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North Carolina’s Factory Farms Produce 15,000 Olympic Pools Worth of Waste Each Year [1]
['Christina Cooke', 'Lisa Held', 'Daniel Walton', 'Jason Mark', 'David Bacon', 'The Civil Eats Editors', 'Ben Seal', 'Kirsten Lie-Nielsen', '.Wp-Block-Co-Authors-Plus-Coauthors.Is-Layout-Flow', 'Class']
Date: 2016-06-28
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Herring lives in Duplin County, North Carolina, on a plot of land her family has owned for more than a century. Located in the eastern part of the state, Duplin contains more than 18.5 million confined animals, including 2.3 million hogs. In Herring’s part of the state, pigs outnumber people almost 40 to one.
“You can smell the odor inside,” 67-year-old Herring says. “The feces, the ammonia—all that stuff—we have to breathe it in, because we have to breathe.” On top of physical symptoms like headaches, stomachaches, excessive coughing, watery eyes, and the urge to vomit, area residents often experience anxiety and depression from the sense of helplessness they feel and the lack of relief from the stench, Herring says.
Last week, environmental groups including the Waterkeeper Alliance, Environmental Working Group, and North Carolina Riverkeeper organizations addressed what they see as “yawning gaps in the North Carolina state agricultural regulatory system” by releasing a collection of maps and data on the 6,500 concentrated animal feeding operations (CAFOs)—and their accompanying waste lagoons—in the Tarheel State.
Searchable by county (click below), zip code, census block, and watershed, the maps give detailed information about each operation, listing its estimated animal count and waste output. And they don’t just provide new analysis of pig farms; they also reveal locations of the more than 3,900 industrial poultry operations in the state that have never before been made public. In the coming months, the groups plan to add processing plants and feed mills to the maps and to produce similar tools for other states.
The research, which draws on sources like U.S. Census data and North Carolina Department of Environmental Quality (NCDEQ) records, has produced a few alarming findings. The maps show that hog and poultry operations frequently exist in close proximity to one another, a condition that heightens their harmful effect on waterways, and that they disproportionately affect poor and minority communities.
Christian Breen, the North Carolina CAFO coordinator for the Waterkeeper Alliance, sees the maps and accompanying data as providing the industry with much-needed transparency. While the state‘s DEQ requires swine operations to obtain permits and submit reports, the fact that poultry waste is dry means it is regulated by the state’s Department of Agriculture, which considers farm records confidential.
“The first step in understanding the impact of the industry in North Carolina is knowing the locations of the facilities,” Breen said during a press call last week. “As the state of North Carolina has failed us in providing this information and protecting the people of this state,” he said, environmental groups are stepping up to produce data sources themselves.
The Growing Cost of CAFOs, Especially on Vulnerable Communities
The meat industry has exploded in North Carolina over the last few decades. Between 1992 and 2012, the number of hogs in the state nearly doubled to 9.5 million, placing North Carolina second only to Iowa for its hog farming industry. The state ranks similarly high—third in the country—for its production of broiler chickens, which increased by 60 million to 148 million over the same two-decade period.
Although hogs earn North Carolina almost $3 billion per year, that economic benefit comes at a cost, environmentalists say. And it’s a cost largely tied to excrement. Each year, North Carolina’s swine produce almost 10 billion gallons of feces and urine—enough to fill 15,000 Olympic-size swimming pools with fecal matter—according to a map-enabled analysis. Meanwhile, North Carolina chickens and turkeys produce 2 million tons of dry waste each year.
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[1] Url:
https://civileats.com/2016/06/28/north-carolinas-cafos-produce-15000-olympic-size-pools-worth-of-waste/
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