It’s not uncommon for influenza viruses to be exchanged between pigs and humans
(Photo by Scott Bauer, courtesy of the USDA)
The current swine flu outbreak was first detected in a region of Mexico with large confined animal feeding operations – factory farms. Many environmentalists wonder if there’s a connection. Lester Graham reports:
Transcript
The current swine flu outbreak was first detected in a region of Mexico with large confined animal feeding operations – factory farms. Many environmentalists wonder if there’s a connection. Lester Graham reports:
A US government brochure indicates it’s not uncommon for influenza viruses to be exchanged between pigs and humans.
Mark Wilson is a professor of epidemeology at the University of Michigan. He says factory farms can make that exchange easier.
“The combination of animals being confined in close quarters as well as the large number of animals is likely to lead to more transmission of infectious agents among them. And as people – workers – are in contact with these animals, the possibility of transmission from those animals to those workers is increased. Absolutely.”
But, Wilson says it’s anyone’s guess whether this strain of swine flu began at a factory farm.
“Completely unknown at this point.”
Health officials from Mexico and the US Centers for Disease Control are investigating the source of the virus.
Researcher Cecil Forsberg created the first Enviropigs in 1999. Their meat may soon be available at American supermarkets.
(Photo by Julie Grant)
An Enviropig at the Arkell pig research station at the University of Guelph, Ontario
(Photo by Julie Grant)
Manure runs off farm fields into waterways (Photo by Murray Borrello)
Pollution from animal farms leads to algae blooms that choke all the oxygen out of waterways (Photo by Murray Borrello)
At factory farms, cows and
pigs produce a lot of manure, and
that sometimes causes a lot of
pollution. Julie Grant reports that
one scientist says he’s got a solution:
genetically modify pigs so they produce
less pollution. But to be successful,
people have to be willing to eat
genetically modified meat:
Transcript
At factory farms, cows and
pigs produce a lot of manure, and
that sometimes causes a lot of
pollution. Julie Grant reports that
one scientist says he’s got a solution:
genetically modify pigs so they produce
less pollution. But to be successful,
people have to be willing to eat
genetically modified meat:
Murray Borrello says pig and cow poop is killing everything
in some of the water he studies. He’s a geologist and has
been researching water pollution with chemists and
biologists at Alma College in Michigan. Borrello says there’s
no fish in parts of the river – because of all the animal feces
running off of nearby farms.
“It’s very obvious. It’s this kind of brown, mucky,
murky looking substance.”
That poop is full of phosphorous, nitrogen, and other things
that cause pollution problems. It creates algae that clogs up
waterways and sucks out all the oxygen.
Borrello says some of the farms house more than
10,000 hogs. Farmers sometimes hold 20 million gallons of
pig manure in lagoons. They liquefy it and spray it on the
fields for fertilizer. But Borrello says it’s too much manure,
so it runs off the land and into the waterways.
In some places, it’s the same water is used for drinking
water. And the same rivers drain into the Great Lakes.
On the northern side of the Lakes, a Canadian scientist says
he’s found a possible solution to this pig pollution problem.
(sound of a pig barn)
It’s called the Enviropig.
Cecil Forsberg has genetically modified pigs so they produce
less pollution in their waste.
I met him at his research barn at the University of Guelph in
Ontario.
There are no windows – just a ventilation system. And,
wow, it’s hard to concentrate – the smell of pig waste is so
strong.
He introduces me to a group of Enviropigs, they’re about a year and
a half old. He says they have no detectable difference from
regular pigs.
“They have four legs, two ears, a snout, and they like to dig
in the shavings.”
But while most pigs poop out a lot of polluting phosphorous,
Forsberg has made the Enviropig into a much better
machine for digesting phosphorous.
He’s no Dr. Frankenstein. But to do it, he did use DNA from
a mouse. He says it’s considered a safe technique, but he
knows it makes people cringe.
“There’s no mouse in these pigs, except for a little fragment
of DNA.”
The mouse DNA allowed Forsberg to add a bacterial gene to
the pigs. It’s that bacteria that triggers the pig’s salivary
glands to start the digestion of phosphorous.
Forsberg says the waste from these pigs does a lot less
damage to the environment than most pigs.
“There’s a reduction in the phosphorous in the manure by up
to 60%. And that’s important because phosphorous is the
component in manure that is the first one that’s problematic.”
And it’s part of what chokes the oxygen out of the waterways –
killing fish and other aquatic species. Forsberg wants to see
Enviropigs bred on the global scale to reduce pollution from
the growing number of large scale hog farms.
Back in Michigan, water specialist Murray Borrello
says reducing phosphorous pollution from giant hog farms
will benefit water quality, but he does not think a genetically
modified pig is the answer.
“The problem is that does not address the issue of all the
other stuff that is very concentrated going into surface water
and ground water.”
Stuff, such as nitrogen and ammonia.
Borrello says a better solution is to reduce the size of hog
farms, so there aren’t so many pigs concentrated in such
small spaces.
But the Enviropig is starting to get some traction.
When Forsberg and his colleagues created the first
generation of Enviropigs, nearly 10 years ago, the question
was: could they do it?
Today, seven generations of pigs later, the question is: will
people eat it?
Until recently, the US government hadn’t allowed the sale
of genetically modified meat. But, the Food and Drug
Administration recently published guidelines for it. And
some industry analysts say you could be eating pork from
animals like the Enviropig as soon as 2011.
Apple grower Jim Koan has discovered that baby pigs are best for taking care
of fallen wormy apples in his orchard. He says they have very tender noses.
The adult pigs like to root around in the dirt and tend to tear up the
orchard. (Photo by Rebecca Williams)
Jim Koan's Berkshire pigs, enjoying the early spring mud. (Photo by Rebecca Williams)
Berkshire pigs like to investigate visitors. (Photo by Rebecca Williams)
Some of the guinea fowl that Jim Koan first tried to use to tackle the apple
pest, plum curculio. It was working, until hawks found out the orchard
was full of tasty little birds. (Photo by Rebecca Williams)
Jim Koan says being an organic grower means thinking ahead. Once you have
an infestation - it's too late. (Photo by Rebecca Williams)
There are a lot of insects that love to eat
apples. A harmful insecticide that kills some of
those pests is being phased out. So farmers are
looking for other solutions. Rebecca Williams visits
an apple grower who’s counting on pigs to get some
help with his pest problem:
Transcript
There are a lot of insects that love to eat
apples. A harmful insecticide that kills some of
those pests is being phased out. So farmers are
looking for other solutions. Rebecca Williams visits
an apple grower who’s counting on pigs to get some
help with his pest problem:
(farm animal sounds – turkeys, etc)
The spring rains have started, and at Jim Koan’s pig pen that means mud.
(sound of shoes squishing in mud and piggy snorts)
Of course, these pigs don’t really seem to mind that.
“These Berkshires, you can see, are really friendly, they’re just coming
right up to you.”
Jim Koan really likes his pigs. That’s because he’s hoping the pigs will
take care of one of his worst pests. It’s a beetle called the plum
curculio. In early spring the beetles lay eggs in the little green apples.
The larvae hatch and eat the apples from the inside out.
Then the tree drops the bad wormy apples on the ground. And the worms just
keep on eating.
For a long time, farmers used an insecticide called azinphos-methyl to kill
the beetles. But the Environmental Protection Agency is phasing it out.
That’s because the EPA says the pesticide is very toxic to some wildlife and
it can make farm workers sick.
Jim Koan hasn’t used the pesticide for 10 years, ever since he became an
organic grower. So for years now he’s been trying to find a perfect
predator to stop the beetle larvae.
The chickens were too lazy. Hawks ate the guinea fowl that he tried.
So, finally, Koan says he had a flashback. His grandpa used to have hogs in
the orchard.
“When I would climb up to go up in the tree in the summertime to get a green
apple to eat all the hogs would come running over there and my granddad
always told me you stay away from those hogs they’ll eat you up! I’d be
really scared and be up there for an hour or two until the hogs left again.”
(laughs)
Koan says he knows now that the hogs were just hoping for a snack. So last
year he decided to buy some hogs and see if they would eat the wormy apples
on the ground. He says baby pigs worked best.
“And they’d just go up one row gleaning it, kinda like little vacuum
cleaners (makes sucking sound) and suck up all the apples!”
Koan says the baby pigs ate 98% of the fallen apples with beetle
larvae in them. But he still needed to know that the beetles were actually
gone, so they wouldn’t come back to attack his apples next year.
That job
was up to researchers at Michigan State University. Koan says they fed a
mix of beetle larvae and apples to pigs on campus.
“Then they put diapers on the hogs – truly, diapers!! It was unbelievable.
They took special superglue and velcroed it on their butt so then when they
defecated they caught all that. Then they took these poor students and made
them go through there and wash all that and look for worms.”
Koan says out of 200 worms that were fed to the pigs, they only found one
worm at the other end. That means, so far it looks like pigs are a
pretty good predator.
But the researchers don’t want to let pigs run wild – just yet. David
Epstein is the lead researcher on the project.
“Jim and I are scheming all the time. I have great expectations that this
could be a good management tool in the future but we have to figure out how
to do it properly.”
Epstein says they need to make sure the pigs don’t cause any contamination
problems. Something like E. coli. He says so far there isn’t any
evidence of that, but it’s the kind of thing you have to be sure about.
If this all goes well, the farmer and the scientist will be writing a book
together. It’ll be sort of a self-help book: getting pigs to take care of
what’s bugging you.
With skyrocketing crude oil prices much of the nation’s attention has turned toward alternative fuels. While many people are focused on ethanol production, one small town is looking at turning waste from humans and hogs into electricity. In a few months, the town will break ground on a 10-million dollar processing plant. It hopes to become the first town in the nation to run completely off renewable resources. The GLRC’s LaToya Dennis reports:
Transcript
With skyrocketing crude oil prices much of the nation’s attention has turned toward
alternative fuels. While many people are focused on ethanol production, one small town
is looking at turning waste from humans and hogs into electricity. In a few months, the
town will break ground on a 10 million dollar processing plant. It hopes to become the
first town in the nation to run completely off renewable resources. The GLRC’s LaToya
Dennis reports:
To get where we’re going, you have to pass through small town after small town and
acres and acres of cornfields. Reynolds, Indiana is a farm town of about 500 people. It’s
hard to find on most maps. And it’s pretty easy to overlook. After all, there’s only one gas
station and three restaurants. But what Reynolds is doing is hard to overlook. Charlie
Van Voorst has lived there for a long time and is now the town president. He says the town is
going to provide its own electricity and it’s not going to burn fossil fuels like coal or
natural gas.
“Town board meetings went from talking about the neighbor’s dog in your yard to now
talking about million dollar decisions about what we’re building.”
What the town of Reynolds is building is a new power plant powered by the by-products
of the surrounding farms, chiefly, pig poop. The plant will use technology to pull
methane and other gases from animal and human waste. The gases will then power
engines and steam turbines. Coming out on the other end is electricity, and leftover solids,
which can be used for fertilizer.
(Sound of pigs)
Within just a few miles there are around 150 thousand pigs. That makes for a lot of
waste:
“Well, this is the bacon.”
Bill Schroeder is a local pig farmer. He’s standing in the middle of a thousand hogs.
They’re about knee high and weigh around 300 pounds each. They’re constantly eating
and pooping.
“It don’t smell to me, does it smell to you. When you walked in here, did you smell?”
Actually, it did smell, but Schroeder thinks it smells like money. He says he’s willing to
give the waste his pigs produce to the town to turn into electricity. After the waste is
processed, farmers will get a higher quality fertilizer back for their fields. But Schroeder
says some farmers still might hesitate because they’re not being paid for their pig waste.
“There should be return. Anytime you invest money, you expect a return. I mean if
you’ve got a CD in the bank you expect a return on that CD. It’s no different from
investment in machinery, hog buildings or anything else.”
Obviously, some of the financial incentives still have to be worked out, but Reynolds
town officials say there are good reasons besides money to take the town off the existing
power grid. Right now, Reynolds gets its energy from coal. That puts a lot of carbon into
the air. Methane processing produces less carbon dioxide than coal.
Jody Snodgrass is managing director for Rose Energy. That’s the company building the
processing plant. He says the project has another environmental benefit. It reduces the
amount methane from pig manure that’s released into the atmosphere because it’s
captured and used to make electricity.
“The increase of methane causes increased cloud formation. Also causes decreased ozone
layer and basically contributes to global warming as does carbon dioxide and several
other compounds. And if you can reduce those or eliminate those, that obviously is a plus
for the environment.”
That’s the reason the town of Reynolds is getting the support of the state in its effort to
become energy independent. Although everyone’s not on board yet, town president Charlie Van
Voorst is excited about what’s to come. He says small town farming communities haven’t
seen a development this big in more than 100 years:
“Oh, my goodness. Since I’ve grown up, golly. I suppose you could talk about the –
something to this magnitude would be when electricity came into our community.”
Town officials hope Reynolds is powered by pig poop and other alternative fuels by
2008. They say if things go well, their town could become the model for other small farm
towns across the country.
For the GLRC, I’m LaToya Dennis.
HOST TAG: This piece was originally produced for NPR’s Next Generation
Radio.
The Environmental Protection Agency says it will start monitoring the air around some large livestock farms this winter. The EPA says it will help them develop better air quality standards for these farms. But critics say the project is too soft on polluters. The GLRC’s Mark Brush has more:
Transcript
The Environmental Protection Agency says it will start monitoring the air around some
large livestock farms this winter. The EPA says it will help them develop better air
quality standards for these farms. But critics say the project is too soft on polluters. The
GLRC’s Mark Brush has more:
Thousands of farms have agreed to be a part of a voluntary air pollution monitoring
project. Big hog, poultry, and dairy operations produce a lot of manure. The manure
releases gases that can cause health problems. As part of the agreement with the EPA,
the farms will be immune from most federal lawsuits while the monitoring is done.
Jon Scholl is with the EPA. He says this voluntary approach will bring more farms into
compliance faster than direct enforcement:
“We have 2,568 agreements covering 6,267 farms that have a written agreement with the
agency that they’re going to come into compliance with applicable air quality laws, and
we think that’s significant and certainly much better than taking it on a case by case
basis.”
Critics of the voluntary project say there is enough evidence now to force these large
farms to comply with air quality laws. They say the Bush Administration lacks the
political will to do so.
Frank Baffi's barn in southern Michigan (photo by Mark Brush)
Today, we continue our series on pollution in the heartland.
There are fewer farmers raising pigs, cows and chickens these days.
But the amount of meat being produced in the U.S. continues to increase.
So livestock farms haven’t exactly disappeared. They’ve just gotten bigger.
In the third part of our week-long series, the GLRC’s Mark Brush reports these big operations have kept food costs down, but those cheap prices come with consequences:
Transcript
Today, we continue our series on pollution in the heartland.
There are fewer farmers raising pigs, cows and chickens these days.
But the amount of meat being produced in the U.S. continues to increase.
So livestock farms haven’t exactly disappeared. They’ve just gotten bigger.
In the third part of our week-long series, the GLRC’s Mark Brush reports these big operations have kept food costs down, but those cheap prices come
with consequences:
When you picture a typical farm, chances are you probably think of a farm just like Frank
Baffi’s.
(Sound of farm)
He grows corn and oats on his land. He’s got chickens, a couple of horses, two ducks,
about 30 beef cows. And in this fading red barn, he’s got pigs:
(Sound of claps)
“Hey Pig! C’mon! Get up!”
(Sound of pigs)
In fact, the pigs have been the most profitable thing he’s raised on this farm. Baffi says
he used to sell more than fifty thousand dollars worth of pigs every year. It was enough
to make a living on.
(Sound of pigs)
But as time went on, selling pigs became less profitable. In the 1980s, his expenses went
up and the price he could get for his pigs went down. Baffi says he was faced with a
decision. It was the same decision that many small livestock farmers faced at the time:
“I think it was a whole trend that if you weren’t big you had to get out. It was if you had
20 cows it was you gotta be milkin’ 30, or if you were milking 30 it was oh, you gotta be
milkin’ 100. The reason they weren’t making any money is that they’re not making
enough money for what they sell.”
Frank Baffi blames the drop in prices on the increase in global trade. He says US
producers started to compete with operations overseas, where expenses can often be
cheaper. To keep up, producers in the US got more efficient, and as they did so, prices
continued to drop. Baffi says he tried to get bigger, but he just didn’t have enough
money.
But just down the road there’s a pig farm that is making a profit. Frank Baffi’s neighbor
is Bruce Barton. His dad started the family in the hog business in the 1950s. Barton says
early on his Dad could see what was coming:
“He pretty much expanded because he could see that small farmers were struggling to
survive and ya know we had buy the feed in larger lots you sell your hogs in larger lots.
There was going to be less margin for each hog. You just had to have more, more of
them.”
The Bartons raised about 11 pigs when the started out. Now they raise about 100,000.
That may seem like a lot, but their operation is small compared to those that raise over a
million hogs a year.
The size of these big farms trouble many environmentalists. These farms are forced to
deal with large volumes of manure. On average one pig can generate close to two tons of
manure a year. Multiply that by one million and you get the picture. Smaller farms can
spread the manure as fertilizer on their land without much problem and large farms can
use the manure too. It’s just that they need a lot of land to spread the manure on. If they
put too much on a field, it can pollute streams and drinking water wells, and researchers
say, these farms are only going to get bigger.
Jim MacDonald researches farming trends for the US Department of Agriculture. He
says small farmers can make a go of it if they’re able to find a niche market, like
producing organic meat and milk. But MacDonald says the demand for these niche
products is still tiny compared to the demand for things like chicken nuggets and hot
dogs:
“The overall trend so far, I think, continues to be towards larger operations producing
what we might call generic or commodity like products and their prices continue to fall.”
Prices are falling because these farms continue to get bigger and more efficient. That
means fewer and fewer people are farming. So the idyllic picture we have of the small
farmer is fading.
(Sound of Frank’s farm up)
Last year, Frank Baffi lost more than a thousand dollars on his farm. He mainly relies on
his social security check for his income. A row of empty metal crates line his barn:
“This is where I’d have pigs and this is where they would have their babies. There
probably all used up but I just haven’t had the heart to tear them out. Because I always
thought that I could at least get back to where I was. And the way it looks, you know, the
profitability of this thing, it don’t look like I’m going to go there.”
So the choices you make at the grocery store influence how farms are changing. It’s only
normal: most of us pick the cheaper product. But some people who live near these large
facilities say consumers don’t know the full cost of their choices.
Like most farmers, hog farmers have seen a shift from small, family-owned farms, to large-scale hog operations, but more pigs on less land creates some major environmental problems – especially, what to do with all that manure. Bio-tech researchers in Canada believe they have created an animal that will help. The Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s Mark Brush has more:
An Ohio jury has awarded neighbors of a large factory farm $19.7 million in damages. People living near Buckeye Egg Farm in central Ohio have complained for years of fly infestations and odors. The outcome is seen as a victory by those living next to large-scale farm operations throughout the region. The Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s Natalie Walston has the story:
Transcript
An Ohio jury has awarded neighbors of a large factory farm 19.7 million dollars in damages. People living near Buckeye Egg Farm in Central Ohio have complained for years of fly infestations and odors. The outcome of the lawsuit may or may not affect similar cases in other states. The Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s Natalie Walston reports.
(Natural sound of locusts, wind, dog barking in the distance)
Freda Douthitt’s house sits at the end of a gravel lane. The driveway is surrounded by trees and wild flowers. She’s always liked it here because it’s secluded … she’s a couple miles from a rural road. She likes to sit on the multi-tiered back patio that overlooks a small pond. That’s where she grades composition papers from her Freshman English class at Ohio University.
(sound of flies)
But she has also had to swat at flies for the past ten years. Douthitt collects flies in a container that is nearly the size of a gallon milk jug. She estimates this one has about 2-3 inches worth of decomposing flies and maggots collected since August 22.
“It smells out here. That’s the flytrap. That keeps some of them from getting in the house. Today there’s a few flies out here. There are days when that wall would be just polka dotted with them.
Douthitt has frozen the containers of flies and collected them over the years. She took them to court with her to prove the problems she deals with living near a factory farm.
That’s what helped her win a 1.2 million dollar share of a settlement with Buckeye Egg Farm. It’s one of the world’s largest egg-laying producers. Douthitt’s house is three-quarters of a mile from one of the company’s egg-laying plants. The flies come from the vast amounts of manure produced by millions of chickens housed at the company’s barns. The manure gets spread on farm fields that surround Douthitt’s house after harvest season in the fall. Since then … she has watched as run-off from Buckeye Egg properties killed tens-of-thousands of fish in a nearby creek. She has even seen the creek water turn purple.
She says she never expected to win in court against the company when she began the legal battle 9 years ago.
“I never thought about suing. Until one of the neighbors I’d been working hard with trying to get the EPA to do something … trying to get the county health department interested … um, we were both frustrated at that point. She called up one evening and said we’re ready to call a lawyer, are you? And I said, yeah, I’ll meet with you.
As the years went by I became pretty frustrated, and wondered what would make a difference.”
Douthitt and 20 of her neighbors won a 19.7 million dollar lawsuit against Buckeye Egg.
This win has other people in Great Lakes states hopeful they too can win in court against large factory farms.
Julie Janson of Olivia, Minnesota knows Douthitt’s story all too well. Janson has been fighting hog factory farm owner Valadco for 6 years. Her house sits sandwiched between two of the company’s hog barns. Janson and her husband filed a lawsuit this spring against the company. They are asking for close to 200-thousand dollars because Janson says her family of eight gets sick from manure odors.
Janson says she took her 11-year-old daughter to a specialist in California to prove she has brain damage from smelling hydrogen sulfide.
Decomposing manure creates hydrogen sulfide gas and ammonia that smells like rotten eggs.
“Sometimes it’s enough to gag a maggot. The stink is putrid. And, it penetrates through your house, through the windows and doors. Every little crack in your home.”
Janson says her family has spent one hundred thousand dollars to fight Valadco.
She had to close her daycare center, which she ran from her home, partly because of the stench. Her husband is supporting the family with his truck-driving job that brings in nearly 38-thousand dollars a year.
She says a win over Buckeye Egg farm in Ohio is a victory that can help her cause.
“There’s finally been some justice served. Some of these people have been fighting for over ten years. And … to me … it just says no matter how long and painful it is, you need to fight for justice because if us citizens don’t fight it’s never gonna happen.”
Both Janson and Douthitt say it’s not the money that will make them happy.
Douthitt says she will probably never see the money that she is owed.
But … she says the county judge may force the company to clean up its farms and the surrounding communities.
“How can they have that many animals and that much manure and let it just pour out and not treat it? They let it just pour out onto the land.”
Buckeye egg farm officials have said they may appeal the verdict. The company says it has already spent millions of dollars to try and clean up its facilities. Earlier this year, Buckeye Egg settled a multi-million dollar lawsuit with Ohio’s attorney general’s office. The state sued the company for dumping dead chickens in a field and polluting creeks by spilling contaminated water. The state has since filed seven sets of contempt charges against Buckeye Egg for not correcting the problems. It’s still undecided whether Buckeye Egg will file for bankruptcy following the verdict.
For the Great Lakes Radio Consortium, I’m Natalie Walston.
Large-scale livestock operations face a big challenge: how to
handle all the manure the animals produce. Manure spills and runoff can
contaminate water with nitrogen and phosphorous. The result can be
polluted drinking water, or fish kills in streams and lakes. But now,
Purdue University researchers have found a way to significantly lower
the
pollutants in hog manure. The Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s Wendy
Nelson reports:
Environmentalists are concerned that big business agriculture will weaken a government proposal to reduce pollution. The federal government’s proposal would make large farm feedlots come up with a management plan to dispose of animal manure. The Great Lakes RadioConsortium’s Lester Graham reports that some farm groups are fighting it:
It’s not uncommon for influenza viruses to be exchanged between pigs and humans (Photo by Scott Bauer, courtesy of the USDA)
