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Hog farming has a massive poop problem
Inside North Carolina’s search for solutions for its thousands of pig manure lagoons.
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For this third episode of our video series with Vox’s Future Perfect team, we went to North Carolina, a state that for decades has been a battleground over the public health impact of hog farming.
Watch Episode 1, How 4 companies control the beef industry: https://youtu.be/3_hCLjUrK1E
Watch Episode 2, The chicken industry's worker safety problem: https://youtu.be/Ia3abCiYX3w
Animal Charity Evaluators provided funding without editorial input for the production of this series.
I interviewed two people in North Carolina who do not appear in the video: Sherri White-Williamson, who heads the Environmental Justice Community Action Network, or EJCAN, a nonprofit working toward water testing in the area, particularly of private wells.
https://ejcan.org/
I also interviewed Jeff Currie, a member of the Lumbee tribe in North Carolina, and a Waterkeeper Alliance worker whose job it is to test the Lumber River watershed for contamination. The Lumbee tribe is primarily located in Robeson County, one of the areas with a high concentration of hog farms that we cover in the video.
https://waterkeeper.org/news/who-is-waterkeeper-jefferson-currie-ii-lumber-riverkeeper/
Another feature of North Carolina that makes it more vulnerable to water contamination is its permeable, sandy soil in areas with a high concentration of hog farms. Experts told me this area used to be swampland, and was drained to make way for agriculture. My colleague Liz Scheltens mentions a similar historical context in a video she made about Lake Erie and cow waste pollution:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WwhcrpJTzGQ
The location of hog farms in North Carolina is related to the history of tobacco farming in the state. When the public health effects of smoking became clear, the government stopped supporting it. Many North Carolina farmers started to diversify their practices, including raising hogs. That’s exactly how Tom Butler got into raising pigs — he was once a tobacco farmer:
http://archive.pov.org/brightleaves/historical-background/
Advocates and community members are also deeply concerned about the proliferation of large-scale poultry facilities in North Carolina, which accelerated when the moratorium on new or expanded hog farms was enacted in 1997:
https://www.wunc.org/environment/2020-07-30/explosive-growth-in-nc-poultry-farms-poses-grave-risks-new-report-says
The Align RNG map we show in this video, illustrating where a proposed methane pipeline might go, has been a source of heated debate in North Carolina. The Southern Environmental Law Center and other organizations have asked the state for more transparency about where the farms and the pipeline are located in order to get informed public input on the project. More details on this are in this story:
https://ncpolicywatch.com/2020/11/16/smithfield-dominion-propose-major-swine-gas-project-but-details-are-secret-troubling-residents/
We contacted Align RNG and Smithfield for this story, and they both said they sought public input for the biogas project and touted the project’s potential for cutting greenhouse gas emissions. They also said that the state of North Carolina has “stringent” permit regulations that they adhere to.
Vox’s Future Perfect team covered this issue here:
https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/2020/9/16/21430837/future-perfect-podcast-season-3-north-carolina-cafo-pig-farm
And in a podcast episode, as part of their series on meat:
https://open.spotify.com/episode/6N7jb4NsgUTzRhYOtuYQH0?si=f1ceb3d817854013
A similar debate about the promises of biogas is happening in the dairy industry as well:
https://civileats.com/2020/04/24/are-dairy-digesters-the-renewable-energy-answer-or-a-false-solution-to-climate-change/
ProPublica has a more in-depth investigation into the Smithfield agreement:
https://www.propublica.org/article/a-hog-waste-agreement-lacked-teeth-and-some-north-carolinians-say-left-to-suffer
I learned a lot from Melba Newsome’s writing and reporting on this issue for North Carolina Health News:
https://www.northcarolinahealthnews.org/2021/10/29/legal-battles-over-pollution-from-hog-waste-environmental-racism-havent-changed-much/
Rick Dove of the Waterkeeper Alliance manages a website that tracks this issue:
http://www.riverlaw.us/
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