From farm to dead zone

       

Before I delve into the subject of this blog, I should tell you that I maintain a vegetarian diet, aside from limited amounts of seafood.   I keep to the diet in part because I’m not confident that hogs, beef cattle, and chicken are raised to be free of additives that might be inimical to my long term health.  In addition, raising sentient creatures for the purpose of killing and eating them makes me uneasy. Thirdly, I believe that the animal food enterprise is bad news for the quality of our environment, a massively greater contributor to global climate change than plant-based food systems. That third point is the thrust of this blog.

My major focus here is on pig farming.  In some sense it’s an easy target; it’s hard to imagine how a system for producing food could be more destructive of the environment and more wasteful of energy than the modern Concentrated Farm Animal Operation (CFAO) involving pork. Let’s start with Smithfield Farms, a company founded in 1936 as Smithfield Packing Company by Joseph Luter and son.  The company had a rather rough first few decades, but they really got going from the 1970s onward.  However, the rapidly expanding company faced a series of lawsuits arising from the adverse environmental effects of intensely concentrating hog farming   For example, in 1985 a Richmond VA federal judge levied more than $2.2 million in fines for pollution of the Pagan River.  In the 1980s Smithfield had begun constructing a large network of its own hog farms. These produced such adverse effects on neighboring environments that many communities in Virginia and North Carolina set restrictions aimed at limiting environmental damage from the farms.

Here’s a bit of background on industrial pig farming: When female pigs reach maturity they are impregnated mostly through artificial insemination. Gestation runs about 115 days.  Weaning of the offspring, usually about 10 piglets, occurs at about three weeks.  The females, now referred to as sows, are bred again shortly after weaning their offspring. A sow is expected to produce approximately two litters per year. Sows are typically kept in the production cycle for 7 to 9 years. Animal rights groups have consistently called out Smithfield Farms for their inhumane treatment of sows.  Gestation pens are typically employed to confine sows for the period of their gestation.  A similarly confining sort of a pen is employed for farrowing of the litter. In either case, the sows can barely move in the small spaces.  Animal rights groups argue that the confinement is cruel, that some pens are so small that the animals cannot even turn around, as seems to be the case from the photo I’ve attached. 

Hog producers argue that confinement is needed to ensure that each pregnant sow gets enough nutrition, and to control the temperature of the environment. 

The industrial scale raising of hogs for food production is not a pretty business, but the environmental effects of hog production go way beyond pretty.  Hog farms create a horrible stench.  Many lawsuits have been brought by people living in proximity to hog farm operations.  The smells are intense and sickening, and there are typically clouds of flies.  People who had established their communities years before an industrial scale hog farm was brought in have seen their property values plummet, water supplies contaminated, onsets of respiratory illnesses such as asthma, and the general quality of their daily life brought low.  

Smithfield Foods, the nation’s largest hog producer, has been sued repeatedly and has, until recently, most generally lost in the courts. But what have plaintiffs gained?  In March, 2019 Smithfield Farms was found guilty of being a major nuisance to the neighbors of its Duplin County North Carolina operation that raises about 5,000 animals.  The settlement was for $420,000.  This was a remarkably low settlement figure. Four previous juries had awarded penalties totaling nearly $550 million against Murphy Brown, a Smithfield subsidiary with an operation of similar size.   Even these larger penalties are not a big deal for giant producers.  North Carolina law limits the size of punitive awards, so large settlements are automatically capped.

Large producers such as Smithfield Foods have contractual relationships with many smaller hog farming operations. so it isn’t just the giant producers who conduct operations on a scale harmful to local communities. Agricultural interests have pushed for stronger “right to farm” laws that protect farmers from being sued by their neighbors for the “routine” smells and noise created by farming operations.  At the urgings of the Big Ag lobby, laws are under consideration or have been passed in several states, including Utah, Nebraska, Oklahoma, West Virginia, and Georgia, to prevent neighbors from suing farmers at all.  Those laws would also protect massive industrial livestock operations.  Many of the bills passed are of the monkey see-monkey do variety, even citing North Carolina provisions as precedent, though they may put their particular stamp on them—for example, in stipulating that the plaintiffs must live within a certain distance.  In Utah and West Virginia, the stipulated distance to have status as a plaintiff is a half-mile.  No one would want to live within a half-mile of an industrial scale hog facility. These laws, passed at the behest of agricultural interests, are effectively depriving affected citizens of any meaningful legal recourse.

Perhaps most importantly, the wastes from hog farm operations are wreaking environmental havoc. Manure isn’t all bad—applied in the right amounts, at the right times, it's a fine fertilizer. Yes, it smells awful, but it’s a useful soil additive, not only in regard to nutrient content, but in adding organic carbon to the soil.  But hog manure can be a health hazard when manure dried out after spreading produces harmful dust.  Another problem is that hogs produce so much shit!  Chris Jones, a Research Engineer and Adjunct Professor at Iowa State University writes on his blog that a feeder pig, one destined for the slaughterhouse, is about the size of a human being, but “it excretes about three times as much nitrogen (N), about five times as much phosphorus(P) and 3.5 times as much solid matter”.  Jones has calculated the amount of fecal waste from hogs on a state-by-state basis. Iowa is at the top of the list, with almost 24 million pigs, more than twice the second-place state, North Carolina, which comes in second with about 9.4 million pigs. 

Suppose we wanted to be as good stewards as possible of pig fecal matter, by putting it into sanitary systems that would digest the raw sewage, just as we do for human municipal sanitation systems.  Jones calculates that the quantity of pig fecal waste in Iowa would be the equivalent of about 84 million people.  He estimates that if we count in also the waste from beef cattle, dairy cattle, laying chickens, and throw in turkeys for good measure, the total fecal waste stream from food animal operations in Iowa would be the equivalent of 168 million humans.  Iowa has a population of 3.2 million humans.  To grasp the magnitude of our problem in disposing of waste from animal food operations, just think about those two numbers.  Granted, Iowa is a special case, but the numbers are big for all the agricultural states, as I’ll show below.   Jones has calculated the human equivalent of the animal wastes in each state on a per square mile basis.  For Iowa, the number is approximately 3000 fecal waste equivalents per person. Here’s a little table that shows the numbers for some other states, rounded off a bit:

                Wisconsin             1550                      North Carolina                   1400

                Minnesota            1050                       Georgia                                900

                Kansas                  1250                       Missouri                              1220

                Illinois                   930                        Iowa                                    3000

               

To be clear: for each state, the number listed is the ratio of the animal fecal waste volume to that of the humans living in that state.  You can see that it’s a lot of animal waste. It has to go somewhere.  Typically, waste from CFAOs goes into settling ponds, where it dries out to a degree. Eventually, some is spread onto agricultural fields as fertilizer, but managing animal wastes is not easy.  Much of it eventually ends up in runoff; into streams, aquifers and so on.  For smaller farm operations the disposal can be rather haphazard.  The wastes, by the way, may also contain the residues of pharmaceuticals--antibiotics, growth hormones, etc, administered to the animals from conception to slaughter.  Much of the waste ends up as runoff into the big rivers, and eventually into the Mississippi River. 

The nutrient-rich waters flow into the Gulf and stimulate the growth of harmful algal blooms. The algae eventually decompose, sink to the bottom and oxidize.  In the process they consume much of the available oxygen in the water, creating a “dead zone,” an area of low oxygen that is unable to support fish and marine life. This year the dead zone in the Gulf is estimated to be 8,776 square miles, an area about the size of New Jersey (see the figure at the top). That dead zone is a disaster for many who've fished in those waters for generations.  It is the largest measured since dead zone mapping began there in 1985.

 Millions of Americans are affected in one way or another by the environmental damage caused by CFAO’s. Why are they permitted to operate all over the country when the pollution problems described above are an inevitable consequence? It comes down to money, of course.  The methods used in CFAO operations are designed to produce the least expensive pork possible. But there's more to this story than just money. I'll dive into those matters in the next blog.  Many of you may be surprised.