud. The activists are mad. The neighbors are confused. And the monkeys still have good aim.

- Felix Gillette

Susan Campbell first heard about the monkey farm from her neighbor William Stephens. It was the summer of 2013, and Stephens explained to her the troubling news. Someone had purchased a plot of land in their rural neighborhood in south-central Florida and was about to begin construction on a farm to breed, of all things, monkeys.

The details were hazy. But as her neighbor rattled off what he knew—the county had already approved a plan to have up to 3,000 or so monkeys live on the premises—Campbell listened anxiously. She recognized the site he was describing, a patch of land by Bedman Creek, where the main road hits a dead end, roughly a mile from her home. How much noise could 3,000 monkeys make, she wondered. Her two wolfdogs, Diablo and Apache, were going to “flip out,” she later recalled thinking.

Campbell, 62, and her husband live on the outskirts of LaBelle, a small town on the banks of the Caloosahatchee River. It’s the seat of Hendry County, a muggy, agricultural region just north of the Everglades, about an hour’s drive inland from Fort Myers. The area’s low-lying fields are crisscrossed by drainage canals and studded with citrus groves, hog farms, pepper plantings, llama ranches, watermelon patches, cattle pastures—and in recent years, as Campbell learned, monkey farms. There were already two such businesses operating in the county, importing and breeding monkeys for sale to biomedical research institutions. A third breeder would soon open outside the town of Immokalee. The proposed farm near her home would make four. That July, Campbell, who’s in the technical support team for the South Florida Water Management District, e-mailed the county’s commissioners, demanding more information. “Seems like a pretty well-kept secret,” she wrote. Nobody responded.