In Battle of Noses, Hog Farms Lose Too Often

When asked how they endure the odors associated with their work, hog farmers once had a standard answer: "Because it smells like money." Today, however, livestock odor problems--real and imagined--are giving a whiff of bankruptcy to many American farmers, and that's not good news for rural communities and Midwest states that depend upon a strong agricultural economy.

Concerns about hog smells have idled hog operations from North Carolina to Colorado, though this isn't just a problem unique to the American heartland. Even in the Netherlands, hog farmers are going out of business due to protests from suburban neighbors.

Ironically, in this war of the noses, the casualties are frequently newer facilities that would control odors more effectively than the older facilities they would replace.

While the odor of hog manure hasn't changed since the days when many of our great-grandparents owned hogs of their own, the ways of handling it have. New technology is being developed all the time to mitigate porcine pungency. Even the fussiest neighbors would be quite surprised at the advances.

Today, manure spreaders for farm fields can inject the manure into the soil and scrape a thin cover over it. The valuable nitrogen stays in the ground to encourage plant growth, instead of venting into the air. An hour after the application a person walking in the field smells only the newly turned earth.

Engineering can build earth dams and multi-stage lagoons that help control odor. So much so, in fact, that a Georgia farmer recently built a new house, and swimming pool, just 200 yards from his hogs. And there is no odor!

The new lagoons can also incorporate such industrial crops as duckweed. Duckweed is an aquatic plant that grows wild all over the world. It can float on the surface of a hog lagoon and form a sort of living green carpet that seals off the odor. It also converts the nutrients of the manure into lush fodder for cattle and hogs.

Odor or not, however, the question remains: why should a local community in Illinois, Iowa, or Kansas care if any new hogs facilities ever get built? The answer is: economic growth. Consider the following.

A 1995 study by the University of Minnesota found that federal programs to idle cropland for wheat, feed grains, rice, and cotton has reduced rural non-farm population by 30 percent since 1950. Much of this lost population would have been engaged in storing, processing, and transporting crops. Likewise, hogs not raised don't need new buildings, transportation, or processing.

Hog production is an important job generator in many Midwestern states. The University of Missouri projects that an additional 80,000 well-managed sows per year in the Show-Me state could create another 2,700 permanent jobs, and $200 million per year in personal income--primarily in rural areas that have previously lost population.

Today pork production offers perhaps an unprecedented opportunity. Due to economic expansion and population growth in Asia, demand for pork is increasing like never before. In fact, experts predict that in the next 35 to 40 years, we'll have to quadruple, or more, the approximately 875 million hogs now on Earth. That's why new and expanded hog production facilities are being built in Australia, Canada, Mexico, South America, and, when opposition is overcome, in the U.S. And as they're built, new jobs and economic growth are being created.

When residents of rural and suburban communities reject new, environmentally friendly hog farms because of imagined odor problems, they are turning away more jobs and opportunities than they realize. Maybe they need to stop turning up their noses long enough to see the economic bonanza that lies behind every pig.

David Juday is an adjunct scholar at the Kansas Public Policy Institute and an adjunct fellow at the Hudson Institute's Center for Global Food Issues.