Floyd wakes states to hazards of hog waste

Robinson Shaw

Environmental News Network (ENN)

9/28/2000

On Sept. 16, 1999, Hurricane Floyd rocked the East Coast, hitting North Carolina especially hard. Fifty-seven lives and thousands of homes were lost.

The disaster also brought to national attention a major environmental threat to waterways and health: high-density farming operations, also known as factory farms.

A year after Floyd, North Carolina is still tallying environmental damages while the state works to minimize risks in the floodplain.

Hurricane Floyd dumped a record amount of rainfall - 15 to 20 inches - and battered the North Carolina coast with storm surges more than 10 feet high.

It also brought the controversy over factory farms literally to the surface through images of dead hogs floating across the landscape in the wake of the hurricane.

"In particular in North Carolina, legislators and the governor made statements that 'We need to do things differently ... this type of damage isn't acceptable,'" said Megan Fowler of the Sierra Club.

High-density hog farming in North Carolina is a big business - and a controversial one. The state is the nation's largest hog producer after Iowa. Some 92 percent of the North Carolina's 10 million hogs are raised on farms containing at least 2,000 hogs.

On these farms, millions of pounds of waste and manure are flushed out of hog houses into open-air lagoons, which produce large volumes of gases such as ammonia and methane. The lagoons can leak into the ground or spill over into waterways, as when Floyd dumped record amounts of rain.

As these lagoons fill, excess liquid is sprayed onto nearby crops and grasses. Spraying spits large amounts of nutrients-turned-pollutants into the air that rain down on land and water. Spraying also intensifies odors from hog waste.

The majority of North Carolina's hog factories are located in the eastern third of the state in ecologically sensitive wetlands and floodplains. For example, the combined hog population of Duplin and Sampson counties numbers more than 4 million.

North Carolina's hogs annually produce 19 million tons of feces and urine, or 50,000 tons a day, which amounts to more waste in one year than the entire human population of Charlotte, North Carolina produces in 58 years, according to the Environmental Defense's Hogwatch campaign. One hog excretes more than 10 pounds of urine and feces per day, or almost 2 tons a year.

Lessons learned

North Carolina has learned some hard lessons from the flooding that accompanied Floyd.

Even before the hurricane hit, the state enacted legislation that prohibits new hog farms to be built in the floodplain. Gov. James Hunt also instituted a moratorium (which expires in September 2001) on new or expanding hog farms unless they employ alternatives to lagoon-sprayfield methods, according to Don Reuter of the state's Department of Environment and Natural Resources.

In the wake of Floyd, the state is spending $5.7 million in grants from the Clean Water Management Trust Fund to purchase 14 hog operations and 32 hog-waste lagoons located in floodplains. The lagoons will be cleaned and the farms converted to grow low-impact crops or cattle, said Reuter.

"There are 200 hog farms still in the floodplain and we're looking for available money to buy them out," said Reuter.

Hunt says the lagoon-sprayfield waste treatment system poses an unacceptable risk during severe hurricanes and storms. To that end, he has initiated a lagoon conversion plan.

"There are five technologies North Carolina State has identified as showing promise," said Reuter. "We need to establish standards of waste treatment levels, and that will drive the technology."

Smithfield Foods, the world's largest hog-processing company, signed an agreement with the state in July to spend $65 million to develop and implement more environmentally-friendly waste treatment technology.

Environmental News Network