Animal Waste on Factory Farms

By Stirling Noel Cousins

You are driving through the countryside on a Sunday afternoon. It is a spring day and the air is refreshingly warm. You see cows grazing in the pasture and think how much they must be enjoying the day*. This is not an uncommon sight in Colorado. I used to live in Wisconsin and this blissful pastoral scene was everywhere. But this stereotypical view of farm animals is not as common as it once was. In fact, the majority of farm animals are now kept on factory farms – farms with thousands to hundreds of thousands of animals confined in small areas.

Over the last few decades the family farm, with a few dozen cows, pigs and chickens, and a couple pastures of land to grow food for the animals and the people, has all but disappeared. As with other things in this country, the bigger the company, the more cheaply the product can be made. The small farms have been bought out or have gone out of business due to competition. Big agribusiness has taken over. Business owners will do just about anything that will save money and make their operations more cost effective. This means that animals and the environment are of the lowest priority. The business people who run these farms (for they cannot be called "farmers") do whatever is quick, cheap and uses the least amount of land and labor. For the animals this means extremely cramped quarters, which leads to a physically painful and emotionally deprived life. For the environment, it means massive amounts of waste produced in concentrated areas, severe local air pollution, water contamination, fish kills, soil depletion, and massive use of antibiotics and pesticides. Here we will focus on the effects of animal waste, particularly from hogs, on water and water ecosystems.

In the United States we had six million farms in 1920. Today, even with a significant increase in population, we have only two million farms. Sixty percent of hogs, for example, are raised on 13,000 mega farms. A single farm may have thousands of hogs. One company in North Carolina has 2 million hogs. Chickens are kept with upwards of 100,000 animals in a single building. Feedlots for cattle typically have over 1,000 animals. In some areas, such as North Carolina, the concentration of animals has become obscene. Two counties in NC have over one million hog apiece. This amounts to 1,200 hogs per square mile. The amount of waste produced on these farms is astonishing. A hog produces three gallons of waste per day. On a farm with 6,000 hogs, this amounts to 50 tons of raw sewage produced each day.

On the family farm, animal waste is a resource. It can be composted and turned into valuable fertilizer that replenishes the land. On factory farms animal waste is just that – waste. Unlike human sewage, animal waste has no requirements for treatment. According to the United States Department of Agriculture, 61 million tons of animal waste are produced each year in this country. That’s 130 times the waste produced by humans and the equivalent of 400 pounds of waste per person in the US. Waste from hogs has been a particular problem in the last two decades. It would be too expensive to process animal waste like human waste so instead it is put into waste lagoons – human made outdoor vats covering up to 12 acres.

Unfortunately, these lagoons are prone to leaks and breakage. Groundwater has been contaminated with bacteria from them. The lagoons can also be overrun by floods that push the waste into lakes, streams and oceans. North Carolina, with its concentration of factory farms, has been the focus of massive water contamination due to its waste lagoons.

One of the major contaminants in the waste is Pfisteria piscicida. This microorganism, actually a type of phytoplankton, feeds on the phosphorus and nitrogen that are abundant in manure. Pfisteria is a lethal toxin that is harmful to humans and fish. In North Carolina there have been numerous fish kills due to animal waste lagoons spilling out into waterways. The waste contains the Pfisteria which, when it gets into the waters causes ugly lesions on fish and kills them. In 1991 one billion fish were killed in this manor in the Neuse River in NC.

Fecal coliform bacteria also thrive in animal waste. When the waste leaks into streams the number of bacteria colonies skyrockets. For example, in 1997 streams were tested to have 424,000 colonies of bacteria in 100 mL of water (about one cup). The safe level of this bacteria in a stream is 200 colonies per 100 mL. These levels can be harmful to the fish and other lifeforms as well as being hazardous to humans.

Another way in which the waste in harmful to the environment is due to the tremendous amount of nutrients that it contains. When these nutrients get into our waterways they cause algae blooms. An algae bloom is an event that occurs when there is an excess of nutrients in the water. Algae feed on the nutrients and their numbers go up very quickly. The algae use up the oxygen in the water depriving the fish of oxygen that they need to survive. Many fish can die off in a short period of time when this occurs. One area on the Gulf of Mexico is now called the Dead Zone. It is the area where the Mississippi River empties into the Gulf and it is an area the size of Connecticut. Because of the algae blooms in this area, there is very little life there.

Another way that some factory farmers try to deal with animal waste is to spread it out over fields. This is a way to return nutrients to the land but the land can only absorb and decompose a certain amount of it. If an excess amount of waste is applied it simply leaches into the groundwater. Some agribusiness farmers do this anyway, because it is a cheap way of disposing of the waste. Accounts of dumping directly into waterways have been documented as well. This can contaminate groundwater with parasites, viruses and bacteria as well as with heavy metals that are found in the waste and become concentrated in the soil. Other contaminates include: e. coli, cryptosporidium, giarardia, cholera, streptococcus and chlamidia.

Giant agribusiness farms have left a trail of devastation in their wake: tainted waste overflowing into waterways and leaking into groundwater and massive fish kills among other things. Governments have bowed to business interests and allowed, often even encouraged, these businesses to exist. Now that their destruction is becoming better known in the east, agribusiness is moving on to new areas. More and more factory farms are being built in the Midwest and businesses are also looking further west, to Colorado and surrounding states for new places to build. We need to be vigilant and put restrictions in place to protect ourselves and our environment. We also need to let people know what is going on with our system of farming. For animals raised on small farms there are environmental issues as well. But factory farming has greatly exacerbated these issues and created new ones.

*The questions of whether cows are happy in the pasture and the environmental effects on the pasture will be discussed another time.

Sources: Earthsave.org, factoryfarm.org (Grace project), and nrdc.org (natural resources defense council)