“The way we eat doesn’t just affect our health, it affects the health of other people too”

“Many of us know more about the inhumane treatment of livestock than about inhumane treatment of people nearby”

Steve Wing

In the 1970’s, hog farming in North Carolina began to go in the wrong direction.  The CAFO (Confined Animal Feeding Operation) model became more standard and CAFOs began to grow dramatically in North Carolina taking it from 15th to 2nd top state to produce pork in the US.  This model not only affects the hogs that have been the more obvious victims of an inhumane system, but has greatly affected the health, well-being, and freedoms of the rural neighbors nearby. As stated in Tedx talk with Steve Wing, “Many of us know more about the inhumane treatment of livestock than about inhumane treatment of people nearby”. 

A lot of these CAFOs are clustered in low-income, historically marginalized communities of eastern North Carolina that are under represented politically. Concerns of environmental racism and environmental injustices have been expressed due to the health impacts these communities have endured from the surrounding CAFOs. Referenced from an article written by Wendee Nicole, a North Carolina study reported “nine times more hog CAFOs in areas where there was more poverty and higher percentages of nonwhite people even after adjusting for population density as a measure of rural location and cheaper land” (1). There is a huge correlation of hazardous hog CAFOs being closer to communities with high rates of poverty, substandard housing, poor health care, and more. These CAFOs create unhealthy and inhabitable conditions for surrounding communities.

CAFO’s have three main parts to the system: confinement, lagoons, and spray fields. Each of these parts contribute to the negative affects it has on air, water, and soil.

A normal part of being a creature is creating feces, but what is not normal? Living your whole life in your own feces. Most pigs that are raised in CAFOs are inside a cement floor building in extremely close conditions eating, drinking, and sleeping in there own and others feces. Not only is completely inhumane, but it also creates a host of problems including pathogens, toxic gases, and more. In an article written by Wendee Nicole, they mention that “7.5 million hogs in five Eastern North Carolina counties produced an estimated 15.5 million tons of waste per year, and that in one year a single 80,000-head facility could create 1.5 times the waste of the city of Philadelphia” (1). But what happens with that waste? The operations channel the waste into untreated lagoons. 

These lagoons hold an extreme amount of liquid waste that is supposed to stay on site, but naturally, with North Carolina being in the pathways of hurricanes and other storms, these lagoons can leach into surrounding areas. These lagoons harbor pathogens, heavy metals, insecticides, pharmaceuticals such as antibiotics, ammonia, and much more. “In 1995 an eight acre lagoon ruptured, spilling 22 million gallons of manure into North Carolinas New River, killing millions of fish and other organism; other spills followed that summer. Even without spills, ammonia and nitrates may seep into groundwater, especially in the coastal plain where the water table is near the surface” (1).

Once the lagoons of waste are treated, the operations spray it on spray fields. This waste travels to surrounding neighbors, creating a toxic environment right in their backyard. People are unable to go outside, hang laundry or do basic things you would expect to be able to do without a fine mist of toxic odorous hydrogen sulfide, ammonia, and pathogens invading their freedoms. There has been a correlation that when surrounding community members are detecting the odor, they begin to feel an array of symptoms such as respiratory difficulties, sore throats, nausea, eye irritation, anxiety, stress and more. “In this primarily African-American population, in a region that is known historically as the Stroke Belt because of very high rates of death from cerebrovascular disease, we don’t need environmental exposures that are leading to additional blood pressure increases” (1).

There was a moratorium that was made “permanent” where no new lagoons could be created and that new CAFOs have to implement “Environmentally Superior Technology” to their waste systems, but in 2011 that mandate was basically reversed. There are new developments in technology that can be implemented to reduce the amount of waste leaching into local watersheds. There is anaerobic digester that captures methane from hog waste and can provide fuel for farms. There are also networks such as North Carolina Environmental Justice Network and Food and Water Watch that have been extremely important in  helping communities that have previously been under represented and help fight the good fight. It is important not only to try to eat local and organic foods, but to support the communities that are directly impacted by the hog industry. 

This post is a work in progress, edits may occur

1. Nicole, Wendee. “CAFOs and Environmental Justice: The Case of North Carolina.” Environmental Health Perspectives, vol. 121, no. 6, 2013, doi:10.1289/ehp.121-a182. 
2. Wing, Steve. “Social Responsibility and Research Ethics in Community-Driven Studies of Industrialized Hog Production.” Environmental Health Perspectives, vol. 110, no. 5, 2002, pp. 437–444. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/3455329. Accessed 23 Oct. 2020.