Reality of living near CAFOs stinks
By KEN MIDKIFF
Published Friday, June 6, 2008
(http://www.columbiatribune.com/2008/Jun/20080606Comm003.asp)

Hog doo-doo stinks.

A few hogs stink a little; thousands of hogs stink a lot. If some way could be found to make hog manure not smell bad, chances are that much of the opposition to the factory-like concentrated animal feeding operations - CAFOs - would go away.

There would, to be sure, still remain a lot of problems. But those problems don’t manifest themselves immediately. It takes awhile for streams to become polluted by spreading the waste products from CAFOs onto adjacent fields year after year; at some point, the fields will become saturated and runoff from manure and urine will foul local streams. But that takes several years. Likewise, it takes awhile for the rural economy to become distressed, for local banks and savings and loan agencies, grocery and hardware stores and farm implement dealerships to go belly up.

Farmers who once depended on the sale of hogs to pay the mortgage will eventually need to find some other source of funds. For those misguided individuals who say we need CAFOs to "feed this country and the world," they conveniently ignore the fact that, in this state, we reached peak production of about 5 million in 1975 by more than 50,000 family farmers and now produce half as many hogs and those by only about six agribusiness corporations.

Among the immediate effects is that folks with upper respiratory illnesses will suffer, but those folks are not numerous in rural communities. However, what is most immediately felt by all rural residents is stink. People who on warm summer nights raised their windows to catch a cooling breeze won’t open those windows - instead they’ll buy air conditioners. The smell of fresh country air is, said rural residents who have the unfortunate experience of living near a hog CAFO, nausea-inducing.

At times, the smell of hog manure is simply unbearable, and families who have long lived in their country houses place them up for sale. But the price of real estate near a CAFO has plummeted. While it is possible to sell a house next to an airport - there are always times when planes don’t fly - it might be impossible to sell a house with the persistent and consistent smell of hog manure.

To this point, regardless of much time, effort and money by agribusiness and land-grant university researchers, there has been no resolution of the stink problem. While some small businesses claim to have a "magic pill" to reduce, not eliminate, odor, even those for-profit entities don’t claim to solve much. At most, they state, their "solution" will reduce odor by 25 percent. Twenty-five hundred hogs will smell like 1,875 hogs. That’s not much of a solution. When it is considered that some hog CAFOs contain more 80,000 animals, the odor becomes horrendous - and overwhelming.

Even if it were someday possible to reduce stink by 50 percent, those 80,000 hogs would smell like 40,000 hogs. Big deal.

Yet there are those who claim that hog manure doesn’t stink, and they keep repeating this untruth as if repetition of a lie will somehow make it true.
To Cargill, Smithfield, Premium Standard Farms and their supporters - the Farm Bureau and a few politicians in the thrall (or pay) of agribusiness corporations, a bit of advice: When you claim that hogs don’t stink, you are only lowering your already low credibility.
Facts are facts. Hog manure smells. The more hogs there are, the worse the stink. To claim otherwise flies in the face of all logic and reason.