DATE: Tuesday, September 2, 1997            TAG: 9708300008

SECTION: LOCAL                   PAGE: B8   EDITION: FINAL 

TYPE: Opinion 

SOURCE: BY CATHRYN McCUE 

                                            LENGTH:   92 lines

HOGGING THE ENVIRONMENT

On Aug. 27, a group of legislators met to begin reviewing whether Virginia's regulations are adequate to protect our environment and public health from the potentially devastating impacts of industrialized hog farming.

And not a moment too soon. The swine industry appears actively engaged in expanding operations in the Old Dominion. In the past several months, three proposals have surfaced to build large hog facilities in Pittsylvania, Buckingham and Frederick counties. (State records show that Brunswick County is also being targeted for a major hog complex, complete with feed mill and processing plant.) Citizens and public officials in Southside and elsewhere have voiced grave concerns about these proposals. And rightly so. A look at what the hog industry has done for North Carolina can greatly inform our choices here in Virginia.

After six years of exponential growth, that state has more hogs than people and has taken second place for hog production nationwide. But all those hogs produce a lot of waste, and North Carolina is now plagued with polluted rivers and streams, contaminated groundwater, massive fish kills and uncontrolled odor problems. Unfortunately, the state's environmental woes have sullied its reputation as a tourism destination.

North Carolina has started passing tougher controls on the industry to protect drinking-water wells, rivers and streams and neighbors of these factory farms. The legislature is currently considering several measures and, observers say, will probably impose a moratorium on new hog facilities, set greater setback distances from neighbors and return local zoning control to communities. The state already requires setbacks and regular inspections of all facilities with 250 or more hogs. By contrast, Virginia has no regulations on facilities with fewer than 750 hogs.

Virginia's five-member legislative study committee decided to meet in Chatham, near the 558-acre site of a controversial 10,000-hog facility proposed by GIS of North Carolina. This facility has outraged local citizens and all elected officials and has received virtually no community support.

Meanwhile, Buckingham County has told Carroll Foods, one of the region's largest hog producers, that its proposed expansion would not be welcome in that county, which is already coping with new or expanded facilities at seven sites. Carroll has written to the other counties in the planning-district region (Charlotte, Prince Edward, Lunenburg, Mecklenburg) to see if they would be interested in new hog facilities. And Frederick County, near Winchester, anticipates a 2,100-hog facility on 100 acres of land. (An adjacent landowner has had to spend $20,000 on a special domestic-waste sand filtration system because the soils are so poor.)

The problem is not the hogs, per se, but the waste they create - almost four times the amount generated by a human being. Thus, the 10,000-hog facility proposed in Pittsylvania County is equivalent to a city the size of Charlottesville but without benefit of a septic or sewage system. Imagine if we allowed cities to pump human waste into huge, open cesspools and then sprayed the waste on fields. Such is the routine practice of the hog industry.

Critics point out that the hog waste cesspools (ennobled by the industry as ``lagoons'') frequently leak, overflow and, worse, sometimes break, sending untreated feces and urine into groundwater and surface water. The land application, in which wastewater from the cesspools is sprayed on fields where crops take up nitrogen and phosphorous, works in theory but is frequently performed in a sloppy fashion. Too often, soils become saturated by rain or over-application, allowing hog waste to seep into the ground and run off into surface waters.

Aside from the environmental impacts, modern hog production takes a heavy toll on small, independent farmers. These facilities are not your traditional ``farm'' but rather industrial operations that confine up to 900 hogs in each warehouse, with four or five houses per site. The mechanization and concentration of hog production has forced many independent, small-scale farmers out of business as they become unable to compete with corporate price structuring. (In North Carolina, while the number of hogs has quadrupled since 1983, the number of hog farms has dropped by 87 percent.)

Virginia is positioning itself to move into this type of industrial development: Virginia Tech has produced, in conjunction with Carroll Foods, a study titled ``The Economic Benefits of Locating a Swine Complex in Southside Virginia.'' And the state offers generous benefits packages, in one case almost $2 million dollars, to lure the industry.

The legislative study committee needs to determine whether Virginia's regulations are sufficient to deal with all types of soils and slopes and proximity to water resources. Legislators need to assure citizens that any new hog facilities will not pollute the water and that spray fields and hog houses will be located a safe distance from homes, schools, businesses and waterways.

Virginia could and should learn from its neighbor North Carolina that Boss Hog need not dominate agriculture in Virginia and that farmers and other citizens can work together to ensure that our outstanding natural resources, our health and our rural way of life are protected. MEMO: Cathryn McCue is public communications coordinator for the

Southern Environmental Law Center, a nonprofit legal advocacy group with

headquarters in Charlottesville. KEYWORDS: ANOTHER VIEW

Send Suggestions or Comments to webmaster@scholar.lib.vt.edu