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HOG MANURE AND ITS DISCONTENTS

by Marty Strange

Agriculture, that mysterious, crucial thing that goes on where nothing else seems to go on, is a disturbance in the balance of nature. The more we understand it the more anxious we become.

Half the clean water violations in this country come from farmland pollutants. Farming affects the atmosphere more than any American activity other than driving an automobile. Many producers lose two bushels of soil to erosion for every one bushel of harvested corn. These facts are pretty remote to most of us. Once in a while an eco-story from agriculture -- pesticide problems, say, or mad cow disease -- makes it to the national media. The most recent example, used by TV networks as a kind of semi-humorous human-interest story played near the end of the nightly news, was the rupture of huge lagoons built to store hog manure. Obnoxious lakes flooded the countryside. Millions of gallons of foulness spilled into nearby streams. Great visuals.

So let us consider hog manure. And how reducing one environmental problem often leads to another.

Those ruptured lagoons are part of a dramatic shift in hog production. The trend is away from work-a-day family farms, tending a few hundred animals at a time, to corporate operations that manage hundreds of thousands of animals crowded into massive compounds. These operations require a complex of interacting technologies designed to produce food on a large scale with a minimum of labor. Concentrating that many animals in one place causes environmental difficulties, as nearly all forms of concentration do. And minimizing human intervention compounds the problem.

To appreciate why, we must remember that nature abhors a pile of poop. Bacteria love to attack the nutrients in feces, digesting away until the pile is speedily reduced. If manure breaks down in a dry field, the bacteria that get the job done are those that function aerobically-that is, in the presence of oxygen. They convert stinking manure into odorless compounds containing carbon, nitrogen, phosphorous, and other elements that build soil fertility. Since family farmers handle hog manure by shoveling it and spreading it on fields, there's not much harm done, environmentally speaking, and quite a bit of good.

Nobody shovels and spreads manure in the corporate facilities. No farmer, no shovel. The vast effusions are flushed. Alas, when manure goes into water, the digestion is handled by anaerobic bacteria-those that operate without oxygen. And they work differently, producing a different mixture of compounds in different proportions. A lot of those compounds are greenhouse gasses, and some of them stink. Sulfur dioxide is an example. It is these stinkers that give hog factories a bad name with the neighbors. But other gasses are less detectable and more serious. Methane is an example. Odorless methane, composed of carbon and hydrogen, is a major source of air pollution and the fastest accumulating greenhouse gas in the atmosphere, growing at a rate of nearly one percent a year. It packs 58 times more global-warming punch than carbon dioxide, and now accounts for about one-fifth of synthetic greenhouse effects. Since there are 60 million hogs in the US, each producing about two-and-a-half times as much waste as the average human, and since half of those hogs now live in close-confinement facilities with flush systems -- well, we have a large problem, and it's growing.

But what bothers people most about this trend to watery hog manure is not global climate change but the quintessentially local contamination threat it poses to nearby streams and reservoirs. Keep the slop out of the creek, for God's sake!

So we do. We pass the Clean Water Act and issue a ton of regulations. We require the construction of elaborate storage systems under or near the hog factories and then the pumping of the manure solution to a lagoon, an above ground cesspool, where it is broken down by those anaerobic bacteria and where it emits all that methane. Every step is engineered to technical specifications and a permit is issued certifying that the manure will stay out of the creek. If the lagoon wall breaks, we tighten the rules or we sue the engineer and the contruction company or we fine the operator. Mistakes make the evening news, but the basic strategy remains. We run a system designed to keep manure out of one kind of water ("our" water) by putting it in another kind of water. But manure in any water is an inherent environmental problem, and it will eventually come home. Addressing the immediate difficulties presented by agricultural production systems almost always simply pushes the problem from one environmental medium to another, or maybe to a further point in time, when it may be too late to deal with it at all.

Sometimes it seems that the high-tech bandaid of the Clean Water Act is about as good as we can do. Last year, North Carolina Senator Launch Faircloth launched a spirited attack on the Clean Water regulations imposed on hog factories. The senator's interest, it was agreed, sprang from the status of North Carolina as the nation's Number One corporate-hog state (three million swine in four coastal counties), as well as from his personal position as a leading investor in one of the largest of the operations. Unfortunately for Senator Faircloth, those images of ruptured manure lagoons that captured all the national TV attention were from North Carolina, and he lost a fair amount of persuasive leverage. The Clean Water regs stood.

Meanwhile, Congress was merging many farm conservation programs into one big Environmental Quality Incentives Program. Hog farmers were eligible to receive grants and loans to defray the costs of meeting environmental standards, but not if they ran a "large confined livestock operation." Our friends in the family-farm movement had fought for the provision. They imagined generous allocations to small farmers to adopt rotational pasture systems, composting, dry bedding, and other soft approaches to aerobic waste management.

But, not naively, Congress didn't bother to define "large," and neither did the Secretary of Agriculture when he issued regulations implementing the giveaway. Instead, he left it to Department of Agriculture officials in each state to decide what's "large" and what's not. The process is still underway, but in North Carolina you can expect that a manure pile won't get large until it towers among the Blue Ridge Mountains.

Marty Strange is the founder and past program director of the Center for Rural Affairs, in Walthill, Nebraska. A native of Dalton, Massachusetts, last year he returned with his family to rural New England to write and make trouble.

 

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