U.S. Water News Online
RALEIGH, N.C. -- It's been a decade since North Carolina banned pork farmers from building new hog waste lagoons.
In that time, environmentalists have tallied the ponds' damage to both rivers and land, and neighbors have complained about their overpowering stench. Scientists have proposed new ways to deal with the sewage, but swine producers have swooned at the cost and complexity.
With the September expiration of the lagoon moratorium on the horizon, there are several proposals at the statehouse on what to do next. While one would simply extend the moratorium for another few years, two others are aimed at resolving the debate once and for all.
"People are interested in helping us find solutions now," said Lamont Futrell of Wilson, who leads a grass roots group of small swine farmers. "We're seeing the most interest ever in helping us solve this problem, and even helping turn it into something profitable."
North Carolina is second only to Iowa in hog farming, with $6.7 billion in annual sales, 46,000 jobs, and 10 million animals that produce 13 million pounds of manure and urine each day.
The waste is typically flushed from barns into open-air lagoons, and later sprayed on fields as fertilizer. It's an easy, relatively inexpensive way to deal with the material, but the sewage has polluted waterways during floods. Neighbors are both angered by the smell and worried about potential health hazards.
The state began adopting stricter lagoon regulations in the early '90s. But a chain of spills -- starting in 1995, when 25 million gallons of sewage leaked into the New River near Richlands -- led lawmakers to ban construction of new lagoons in 1997, a "temporary" solution has already been extended four times. The moratorium also has some loopholes, enough for the state's hog industry to expand by 500,000 swine in the past 10 years.
In 2000, pork butchers Smithfield Foods Inc. and Premium Standard Farms Inc. agreed to pay $17.3 million for research on new ways to handle the waste. Last year, researchers at N.C. State University offered five alternatives that -- while reducing ammonia and pathogen emissions -- are up to five times more expensive as a lagoon system.
"Some people felt that we might hit on a silver bullet," Futrell said. "We didn't find one."
But that research also provided a starting point for compromise.
Rep. Carolyn Justice, R-Pender, plans to introduce legislation soon that would effectively block most new lagoons, but also help swine farmers willing to experiment with other ways to treat hog waste pay for the new technology. Her bill would include $10 million in grants for between 50 to 100 farmers.
"Hopefully, other farmers would then join voluntarily, or perhaps the Legislature would consider mandating participation in the future," said Dan Whittle, a senior attorney in the Raleigh office of Environmental Defense. The volunteer farmers will force down startup costs by demonstrating the technologies are workable, he said, and by identifying buyers for electricity, "super soil" and other potential byproducts.
Under Justice's proposal, existing lagoons could remain in place, but waste systems on new or expanding farms would have to meet performance standards call for major reductions in odor, water and air pollution, and pathogens.
Justice said she deliberately avoided an outright ban, recognizing that lagoons are used in some of the new technologies -- most notably, a proposal backed by the North Carolina Pork Council and Progress Energy to capture methane gas for electricity generation.
"My belief is that one day the waste will be as valuable as the hogs, because they will find -- either by burning it, by using it as energy, by converting it to soil supplement -- that the waste we've all hated so much becomes something of value," she said.
Two other proposals are already before lawmakers. One, filed by Sen. Charlie Albertson, D-Duplin, would bar new lagoons and sprayfields that fail to meet environmental performance standards. The second, sponsored by Rep. Dewey Hill, D-Brunswick, would simply extend the moratorium for another three years.
"That doesn't make one effort whatsoever to solve the problem," Futrell said. "If we extend the moratorium three years or five years, we're going to get five years down the road and be sitting right where we are."
Futrell, whose organization helped Justice and Environmental Defense to write the bill, said farmers are happy to try better ways of doing business -- if the state will help with the bankroll.
"Farmers are innovative people. We can't just go out and buy everything, so we have to make things work for us. With enough people trying something, somebody will eventually come up with a system that's going to work," he said.
"Do we have solution today? No, ma'am. But we would like to find one. And if we sit idly by and do nothing, we're not going to find one."
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