Hurricane Matthew brought back some memories from 1999 when flooding from Hurricane Floyd near hog farms led to a widespread environmental and health failure in the state. The question of what to do about industrial quantities of swine poop has gone silent in recent months. But after Matthew and the coincidental release of a new map showing worrisome trends in the distribution and scale of the state’s chicken and hog farms, concerns about hog waste lagoons seem to be back in the political surface.
As with anything political, opposing narratives and the media show inconsistencies between what state regulators announce and what local communities and interest groups report.
In the aftermath of Matthew, the North Carolina Department of Environmental Quality announced that it had not confirmed any reports of breached or overtopped lagoons and state environmental regulators said they are optimistic that hog waste lagoons are intact.
However, local news coverage focused on the struggles experienced by locals in dealing with the lagoon flooding that occurred during Hurricane Matthew. Elsie Herring of Duplin County, the largest hog producing county in the U.S., recently wrote, “One facility sprays hog manure on a field less than a dozen feet from my front door. My family and I can’t dry our clothes on a clothesline anymore, because they would be covered with manure. We can’t garden or hold cookouts with family and friends, because the smell and particles in the air burn our eyes and make us gag. We can’t fish or swim in the rivers and streams near us because they’re polluted with hog manure, and we can’t drink or wash with water from our shallow wells.”
Obviously, “intact” seems to be an overstatement by the DEQ.
In North Carolina, the hog industry has exploded in recent years, surpassing tobacco as the state’s top agricultural money-maker. Hog farming occurs in every state, but it is heavily concentrated in certain regions. According to the most recent Census of Agriculture, North Carolina ranks as the second largest hog farming state, home to more than 2,100 permitted industrial swine operations and nearly 9 million animals.The waste generated by these farms is stored in more than 4,100 lagoons which are heavily concentrated in the east of the state. According to the president of Waterkeeper Alliance, together, these lagoons are the equivalent of 15,000 Olympic-sized swimming pools.
Environmentalists and social advocacy groups say that large-scale animal farms pose a threat to streams and air. They argue that state regulators issued too many permits in the 1990s and have not been aggressive enough in finding violators. The DEQ denies such allegations.
From an outsider’s point of view, environmental regulators seem to be far from negligent. On the contrary, they seem to be leading the way in the search for environmentally friendly ways of managing waste from industrial agriculture.
Originally, waste from hog farming could be stored in lagoons and then sprayed onto crop fields. But in 2007, North Carolina put a moratorium on the construction of new hog farms, and since 2012, North Carolina is the only state mandating utility companies to source a portion of their power generation from swine waste and poultry droppings through a process called anaerobic digestion. This progressive and socially beneficial initiative looks great on paper. However, in practice it has been a great disappointment.
Generating electricity out of manure residues from livestock via AD is not exactly a feasible option. In fact, since the establishment of the mandate, North Carolina has never met its goal for converting hog waste into an energy fuel. A recent analysis by the Agricultural Economic Research Institute concluded that adopting and implementing AD is a prohibitively costly investment in the absence of stable subsidy programs.
The broad dilemma of managing industrial and toxic waste is not new to North Carolinians. Remember coal ash? What are less known to local folk are the particular circumstances of time and place that dictate how hog waste should be disposed and managed.
What to do about the hog waste lagoons? The state already has a moratorium on opening new facilities, but closing down existing lagoons or subsidizing AD adopters are other routes for intervention.
It’s socially beneficial to establish subsidies for environmentally friendly technologies that transform hog poop into commercial products like energy, fertilizer or even adhesive. But is it politically palatable?
About 80 percent of North Carolina’s hog operations are owned by a single multi-national corporation, Smithfield Foods, of which the Chinese meat processing company, Shuanghui Group, owns an important share. I doubt North Carolinians will feel comfortable transferring their tax dollars to a powerful company whose identity hardly reflects or represents interests and views of local folk. However, I think they would be in favor of promoting the adoption of renewable energy technologies and of protecting local communities from potential threats to their environment and their health.
The answer is certainly not simple or obvious. As with the coal ash debate, the key questions remain to what extent and through which mechanism the government should intervene. Feasibility is a key concept that can be answered with insights from engineering, economics and science. But there is another important aspect to this dilemma, the subjective idea of fairness, which must therefore be addressed with more than facts.
