Pig Poop is Causing Water Pollution

I have to admit, I originally only started reading “What to Do About Pig Poop? North Carolina Fights a Rising Tide” because it was on the page of the shrimp article I just posted about (October 31, 2014) and because I’m originally from North Carolina so the heading caught my eye. That, and I love talking about poop. The article turned out to be much more interesting than I thought. Also, turns out North Carolina has a real poop problem. 😉

The article reveals that North Carolina and other pig farm states (Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, and Minnesota) have a real problem with the amount of pig waste that results from these large farms. It not only produces a rather foul smell for the surrounding area, but it’s getting into the local water supply of these states and causing contamination with an excess of nitrogen and phosphorus, which contribute to harmful “algal blooms and fish kills.” In addition to excess nutrients, the liquid fertilizer (this occurs by using pig lagoons where their waste mixes with water becoming a liquid fertilizer) can also contaminate the water with parasites, viruses, hormones, pharmaceuticals, and antibiotic-resistance bacteria.

In the last two years, there have been “waste spills” on hog farms in Georgia, Illinois, Iowa, Missouri and North Carolina. “In October, a hog farm in Callaway County, Missouri, spilled 10,000 gallons (37,854 liters) of waste into a stream. In the same month, a lagoon spilled 100,000 gallons (378,541 liters) at a farm in Greene County, North Carolina.”

Pig farmers in North Carolina, where pig sales reached $2.9 billion in 2012, must follow state law that restricts farmers from spaying liquid fertilizer on fields with standing water, when it’s raining, or on windy days. Even those these restrictions exist, the article reports that they are routinely ignored. Supposedly, this is because oversight is not regularly enforced, so when a task has to go due to too much work, waste management is the first to fall of farmers’ “to do” list. In addition to this lack of oversight, the article states that of the nation’s 20,000 large livestock facilities, only around 40 percent are regulated under the Clean Water Act

While what I just summarized all sounds terrible, at least one farmer in North Carolina has worked to figure out a way to resolve some of the problems mentioned previously. Tom Butler and his farm manager, Dave Hull, have created a system that seems to work for them, though it’s quite expensive (so far $1 million, ¾ of that has been covered by grants) below are some bulleted highlights.

• There are slats on the bottom of the barns where the pig waste falls through.
• It’s collected in a one million gallon “manure digester where bacteria is used to decompose it over 21 days, creating methane gas.
• The gas is cycled to a generator, where it’s used to create electricity that the farm sells to a local coop (enough to power 90 refrigerators).
• The waste that’s not used in this process is sent to “overflow lagoons” that are topped with plastic coverings. The covers trap the smell and prevent the waste from running off into the water supply when it rains.

This digester could certainly offset the water pollution that the waste run-off is causing, but in order to have buy-in from other farms, the price tag is going to have to come down significantly.