Pork Power

[Guest guest]

Can't they just figure out that if they stop slaughtering animals for

their food, then they won't have any more problems!

Is that so difficult to understand?

f

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Pork Power

June 22, 2003

http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2003/06/19/60minutes/main559478.shtml

 

Tobacco, once the number-one crop in North Carolina, has now been replaced

by something that's causing the state an even bigger headache: hogs. Right

now in North Carolina there are more pigs than people.

 

Correspondent Morley Safer first reported on this story from North

Carolina in 1996. Now, seven years later, nothing seems to have changed.

 

In fact, it appears to be worse, and new studies reported a few weeks ago

by the New York Times indicate that there might be very serious health

problems for people living close to the fumes from hog waste -- a big

problem for a state that right now has more pigs than people.

 

--

 

At any given moment, North Carolina houses 10 million hogs in barns as

large as football fields on huge industrial farms. These are corporate

hogs, bred, born and raised in these indoor pens. Their future: just 165

days before the slaughter.

 

Americans want to think of pigs as cute and cuddly enough to be nominated

for Academy Awards.

 

But real-life “Babes” see no sun in their limited lives, no hay to lie on,

and no mud to roll in and do not talk. The sows live in tiny cages, so

narrow they can't even turn around. They live over metal grates, and their

waste is pushed through slats beneath them and flushed into huge pits.

 

It's the waste that's the problem. Pigs excrete four times as much waste

as humans, and it's turning North Carolina into one vast toilet.

 

“The smell is so offensive that on the first whiff, you get a headache,”

says concerned citizen Gary Grant.

 

“It's primarily ammonia that you notice. The hydrogen sulfide smells more

like rotten eggs,” says Larry Cahoon from the University of North

Carolina.

 

The stench comes from what the industry politely calls “lagoons.” But

retired hog farmer Don Webb calls it something else: “Cesspools, not

lagoons. A lagoon is something a beautiful girl in a South Sea island

swims in. A cesspool is something you put feces and urine in.”

 

Cesspools or lagoons are just holding places for the 9.5 million tons of

hog manure that's produced in North Carolina every year. There's real

potential for damage when the manure is liquefied, and then sprayed as

fertilizer onto the company's fields.

 

“The caveman -- he used to go to the rest room inside the cave in a wooden

bucket he carved,” says Webb.

 

“And when he got through with that bucket, he would go out in front of the

cave if it was real cold and just chuck it and spray it all out, and

that’s the same thing they’re doing now.”

 

There is so much manure that the fields of North Carolina can't absorb it

all -- and it's beginning to poison the groundwater and contaminate

drinking wells.

 

There have been other problems. Lagoons have leaked and overflowed. Lagoon

walls have broken, spilling out millions of gallons of hog manure and

saturating fields even more.

 

And where does all this hog dung end up? In the streams and rivers of

North Carolina, creating a growth in green algae that has closed rivers

for swimming and killed thousands upon thousands of fish.

 

In fact, Webb got so mad when one hog operation threatened to build a

factory near his place that he started his own Watch-Hog group.

 

“We're the cesspool of the United States,” says Webb. “I mean, all you got to

do is see a map somewhere and put a commode on North Carolina, and that's

what you got.”

 

Webb accuses the industry of reckless disregard of the law, of illegal

dumping when it thinks no one is looking. He's always looking and finding

dead animals simply dumped in open pits.

 

What possesses a grown man to go out and slog through that stuff?

 

“This is God's water. This is God's land,” says Webb.

 

And this is going into public waters in North Carolina.

 

“I heard all this stuff about, 'Oh, you'll get used to the odor, we

don't pollute, the cesspools don't leak,'” says Webb. “Well, you know, I

had sense enough to know I didn't need a rocket scientist to tell me that

cesspools would leak. But a good neighbor would never stink up his

neighbors' homes with feces and urine.”

 

--

 

Gary Grant mobilized his neighbors when seven hog farms were proposed for

his community. His community of Tillery in Halifax County is poor, black,

and rural -- a prime target for hog expansion.

 

“And they are saying that there will be 410 new farms built in North

Carolina by the end of 1997,” says Grant, who holds community meetings to

reinforce resistance.

 

“And they can get away with it. Poor people are less prone to participate

in voting. It's the avenue of least resistance.”

 

Five years ago Halifax County got the strictest laws in the state passed

-- tough rules about lagoons and groundwater monitoring systems, laws that

are too tough for many companies.

 

But Grant doesn’t believe this helped provide better jobs for the

community. “They're all dirty boots jobs,” he says. “All of the management

comes from outside leaves -- doesn't have to live in the community.”

 

And the response of the industry to Grant’s plan has been negative.

 

“Well, when we first started there, I would go home evenings and get on my

answering machine, and there would be threats like, 'Nigger, you're going

to get killed,' and all of that,” says Grant.

 

More than $1 billion is at stake here, and North Carolina has gone from

the seventh-largest pork producer in the country to the second, with most

of the hogs belonging to a few large corporations. It's also replaced a

declining, even dying industry -- tobacco. And it's put the small hog

farmer out of business.

 

Now, corporations are using science to produce millions of carbon-copy

pigs: high on pork, low on cost.

 

“How do you call it farming when you have an assembly line producing

animals, which is the same way that we produce automobiles,” asks Grant.

 

“I think this is industrial production. I don't even refer to it as

farming,” says Larry Cahoon, a scientist at the University of North

Carolina at Wilmington. “And I think that from start to finish, we have to

consider this as an industry.”

 

Hazardous industrial waste, Cahoon says. “Germs, bacteria, viruses such as

flu virus, protozoan, various worm-type parasites.”

 

The problem, says Cahoon, is that rural North Carolina depends on well

water. But the state toxicologist says 30 percent of the wells tested near

hog farms are already contaminated.

 

“It's slow-moving and it's not going to make the instant headlines that

Love Canal made when the connection to toxic chemicals was established,

but it's massive,” says Cahoon.

 

It's difficult to get anyone in authority to talk about it. Bob Ivey,

general manager of one of the largest hog farms in the country, is the

only corporate hog farmer who would be interviewed, but only under the

condition that we not mention the names of the companies he works with. He

says the complaints about water pollution against his industry are all

hogwash.

 

“Annually, we have someone from the Department of Water Quality come and

review the operation,” says Ivey.

 

“I'm happy that--and proud to be associated with an industry that is in

the forefront of trying to design systems and have programs that work with

farmers to be good environmental stewards.”

 

But from 1993-1996, 115 farms have been caught illegally dumping hog waste

into waterways, a number of them intentionally. In one farm there was a

massive spill in 1995 when the walls of an eight-acre lagoon collapsed,

spewing out 25 million gallons of liquid manure into rivers, farms and

highways.

 

“I think that--that the industry has operated for many, many years, and to

my knowledge, this was the first spill of that particular kind,” says

Ivey.

 

Neuse River Keeper Rick Dove disagrees. An environmental group hired him

to monitor the waterways, and he's dismayed by the effect of so much

manure being poured into the rivers.

 

“It looks like something -- like a green slime, something you might expect

in a movie like the ‘Creature From the Black Lagoon’ or something. It's

just ugly,” says Dave.

 

“Right now, in this time of year, in this river, I would not swim,” says

Dave, who also claims he wouldn’t eat or touch anything in the river.

 

--

 

Why did it happen? Where was the legislature? Where were the county

commissioners?

 

“The county commissioners, the hog industry, was smart enough to get

to them real quick,” says Webb. “And, also, the legislators here in North

Carolina, most all of them have received money from the pork producers.”

 

In fact, the largest pork producer in the world, Wendell Murphy, was a

North Carolina state senator for 10 years. Some would say he’s also

responsible for creating dozens of laws protecting the pork industry. And

the part owner of this farm is none other than North Carolina's U.S. Sen.

Lauch Faircloth, who chairs a subcommittee on the environment. He also

owns a $ 19 million stake in the hog business.

 

“So that's how well they are protected,” says Grant. “It's like a sacred

cow, it's a sacred hog, is what it is.”

 

“It's big-time money. I mean, it's bigger than I realized,” says Webb.

“You’ve got some of the most powerful companies and corporations in the

world involved in this thing, and it's been a real battle for middle-class

and poor -- grass-roots people to fight these people. But we're not

quitters.”

 

And back in Tillery, the fight could be on again.

 

Gary Grant's strict regulations might not be enough to keep an industry

out that is looking to expand.

 

“Then we'll go back and strengthen the regulations,” says Grant. “We will

not allow you to come in and pollute our community and to kill off our

people and to come in under the disguise of economic development and

bringing destruction to us. We will not allow it.”

 

 

 

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