by Laura Bult
January 4, 2022
https://www.vox.com/videos/2022/1/4/228 ... ed-farming
Introduction:
(Vox) When large-scale farms confine thousands of animals, it creates a problem that doesn’t exist for farms where animals graze: managing all the animal waste produced in confined spaces. This problem is especially acute for pigs. They produce so much manure that farmers end up using what’s known as a “lagoon and sprayfield system” to manage it.
For this third episode (see below) of our video series with Vox’s Future Perfect team, we went to North Carolina, a state that’s been battling the public health and environmental impact of hog lagoons for decades. The issue is especially grave in this state due to the vulnerable populations who bear the brunt of this pollution, and because hog facilities are so concentrated in such a small area.
Another feature of North Carolina that makes it more vulnerable to water contamination is its permeable, sandy soil in hog farming areas. Experts told me this area used to be swampland and was drained to make way for agriculture. This was a common land management practice in the US and is covered in this Vox video about Lake Erie, produced by my colleague Liz Scheltens.
The location of hog farms in North Carolina is related to the history of tobacco farming in the state. North Carolina is still the biggest tobacco-producing state in the US, but it used to be a much more common cash crop in eastern North Carolina. When the public health effects of smoking became clear and government programs stopped supporting it, many North Carolina farmers started to diversify their practices, including raising hogs. That’s how one of the people we interviewed for this piece, farmer Tom Butler, got into raising pigs — he used to be a tobacco farmer.