October 17, 1999

Hurricane Reveals Flaws in Farm Law

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Storm Heads for Carolinas After Soaking Florida

Lingering Hazards Cover Carolina's Sea of Trouble (Sept. 22, 1999)

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By PETER T. KILBORN

ENANSVILLE, N.C. -- In the aftermath of Hurricane Floyd, loose regulations that helped eastern North Carolina become the nation's biggest producer of turkeys and the second biggest of hogs have come back to haunt the state's public health and its environment.

Officials say that the September storm that hit the region harder than anywhere else, killing 48 people and leaving behind more than $1 billion in largely inescapable damage, also left a vast amount of damage that might have been averted: incalculable and continuing hazards in ground water, wells and rivers from animal waste, mostly from giant hog farms.

For years, farmers had been free to build hog and poultry operations as big as they wanted and wherever they liked. They were allowed to dig huge pits for animal waste, without regard to the water table or the health and sensibilities of neighbors.

In the hurricane, feces and urine soaked the terrain and flowed into rivers from the overburdened waste pits the industry calls lagoons. The storm killed more than two million turkeys, chickens and livestock in the region, and waste from the farms is expected to keep leaching into the water supply until next spring.

"We do have a practical problem here," Gov. James B. Hunt Jr. said. Normally by mid-October, Hunt said, farmers would have reduced the levels of waste in the lagoons, where it evolves naturally into nutrients that are sprayed on crops.

But the lagoons are brimming with flood-bloated waste, and there is less use for it now. The growth of crops slows in the fall, and many fields have been saturated or rendered fallow by the storm.

[On Thursday the State Department of Environment and Natural Resources announced an "emergency waste management strategy" for hog and poultry farms in an effort to keep waste out of the water supply. The agency is allowing farmers to spread waste to more fields, but it prohibited reconstruction of severely hurricane-damaged waste lagoons in the flood plain.

In the current soaked condition of the land, some waste sprayed on the fields will spread. "We recognize this policy could contribute to water quality problems through the winter," said Bill Holman, the state's assistant secretary for environmental protection. "There are so many swine operations we have a long way to go."]

In Duplin County, of which Kenansville is the seat, and across the rest of North Carolina east of Interstate 95, Hurricane Floyd has exposed the hazards of one of farming's great innovations of the 1980's and 1990's and the political liaisons that helped it develop. That is the practice of industrial farming, or raising livestock and poultry in close and confined quarters.

It allows farmers to raise thousands of hogs on land where they could once raise only scores and gives them tight and automated control over their livestocks' diets, health and growth. The farmers raise pigs under contract to major hog processors, known in the business as "integrators," like Murphy Family Farms of Duplin County. The processor supervises the construction of barns, supplies the pigs and their feed and medicine and hauls them off to slaughter after the four or five months it takes for them to grow to 250 pounds.

In eastern North Carolina, this assembly-line production of hogs and turkeys has come as a savior for tobacco farmers whose incomes plunged with the decline in smoking. But Hurricane Floyd has stirred controversy over a means of capturing the wastes of a hog, which produces four times that of a human.

Human waste in North Carolina and most of the nation must be captured in public sewers and private septic systems to prevent the spread of disease. But the state lets the waste of hogs, which carry many human diseases, be captured by nothing more than a cesspool. The poultry waste is far less a problem.

The state had few rules for industrial farming until 1993, when it enacted a law to prohibit livestock farms from intentionally contaminating the public water supply. Then, two years ago, it put a moratorium on hog farms.

In Duplin County, 50 miles south of Raleigh and the home to 42,000 people and 2.2 million hogs, Dr. Hervy Kornegay, a family physician and chairman of the County Board of Health, said no disease attributable to the flooding had developed. But as waste seeps into the private wells that half the homes use for drinking water, Dr. Kornegay said, "the greatest potential for harm would be severe gastroenteritis, with diarrhea and vomiting."

And the seepage is under way. Ronnie Kennedy, county director for environmental health, said that of 310 private wells he had tested for contamination since the storm, 9 percent, or three times the average across eastern North Carolina, had fecal coliform bacteria. Normally, tests showing any hint of feces in drinking water, an indication that it can be carrying disease-causing pathogens, are cause for immediate action.

Even before the hurricane there had been flooding and ruptures of the waste pits that contaminated rivers and killed millions of fish. And with public fury rising over the acrid, ammonia-laden odors from the waste lagoons, which carry for more than a mile, Governor Hunt had begun to call for restraints on an industry he had long allowed free rein.

Hunt, a Democrat, backs the Legislature's 1997 moratorium on construction of new and expanded lagoons, which remains in effect until July 2001. In April, the Governor proposed a plan to phase out the lagoon system over 10 years while engineers devise safer methods for disposing of the hog waste. He also brought a former Sierra Club lobbyist, Holman, the environmental protection official, into his administration.

"My views and most views have evolved to where we have to take stronger action to clear up our water and rivers," Governor Hunt said. "We need a strong economy for our people, but we cannot sacrifice the environment for jobs."

Molly Diggins, the North Carolina director for the Sierra Club, said that the state had recently made progress in passing environmental laws that would not have passed earlier, adding, "But Floyd has set everyone back on their heels about how much more has to be done."

Any legislation to tighten regulations on hog farms meets the stiff resistance of companies like Murphy Family Farms, the nation's biggest hog producer.

"Whatever you do here," said Dennis McBride, the State Secretary for Health and Human Services, "you're going to end up in court. There's no question in my mind about that whatsoever. We're not dealing with a group that's going to go without a fight." The industry, whose North Carolina Pork Council vies with tobacco as the state's mightiest lobby, contends that the lagoon system held up well in the storm, that the bacteria in wells might have come not from hogs but from people, factories, flooded water treatment plants or migrating geese. The council said that only 3 of some 4,000 waste lagoons ruptured.

To protect the system, the council sent the state's Congressional delegation in Washington a document, dated Sept. 29 and entitled, "Draft Legislation for Flood Relief for Farmers in Eastern North Carolina." It seeks $1 billion in grants for farmers in 41 counties to repair or replace storm-damaged facilities, including waste lagoons, as they were originally built.

Governor Hunt said of the document, "It's 'stunning and it's wrong."

Beth Anne Mumford, the council's spokeswoman, said the document, disclosed on Oct. 8 by The News and Observer of Raleigh, had been misunderstood. "Its intent was to be sure assistance wasn't prohibited," Ms. Mumford said. "We're not illegal operations, so we shouldn't be punished."

Nowhere is the industry more entrenched, or its political power stronger, or the hurricane's farm damage greater, than in Duplin County. With 48 hogs for every one resident, the county has the densest concentration of hogs in the country.

The rectangular lagoons of reddish-brown waste, many of them covering more than an acre, dot the flat countryside. Enclosed within dikes, the lagoons sit behind rows of single-story, gray-metal structures as large as football fields that house the hogs. The hog waste flows through slotted boards in the barns to a cellar, and then is carried by plastic pipes to a waste lagoon. The lagoons now and then burp with the bubbles that mark the natural transformation of feces and urine to the nutrients that farmers spray over pastures and fields of corn, tobacco, soybeans and rye.

In the hurricane, said Rick Shiver, regional supervisor for the State Division of Water Quality, many of the lagoons flooded and the three that ruptured were in Duplin County.

Two of the ruptured lagoons were on farms under contract to Murphy Family Farms of Rose Hill, on the southern edge of the county. Wendell Murphy, the company's founder and chief executive and a major contributor to Governor Hunt's campaigns, perfected the current system of raising hogs for producers. It is the major reason the state's hog population has grown to more than nine million from less than three million a decade ago.

Murphy was a State Senator for 10 years, until 1992, and as a legislator supported measures curbing counties' power to zone out hog farms. Murphy would not comment for this article, said his spokeswoman, Lois Britt.

Ms. Britt said the company thought that counties should look within for solutions to the environmental issues. "It's easy to look from outside and say what's wrong," she said. She said hog farming provided jobs and tax revenue.

"The hog lagoons," she added, "held up fine."

Clearly, many farmers have mastered the intricate balance of waste production, lagoon levels and spraying. The Division of Water Quality said that it had never recorded a complaint against the hog farm of Tony Jones, 30, of Mount Olive.

Like nearly all hog farmers, Jones works under contract to a producer. He raises 4,100 pigs in six barns and has two waste lagoons.

He said he constantly tested the lagoon waste. "If it needs lime to keep the odor down," he said, "I add lime. If it needs pumping, I pump on days that are optimum for pumping."

But other farms stir frequent complaints. Becky and Danny Lancaster, who operate a rural welding supply business, live within a mile of three farms they call offensive. Mrs. Lancaster, the mother of two teen-agers, said: "You don't plan birthday parties outside. You no longer plan things. You plan around the odors and flies."

She keeps a log of odors that waft her way. In September, she made entries on six days. "Nasty, musty, stifling odor in the air," she wrote on Sept. 9, a humid and rainy day. "Difficult to breathe. Feel like suffocating. Like an old outhouse." On Sept. 23, she wrote, "Smell of urine strong in air."

She produced another log she used to keep of the flies she swatted in the office. On May 22, 1996, she said, "I killed 1,192. The next day I killed 1,100. The next day it was 1,140." Flies appear in January, too.

For years, said H. C. Powers, a 77-year-old retired school principal and current chairman of the six-member Duplin County Board of Commissioners, residents have been complaining of odors and flies. But three board members always support the industry, so efforts by Powers and two others to regulate the farms die in 3-to-3 votes.

Still, many people here say more pollution control would only imperil more farmers, who are already struggling. Pork prices have been plunging for more than a year, so much so that Murphy has agreed to sell out, for $450 million, to Smithfield Farms Inc. of Virginia, the nation's leading slaughterhouse.

The County Manager, James W. Barnhardt Jr., said farms in the county that had $620 million in revenue two years ago were expected to receive $170 million less this year. "We are trying to diversify," Barnhardt said. "On the other hand, Duplin County is a rural agricultural county. That's what we do."