Why aren't hog factory farming installations required to have on-sight waste water treatment facilities?

Whenever you come across anything as grossly disgusting as those monster hog factories or mountain top removal coal mining, you can be certain that something very sleazy has occurred politically. When I heard that Iowa was now a hot spot for county sized hog operations, my heart sank. Say what you will about liberals, but you’ll never find that sort of crap in a blue state.

Pig shit is drier than cow shit, and cows pee so much more. Other than that, I got nothin’!

Installing a wastewater treatment plant for pork farms would increase the cost of pork products to the point where nobody could afford them. It is impractical. I agree there must be a better way to handle it. And any way you put it, you still have to put the solid waste somewhere. Farmers have been putting manure back on the land for thousands of years.

Factory farms are unhealthy and cruel for the animals. It’s not that much more expensive to produce healthy ethically raised animals for slaughter (raised on grass), and the environmental impact is much more manageable.

The meat produced isn’t as flavorful as grass fed meat, and since factory farms add antibiotics into the animals’ feed as a matter of course, the meat isn’t as healthy as grass fed meat either.

We were just talking about this at Science Friday last week. Someone just wrote a book.

http://www.sciencefriday.com/segment/05/08/2015/tales-from-big-pig.html

We used to have a pigpen when I lived on the farm. It was about the size of my current bedroom and had six big pigs in it. It was actually about 100 meters from the well we got our drinking water from. Butchering one pig and two cows gave our family of four meat for a year. The other five pigs were sold.

So I think it is doable if you spread it out. And really, it wouldn’t be the end of the world if pork was the new lobster. A pound of peaches cost more than a pound of bacon.

Well, you can guess at how environmentally conscious these guys are by what’s down slope in the background of the manure cannon shot.

I’m a little confused. Manure has been used as fertilizer since the beginning of time. Sure a manure cannon sounds gross but would you rather store it at someplace like Yucca Mountain and use chemicals for fertilizer? I thought recycling was a liberal standard. Whether they build a waste water treatment facility or not, you still have to do something with the solid waste.

You all would complain if you were hung with a new rope. If you get rid of the farms, how are you going to feed all those people in the blue states?

It has to do with scale and volume of shit. Surely, we’ve all been on Fluther long enough to understand that.

We have about 970 million acres under the plow. It takes a lot of shit to fertilize that. Surely we’ve all been on Fluther long enough to realize that.

Logistics. Cost. sometimes too much shit happens in one place and it just doesn’t pay to distribute it. ‘This thread has been closed’... comes to mind.

@Jaxk You make a good point. The affluent treat rural America like 3rd world countries, and the folks stranded there are grateful for any economy, no matter how vile. I can gobble up all the sausage I want and never get a whiff of the stench and rain of turds descending on the once wholesome residents of Iowa.

Cost is the big barrier, in two ways. First is the cost of engineering design & construction, which could be considerable on a factory farm. Second is the continuing cost of governmental regulatory compliance.

The trouble is that all of that waste is concentrated in one spot. The folks responsible would give the stuff away, but it’s obvious no one wants it. There’s just entirely too much of it.

Yup. Science Friday was the inspiration for the question, @cazzie.

What an incredibly ignorant answer, @Jaxk. Just the kind of thinking that had clogged our waterways with human waste and decimated the large bird population in the US by the 1970’s. In human terms, your argument is akin to saying taller buildings just need deeper outhouses.
Just like a goddamn conservative to politicize an environmental issue and blindly favor greed big business over common sense.

What would a waste-water treatment facility cost? $10 million? That’s a dollar a hog for 5 years. Hardly going the ruin the economy. Bio-solids? Call the Poop Train!

@ibstubro – You should probably stick to the pig shit. You’re not very good at the financial analysis.

Easy guys. It’s a question of the total nutrient load and how many acres it’s spread over. Farms used to be smaller. We had 80 cows and 350 acres. These hog farms have a huge number of pigs over similar acreage. The amount of nitrogen in the manure exceeds what the plants can use, so the excess seeps into the groundwater. Plus the phosphorus runs off into the waterways, causing algae blooms, depleting the oxygen, or worse, feeding bacteria, some of which are nasty.

Antibiotic-resistant bacteria, @Adirondackwannabe, since the hogs are constantly fed low levels of antibiotics. And remember, hog physiology is close enough to human that hog heart valves are still used to replace faulty human heart valves.

I haven’t seen you analyze anything, @Jaxk. Admittedly confused and baseless claims based on perceived political leanings are more like it. Like being conservative precludes thoughtful discussion of environmental issues.

They also feed poultry and beef animals in feedlots lots of antibiotics. I try to buy locally from safe suppliers.

Yes, @Adirondackwannabe, almost all the meat I purchase comes from a local chain of markets that still have full-service butcher counters. Oddly, they’re also the cheapest meat in the area.
I have a hard time buying meat from Trader Joe’s, Whole Foods, or Lucky’s Market because there are all more than an hour away.

Hey guys- I’m quite conservative and a Christian to boot! Isn’t anyone going to blast me for my post above??? (It’s the third one down from the top.) Did I miss the boat?

Well, honestly, @snowberry, your answer was kind of schizo. You seem to be against waste-water treatment facilities for the reality of factory farms, and against the factory farms themselves.

In my area pork loin is $1.78 a pound at Sam’s Club, whole rib eye in the $8–10 range. There seems to be some room for environmental-driven price increase.

The reality is that industrial pig farming results in the unnatural collection of loads of shit in a small area. It needs to be managed for the welfare of the animals and the environment. If you haven’t listened to the Sci Fri show, please do.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intensive_pig_farming

http://www.pigresearchcentre.dk/Pig%20Production.aspx

Ah, thanks @ibstubro! I was wondering where the insults were! Fluther wouldn’t be fluther without ‘em!

Regardless of what solution is found, or IF one is found, someone’s going to be unhappy with it, and likewise there will always be a cost, either environmentally, cost-wise or health-wise. That’s for certain. As a population, the US eats waaay too much meat. My solution would produce a much healthier meat and far less load on the environment, but it would certainly drive the cost up far enough that some folks wouldn’t be able to afford much of it, which isn’t a bad thing, in my opinion. We could all stand to eat less meat.

The other option already mentioned in the question was to force the industry to build a wastewater treatment plant every where there was a factory farm. That also would vastly increase the cost of pork, and yet the health of the animals (and therefore the quality of the meat) would remain the same. This increase in cost would shut down the factory farms anyway because folks wouldn’t be able to buy their meat. Now THAT’S schitzo IMO, but that’s another discussion!

Unfortunately the US population is so entitled and so run by big business, we’ve got to have what we want when we want it, regardless of the consequences (it’s part of the American Way…) And for that reason I don’t see it happening.

Thanks, @cazzie.

Did I insult you @snowberry?