Alliance for a Responsible
Swine Industry (A.R.S.I.)

Don Webb
President, Alliance for a Responsible Swine Industry

My name is Don Webb. I am from North Carolina, home of feces & urine, the Cell from Hell (pfiesteria) and heaven for hogs, and hell for humans. I am the president of the Alliance for a Responsible Swine Industry, an organization that was designed to help the swine industry become responsible citizens.

Over the past few years, the eastern region of the state of North Carolina has been inundated with large intensive corporate hog operations. These operations have invaded our neighborhoods and our communities, forcing our people into the bondage of feces and urine. Thousands of North Carolinians have begged for relief from the stench of these feces and urine factories, but there has been no relief from the devastating odors, permeating from open earthen cesspools and spray systems that saturate surrounding fields and runoff into our public waters.

According to a report by Dr. Susan Schiffman of Duke University, nearby residents of commercial swine operations who experience these odors have less vigor and more tension, anger, depression, fatigue and confusion. It is obvious that odors from these types of operations are harmful to human beings.

These factory farms force neighbors to either leave their homes or endure the negative impacts associated with this industry. There are North Carolina families that have made the difficult and painful decision to sell their homes at a loss in order to regain a decent quality of life. Why should people have to leave their homes in order for a few people to make money. In most cases the homes were there and the operations moved in on them, in most cases without warning.

One North Carolina farmer, in order to protect his family and home from the filth of a threatening factory farm, paid an undertaker cash money to not build an operation near his home. Unfortunately, for most Americans, this is not an option. Most are simply at the mercy of the conditions at the nearest operation.

Many of the operations in North Carolina are built by non-farmers such as lawyers, commercial airplane pilots, undertakers, judges, local & state officials, and many other professional types. These are not family farms. These are industrial endeavors by investors, which is making money while at the same time making sharecroppers of our true American farmers. In North Carolina the pig population rose from over 2 million in 1983 to over 9 million in 1996, while at the same time, the number of hog farms dropped from over 22,000 in 1983 to just over 5,000 in 1996. Where have all the hog farmers gone?

Over the past few years it has been discovered that a number of the cesspools that store the feces and urine at these large hog operations have been leaking and contaminating both ground and surface waters. One North Carolina University report estimates that as many as half existing lagoons, perhaps hundreds are leaking enough to contaminate groundwater.

In 1995 the 25 million gallon spill of hog feces and urine in Onslow county North Carolina captured world wide attention but its the daily seepage, runoff, airborne nitrogen, over spraying of fields, and accumulation of heavy metals that can devastate the surrounding environment. In North Carolina, plant available nitrogen from manure equals or exceeds 100% of the crop and plant needs in 3 counties, while phosphorus exceeds the plant needs in 7 counties. These figures do not even take into account commercial fertilizer applications in those counties.

Public outcry prompted the state to offer citizens with property lines adjoining hog operations free testing of their drinking water for nitrate contamination. Dr. Kenneth Rudo, a Toxicologist with the Occupational & Environmental Epidemiology Section, reported that of the 948 wells tested, approximately 9.4% were found to have nitrate levels that were at or exceeded the nitrate drinking water standard of 10 ppm, with some as high as 70-100 ppm range.

Recent findings have indicated that the Center for Disease control has data that establishes a link between high nitrate levels and stillborn births and spontaneous abortions. High nitrate levels in drinking water have also been linked to cancer of the esophagus and stomach. " Blue Baby Syndrome" has also been linked to nitrate contaminated water.

North Carolina has recently passed a 2 year moratorium, but from the supposed start of the moratorium, March 1st, until the signing of the legislation on August 27th, the North Carolina Division of Water Quality issued 86 permits for new and expanding hog operations for a total of over 500,000 additional hogs. These new permits will allow the hog industry to keep growing even under the state of a moratorium, a moratorium that in actuality ends up being only 18 months.

The recent legislation directs the NC Department of Agriculture to develop a plan to phase out the use of the inadequate existing anaerobic lagoons and spray field system as the primary methods of animal waste disposal.

Although the moratorium and the additional legislation does not fully address the problems associated with the industry, it is at least a clear indication that our public officials now understand and acknowledge, what the affected citizens of rural North Carolina have already known, the cesspool and spray field system do not, and will not work.

This so called, state of the art technology is stone age, cave man mentality and it has allowed North Carolina to get into the mess it is in today. In the summer of 1996, Dr. Bob Edwards and Dr. John Maiolo of the Department of Sociology at East Carolina State University in Greenville North Carolina conducted a survey of 998 adult residents in 41 eastern North Carolina counties. The results of this survey indicated that of the participants 86% supported stricter regulations on hog farms. Participants ranked their concern about water quality and additional hog farms higher than their concern over higher taxes and crime.

Remember that the current method of animal waste disposal has not worked in North Carolina. There is no reason to believe that the current method of waste disposal will work anywhere else.

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