Alternatives for CAFO Waste Studied, Found Expensive
Indiana had about 3.5 million hogs in 2002, ranking it 5th in the nation for hog production - this is what the Daniels administration set out to remedy in its Possibilites Unbound: The Plan for 2025, a plan to double Indiana’s pork production over a 20 year time frame. Even if we can accomplish this, we would still be small potatoes next to North Carolina, which has over 10 million hogs.
Indiana can learn about issues caused by increased livestock production in condiment operations from where North Carolina is now. NC is almost reaching the end of its self-imposed hog farm moratorium (see Indiana Law Blog: Environment - Ten-year moratorium on new hog farms in North Carolina will end soon, with no viable solution in sight), a block that has fueled Indiana’s growth in hog farms as NC producers look for greener pastures.
North Carolina State University has just completed a 5 year study funded by big players in the hog industry of alternatives to dealing with hog waste. The generally accepted method of handling poop out of a confinement operation is to store it up, then spray it on or inject it into cropland. This method results in animal poop working its way into watersheds, and potentially ground water supplies as rain leaches it out of the fields, or it is flooded out of the lagoons.
John Whitehead over at the Environmental Economics Blog reports on the study, and notes that the research found the alternatives to be 2 to 5 times more expensive, putting it beyond the price range for most independent farms. The researches started with 17 proposed technologies, and whittled this list down to 5 feasible plans and then implemented the 5 technologies on existing hog farms:
WHAT WAS CHOSEN?A system for treating liquid waste, was designed by Super Soil Systems USA, which separates liquid waste from solids and treated treats it in a series of large tanks. A solid waste treatment system, also by Super Soil, ’s solid waste treatment system was also chosen. In that process, the which combines solids are combined with other materials, such as cotton gin residue or wood chips, into composts. A gasification process, which burns waste called gasification was chosen as a solid waste treatment. In this process, waste is burned in a low-oxygen environment, which converts converting organic compounds into gases, such as methane, carbon monoxide and hydrogen, which can be These gases can then be used to make ethanol. A burning process, known as Biomass Energy Sustainable Technology, or BEST, involves which burns burning the solid waste at temperatures above 1,300 degrees. A system is called ORBIT, in which uses microbes in an anaerobic digester to convert waste is converted to biogas, methane and carbon dioxide. by microbes in an anaerobic digester.
Link (Fayetteville Online).
The study was funded by the hog industry under an agreement with the NC attorney general:
Smithfield Foods provided $15 million to evaluate technologies, while the attorney general allocated $2.3 million from the Premium Standard Farms agreement, for a total of $17.3 million. In 2002 the attorney general entered a third agreement with Frontline Farmers, an organization made up swine farmers. While Frontline Farmers did not provide funding, the organization’s membership agreed to work with the attorney general and N.C. State University to develop and implement environmentally superior technologies.
More:
Or you can access the report :here
March 14th, 2006 09:22
I’m guessing the studies didn’t include the externalized costs of stench, health problems, and the like when considering how much each alternative actually cost.