NEAC

CAFOs

By Ken Midkiff
www.kenmidkiff.com

 

Let’s start out by talking about what a CAFO is. CAFO is an acronym.  These are the initials for Concentrated Animal Feeding Operation.  But, across most of the US, when you speak of CAFO, folks know what is meant.

People in some areas use the term CAYFO, others say CAHFO, but it is the same thing.  I say CAYFO.  State agencies – DNRs and DEQs – speak of CAYFOs. The US Environmental Protection Agency speaks of CAYFOs. Most states and the US EPA have regulations pertaining to CAFOs.  Due to pollution problems , some states such as North Carolina, aren’t allowing any more to come in – the state legislature imposed a moratorium.  Recently, a bill has been introduced in the North Carolina General Assembly to lift the moratorium, but ban cess pits and sprayfield.  The bill has wide bi-partisan support

That aside, there are some minor differences in the design, layout and operation for different animals, but two things are constant: The first things is that many animals – be they hogs, chickens or cows– are concentrated in small spaces.  The second thing is that hardly ever does the CAFO operator own the animals – a corporation owns the hogs and chickens. The grower merely contracts to grow the animals to a certain size – about 250 pounds for a hog and around 5 pounds for a chicken.

Beef steers are a bit different:  they spend most of their lives on pasture and then are fattened up for slaughter in feedlots with thousands of other steers.  Ranchers own the beef steers and pay the feedlot owner for their last few weeks.  The CAFO operator usually owns dairy cows, although the milk is sold under contract to a corporation.

Hogs are the worst offenders to people.  Hog manure stinks worse than any other manure and the odor travels for miles – making life miserable for rural residents who are unfortunately downwind.  Stink is the first problem and, as anyone who has taken a basic high-school science course knows, it is the compounds coming into contact with our nasal nerves that register as “bad smell” in our brains.  But, those compounds do something more than just smell bad – they cause all sorts of health problems, particularly among what is called “at-risk” populations: children, elders, and folks with existing respiratory problems.

Hogs are usually housed in buildings that contain about 1100 such creatures.  There are anywhere from 6 to 10 buildings in one operation.  All of those send hog urine and excrement to a “lagoon” – a cess pit.  The floors are slatted and the wastes go down onto a concrete floor that is flushed with water at regular intervals – each hour or several times a day. A different method is to have the cess pit directly under the confinement building, so that the wastes go right into the pit. No flushing.  These pits – whether open air or under-building – are designed so that they need be emptied out only twice a year or so.

It is waste handling that gives the operators of CAFOs the most problems.  Drains get clogged.  Waste pits get full at the wrong time of year – no waste application is allowed on frozen ground. Normally, the CAFO operator doesn’t have sufficient land space to dump or spray the wastes on – so a permanent easement is signed with neighbors.  The waste application sounds like a good deal:  the landowner gets free fertilizer and plenty of it.   But, most of these contracts don’t stipulate any sort of notification to the landowner nor any limitation as to amount, and, as noted. the contract creates a permanent easement.  Even when the land is sold or ownership transferred, that pesky spreading agreement goes along.

Proponents of hog CAFOs will proclaim that manure is the ideal fertilizer and they are right about that.  BUT, the way it comes out of CAFOs is not the traditional farmer’s way.   Similar to most things, moderation is a virtue.  A few hundred pounds of hog manure is good, a few million tons is bad.  But, the waste coming from hog CAFOs is measured in tons. A hog excretes about six pounds per day.  Multiply that times 180 days, then multiply that times the number of hogs in a CAFO (anywhere from 2499 to 100,000) and the amount of hog crap generated is huge – up to 108 million pounds per CAFO.  Twice a year.

There are two types of chicken CAFOs, but both are equally cruel and inhumane.  Broiler houses contain about 22000 birds.  That’s not too bad when they’re first put in as small chicks (best not to know what happens to the dead ones), but when these birds reach 2 pounds or so, then the house becomes rather crowded. That doesn’t last too long, though. A broiler chicken is hooked into small cages, placed in a big truck, and carried off to be slaughtered at the tender age of 7 weeks. Broiler houses’ floors are covered with “litter” (might be rice hulls, peanut shells, ground-up corncobs, straw, whatever is available) and the birds excrete into that.  The litter and chicken poop are cleaned out between flocks and the waste spread onto adjacent fields, several times a year, year after year.

The essence of human cruelty to sentient beings reaches its peak in buildings that house laying hens. Usually there are about 10000 or so in each building, with 10 hens per cage. While some buyers of eggs now stipulate that the cages must be large enough to allow the birds to turn around, this is scant improvement. The cages are stacked five high in pyramid fashion, so that the excrement from the top cage goes onto a metal “roof” over the cage directly below and so forth.  Water from above flushes the waste from all these cages into a central pit, where giant perforated paddles move the solids (including broken egg contents and shells) into an outside pit, where this mess is then land applied as so-called fertilizer.

Dairy cows, contrary to all those pretty pictures, are never allowed on a pasture.   Rather they spend their “free time” on concrete, eating and drinking from conveyor-belt troughs.  Twice a day the cow gets milked, with the milk being piped into a giant cooler where tank trucks back up and connect like suckling pigs.

A dairy cow excretes about 20 pounds per day.  Most corporate dairies contain 5000 cows, recently proposals have been made for dairies with up to 50,000 cows.  A lot of cows and a lot of manure.

While stink is the first complaint of those living and farming nearby, water pollution occurs after a few years of application of manure to the same fields. The waste is excessive and the excess runs off.  While too much nitrogen causes the “Dead Zone” in the Gulf of Mexico, phosphorous has the same effect on fresh water.  Nitrogen and phosphorous both promote massive algae growth – the algae dies off and in the process of decomposition uses up almost all of the oxygen in the water.  Fish and other aquatic life cannot live in water with low amounts of dissolved oxygen.

It is no accident that every stream and river in McDonald County, Missouri, is on the “impaired waterbody” list – also known as the 303(d) List since that is the section in the Clean Water Act that requires that each state list “impaired waterbodies”.  The waters of McDonald County don’t support aquatic life due to “excessive nutrients from animal agriculture”. McDonald County is almost totally dependent upon broiler and egg production. On any given day there are 13 million chickens and several hundred thousand turkeys in that county.  These birds belong to Tysons, MOARK/Land O’ Lakes, and Simmons and for at least 20 years these companies have been land applying chicken litter to the fields of McDonald County.

The immediate concern about CAFOs is stink; the long-term problem is with water quality. CAFOs pollute both air and water.

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