Getting Tough on Hog Farms

Background

Gone are the days when hogs coming to market were raised by family farmers who kept a few hundred hogs as part of their general farming operations. Today, large corporations operate industrial-size facilities that produce tens of thousands of hogs on a single site, mechanically breeding and feeding the animals in confined metal cages where they spend their entire lives. Under the guise of "farming," the pork industry had until recently avoided environmental controls, skirting the waste management regulations required of virtually all other major industries.

The fact is, these factory farms generate millions of tons of untreated waste every year in the form of hog feces and urine. Most farms pipe the waste from the hog houses into huge open-air pits, or so-called "lagoons,” and then siphon liquid off the top to spray onto nearby fields. This primitive and wholly inadequate method of disposing of hog waste is dangerous to the environment and to public health.

In North Carolina, which has some 11 million hogs, the environmental impact from the waste-pit and sprayfield system has been catastrophic. A series of hurricanes in 1999, followed by torrential rains from Hurricane Floyd, spilled untold volumes of hog waste into the floodwaters, along with waste from sewage plants and other sources of pollution. The result was a brown plume of pollution that extended for miles into the Atlantic Ocean, contaminated drinking water supplies throughout the coastal plain, breached and overflowing hog-waste pits, thousands of drowned pigs, and flooded sprayfields unable to absorb the excess waste and water.

Even under normal conditions, pollutants from hog waste seep from the pits and sprayfields into groundwater that supplies the drinking water of rural residents who rely on wells. The liquid waste also evaporates, sending ammonia-nitrogen into the air that is re-deposited on land and surface waters, exacerbating water quality problems.

There is an overpowering stench from factory farms that can cause severe headaches, nausea, and other ailments, and drives neighbors indoors. It is no surprise that property values of homes next to these mega-farms have plummeted, and some people cannot sell their homes at all.

Industrial hog production is increasingly a national phenomenon. The pork industry is expanding not only in southern states, but also in Oklahoma, Utah, Colorado, Missouri and Illinois. At least 25 states are struggling to address the problems posed by expanding livestock production, and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has declared that animal waste from hogs and other livestock is the number one pollution threat to rivers and streams throughout the nation.

Citizen activists have made tremendous headway on this issue, but much remains to be done. SELC continues to assist a variety of organizations in the South to increase control over large-scale hog farms, and to ensure that the corporations that own the hogs and make most of the profit are held financially responsible for contamination and proper waste-pit closures.

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