Young hogs at an industrial animal-feeding operation in North Carolina. As Hurricane Florence approached, many farmers near the facilities were expected to evacuate, leaving the animals behind.
Credit: Gerry Broome / AP
On any given day, there are about six million hogs in North Carolina. The vast majority of them are confined in buildings, in what are known as concentrated animal-feeding operations. According to research conducted by Mark Sobsey, a professor of environmental sciences and engineering at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, farmed hogs, which can weigh in excess of two hundred and fifty pounds, create as much as ten times the fecal waste produced by humans. (The hog industry disputes Sobsey’s conclusion.) Other environmental groups say that hogs only create five times as much shit. Regardless, eastern North Carolina, which is being drenched to unprecedented levels by Hurricane Florence this week, is “literally the cesspool of the United States,” Rick Dove, a senior adviser to the Waterkeeper Alliance, a nonprofit environmental group, told me. “You can’t describe it […]
Obviously written by a city slicker who thinks food comes from the grocery store.
Obviously written by someone who has never been to an industrial sized pig operation. Pig shit sticks and there are ponds filled with it which in past storms have overtopped and washed down to the ocean. Nasty mess that I doubt even you what want to be close to. It is a matter of maximizing profits by failing to use available design and engineering knowledge to safely handle this toxic shit. The NC lege just pasted a law limiting lawsuits against these corporate contractors. Got to protect the “family farms” you know. I grew up on a farm and I know where food comes from do you?
There are actually two methods for composting: the “hot method” and the “cold method”. In the hot method the compost is left outside and turned over repeatedly, and has no covering but is done very quickly. In the cold method, the compost is protected from underneath with a plastic or other impregnable substance and then after mixing with dirt, is covered and sprinkled with compost starter and a little water which make it moist but not wet, then covered with another waterproof covering which will not allow the compost to be exposed to the weather and run off; and this is the method I use, which takes many years but is well worth it.
Yes Rev Dean I too have experience with composting. But these industrial scale hog operations are way beyond composting and require industrial level sewage treatment technologies. Many of the contract farmers are entangled in contracts and debts that keep them tied to Chinese owned Smithfield Farms as well as other large food corporations so there is little room for change or improvement without the corporate masters agreement and financial. Yet the story told is about the small farm families being attacked by greedy lawyers bring class action suits to destroy them.