Rural Health and Large-Scale Swine Operations

Kendall M. Thu, Ph.D.
The University of Iowa

I examine how large-scale swine operations influence rural health. By rural health, I broadly refer to the physical, social, economic, environmental, and political well-being of people living in rural areas. Considerable research is being devoted to understanding various pieces of the puzzle, e.g. odor, manure application, ground and surface water protection, while less time and energy is spent articulating the range of issues involved and their interrelationship. A broader framework is needed that allows us to understand the place and relative importance of each piece of the large-scale livestock puzzle. Drawing on findings from an interdisciplinary scientific summit publication "Understanding the Impacts of Large-Scale Swine Production" (Thu, 1996) and related research, I provide a framework which outlines the range of issues involved and gauges their relative importance for meeting the needs of our rural communities.

The swine industry has undergone a dramatic shift in the past ten years marked by such changes as increased concentration of production, loss of independent swine producers, geographical shift of production within and outside the U.S., and the growth of large-scale swine operations. The number of U.S. swine producers has declined precipitously from 750,000 in 1974 to 157,000 by the end of 1996 (USDA). Between 1994 and 1996 one out of every four hog producers left the business. And by the end of 1996, 3% of producers representing the largest corporate operations in the U.S. produced 51% of all the hogs, while 21% of all hogs were grown under contract. In Iowa, 55% of all new swine facilities permitted by the Iowa Department of Natural Resources from 1987 through 1995 were owned by or under the effective control of large-scale corporate swine producers (Ziegenhorn, 1997).

Large-scale swine operations are defined as firms which possess the following combination of features (from Donham and Thu in Thu, 1996): 1) management, labor, and ownership are separate; 2) family labor plays a limited role in the operation; 3) owners, management, and labor do not live on or near the operation; and 4) a non-family corporate or company organizational structure. These characteristic features of emerging large-scale swine operations reflect the continuing industrialization of agriculture. Industrialized agriculture is a type of food production system heavily dependent on fossil fuel based energy inputs such as fertilizers, machinery, pesticides, and gasoline. Anthropologists have documented that based on measures of energy expended per calorie of food produced, industrial agriculture is the most inefficient form of food production in the history and prehistory of humankind (Harris, 1987). Industrial agriculture is characterized by large-scale operations that substitute capital intensive fossil fuel based technology for people. Concentration of production and distribution into relatively few firms, which integrate highly, specialized operations such as food processing and marketing is common. And a highly specialized political apparatus extending into national, regional, and local governing bodies, as well as state supported institutions to support and replicate the system, is typical of human organizations associated with industrial agriculture (Thu and Durrenberger, 1998).

Proponents and opponents of industrial agriculture have respectable support in academia. Frequently invoked evidence for the economic advantages of industrial agriculture are the wide availability of abundant food at extremely low cost to consumers and the record productivity and efficiency of modern farmers. In contrast, critics of industrial forms of agriculture point to the narrow focus of economic measures of development and efficiency which typically exclude assessments of the social, environmental, physical, psychological, political, and rural economic health of people. Most of these issues are not incorporated into economic analyses of food production (treated as externalities), but each has a distinct, often measurable, and very human cost which I outline in the remainder of this paper.

The range of rural consequences of large-scale swine production to be assessed fall into six categories: 1) air quality; 2) water quality; 3) worker health; 4) community social health; 5) rural economic health; and 6) political health. Each category encompasses a range of issues to be considered and I, of necessity, touch upon only a few in order to provide a backdrop for developing a framework for understanding priorities.

Air quality issues can be divided into two general areas: 1) odor; 2) public health. Most of the attention to air quality issues has focused on odor, particularly identifying sources of odor, measuring it, and developing control techniques (Melvin, et al. in Thu, 1996). Less attention has been paid to the potential consequences of odor for the health of neighbors, though two studies to date indicate deleterious health consequences are present (Schiffman et al., 1996; Thu et al., 1997). The evidence collected thus farm indicates efforts to control odors are not synonymous with addressing the potential public health problem. Moreover, no systematic data is being collected to determine which forms of production, particularly which kinds of producers, are more likely to be responsible to their neighbors in controlling air quality.

In 1996, an EPA Comparative Environmental Risk Assessment was completed for Iowa which demonstrated water quality related to the changing swine sector were primary environmental and social concerns statewide (Dahlquist, 1996).

The evidence justifies rural resident concerns. The Iowa Statewide Rural Well Water Survey (Hallberg et al., 1992) shows that in north-central Iowa 10-15% of all wells (all depths) exceed the recommended drinking water limit for nitrate-nitrogen and over 30% of all water supplies are positive for total coliform bacteria. Runoff related to livestock manure is the number one source of fish kills in Iowa streams (Hallberg, 1996). Despite the concerns and evidence, little systematic data exist to assess the actual performance of large-scale swine operations relative to contamination to surface water, groundwater, and precipitation (Jackson, et al. in Thu, 1996). No systematic data is being collected to determine which forms of production, particularly which kinds of producers, are more likely to be responsible for good water quality.

One of the most well researched areas related to swine production is the relationship between exposure to the interior environment of swine confinement production and worker health (Thorne et al. in Thu, 1996). Twenty-five studies from the U.S., Canada, Sweden, Denmark, the Netherlands, Germany, and England consistently show a number of work-related health problems among swine confinement workers. Approximately 25 percent of all swine confinement workers have one or more respiratory conditions. However, there remains the unanswered long-term health question concerning the health risks for workers spending 40 or more hours per week typical of large-scale operations.

Social issues refer to personal, family, neighborhood, and community relationships and quality of life. Research in this area shows that measurable social problems result from absentee-owned large-scale agriculture (Thu et al. in Thu, 1996). Community divisions are created and frequently become acutely disruptive as the result of large-scale swine operations. More fundamental than any single issue is the deep-seated frustration that people feel from the lack of adequate local means of problem resolution. The lack of local control results in an escalating social pathology in many rural areas. A continual recurrence of discords and attempts to find an outlet has led to a pattern of community distrust that is at odds with core values of rural Iowans. This intense conflict acts as a pressure cooker and with no outlet attitudes and behaviors that resonate with extremism can and will develop.

The rural economic impact from smaller and more diversified farms is better than from large-scale swine facilities because they add greater value to the community economy (Lasley et al. in Thu, 1996). Considerable research indicates that a better measure of industry health for rural areas is not the total volume of hogs produced, but the number of farmers producing those hogs. Hogs are not as important as people. Traditional economic assessments of large-scale swine facilities have been overly narrow in scope in dealing with job creation and tax bases, and generally ignore environmental, social, and human health costs. Large-scale swine facilities are by their very nature intended to displace people with capital intensive technology and it is therefore erroneous to project job creation gains since their displacement of independent swine producers will result in a net job loss (Ikerd, 1998).

Perhaps the most disturbing aspect of swine industry change is its consequences for the democratic health of the country. Anthropological cross-cultural research clearly demonstrates that concentration of power over the production and distribution of a precious research is antithetical to democratic process. This is illustrated quite clearly in former U.S. Senator Robert Morgan's experience from North Carolina (Morgan, 1998): "Before I became State Attorney General of North Carolina, I spent some years as a country lawyer. We lawyers all knew each other and we took our cases down to the courthouse where we went up against each other but all played by the same rules. When big business steps in it is no longer that way. This situation was brought to my attention in early 1992 when a group of homeowners and small farmers asked me to represent them in their efforts to protect themselves against damage done by a large-scale hog operation. The defendants brought in a law firm with more than fifty lawyers and assigned several to our case. These lawyers had virtually unlimited time and money. The industry's resources helped the defendants in more subtle ways. When attorneys for the plaintiff, armed with a court order, inspected the facilities, they found that the owners were accompanied by several professors from North Carolina State University, a land grant college with responsibilities for agricultural research. It is perhaps relevant that Senator Murphy not only serves on the University's Board of Trustees, but has contributed several hundred thousand dollars to its programs."

The relative importance of the six issue areas outlined here can be gauged by asking a simple question: "If it's broken, why can't I get it fixed?" If we accept the evidence that there are in fact significant water quality, air quality, economic, social, and worker health problems associated with large-scale swine operations, we are then faced with the question of why we have failed in our efforts thus far to fix them. The answer is that the political system, the system that should respond to these problems, has also been broken along the way. This is the fundamental problem. By unjustly and incorrectly dismissing the voices of rural Iowans and rural Americans as overly emotional, unscientific, antigrowth, or anti-agriculture, our political leaders have violated a fundamental democratic tenet of trust and faith in due process by exchanging human dignity for the hollow rhetoric of economic development. More fundamentally, trust lost is not easily regained. Loss of faith in our leaders, in our political system, in our academic institutions, and in our country is a heavy price to pay.

The future holds hope and promise. In our vision for the future we must remember that people are always more important than commodities; that the best measure of industry health is the number of people producing hogs, not the number of hogs produced. Assumptions that define and promote ideas of productivity and efficiency as inevitable and that industrialized swine production is natural convinces those who suffer its costs that there is nothing they can do about it. There is something that can be done about it. Recent strides in sustainable agriculture have succeeded in establishing a foothold relative to the dominant industrial agricultural paradigm. Sustainable agriculture is often perceived to be associated with specific farm practices to deal with such issues as soil erosion or decreasing fertilizer use. Criticism is often leveled at sustainable agriculture that it is nebulous and ill defined, and that it has no pragmatic program or mechanism for ensuring profitability among farmers who make the transition. However, we must remember that any newly emerging system of adaptation requires a range of variation to increase its likelihood of success. Sustainable agriculture would be doomed to failure if its tenets were clearly defined and rigidly practiced at the outset. The underlying point of sustainable agriculture is not precisely what it is, but what it means and why it is emerging.

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