A five-year study to find more environmentally friendly ways to treat hog waste in the nation's second-largest swine producing state turned up several options, but none that farmers appear ready to pay for.
RALEIGH, N.C. — A five-year study to find more environmentally friendly ways to treat hog waste in the nation's second-largest swine producing state turned up several options, but none that farmers appear ready to pay for.
"The jury's still out on how much these technologies will actually cost once they are on the farms," said Dan Whittle, a senior attorney for the nonprofit Environmental Defense. "We know the alternatives are out there, but the costs appear out of reach."
The nearly 10 million swine on North Carolina hog farms have created an environmental hazard, producing enormous amounts of manure and urine that are flushed from barns into open-air waste ponds and later sprayed on fields as fertilizer.
The lagoons have polluted waterways when they flooded and angered neighbors concerned about their health, but they are an easy, relatively inexpensive way to deal with the animals' waste.
The report recommends five alternatives that would reduce ammonia and pathogen emissions, but they could cost up to five times as much as the lagoon and spray-field method.
Pork producers Smithfield Foods Inc. and Kansas City, Mo.-based Premium Standard Farms Inc. paid $17.3 million for the research under a 2000 deal with the state Attorney General's Office.
The agreement came after several large hog-waste lagoons overflowed into rivers in the 1990s. State officials also placed a ban on any new hog farms through 2007 and continue to examine alternative forms of waste disposal.
The companies, which own or have ties to many of the state's hog farms, agreed to phase out their open-air waste pits and adopt environmentally superior technologies at new and expanding farms.
The report listed five alternatives as economically feasible even if they caused up to a 12 percent decline in North Carolina's $2 billion a year hog industry. Some members of the panel wanted no economic impact.
"I am not willing for the uncertainty to push it beyond that," Mike Williams, who led the research and is director of the Animal and Poultry Waste Management Center at North Carolina State University, told the state's Environmental Review Commission.
Finding alternatives has united hog farmers and environmentalists, who joined economic experts, scientific researchers and others on the panel.
Hog farmer Chuck Stokes said he believes the alternatives -- with some financial assistance possibly from the government or money from the state's settlement with cigarette companies -- can be successful if they're used as part of a volunteer program.
"We as hog farmers are not anxious to become mandated into another system," he said. "We hope that the mandate will never be necessary."
Source: Associated Press
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