Merits of large-scale hog operations hotly debated

A motorist crossing Iowa, the nation's leading hog-producing state, would be hard-pressed to lay eyes on even one of the more than 19 million swine raised here each year.

That's because almost all of them are confined in specialized buildings that have transformed livestock production in the past 20 years.

Producers like Todd Wiley of rural Walker, who raises more than 25,000 pigs each year in 11 confinement buildings, say the system maximizes efficiency, yielding low-cost, high-quality protein for world consumers.

Close neighbors of hog confinements like Jayne Clampitt of rural Independence say pig factories foul air and water, ruining the country lifestyle that she and her family once enjoyed.

State regulators like Gene Tinker, coordinator of Animal Feeding Operations for the Department of Natural Resources, say confinements are friendlier to the environment than the open feedlots they replaced.

But environmentalists like the Iowa Sierra Club's Steve Veysey say more regulation is needed to keep pig manure out of Iowans' water.

While pork producers take their critics seriously, red ink has supplanted manure as the producers' most troublesome byproduct. Since September 2007, pork producers have lost an average of $21 on each hog marketed, and the outlook may not improve until the end of next year, according to the Iowa Pork Producers Association.

Contributing factors include increases in the cost of the industry's principal input, corn, and dropping demand caused by the worldwide recession and a curtailment of exports. Countries such as China have used H1N1 (commonly called swine flu) as a pretext to halt imports, said Ron Birkenholz, the association's communications director.

Such losses would have been less painful in the pre-confinement era, when as many as 60,000 diversified Iowa farmers raised hogs, often getting in and out of the business in response to the market. Today, with barely more than 8,000 Iowa pig farms, most of them raising thousands of pigs per year, getting out is much less of an option.

“We can't let buildings worth millions of dollars sit empty, and we have contractual obligations to packers and people who own some of the buildings,” said Wiley, 41. “We will keep going to the bitter end.”

Rather than shrinking to cut losses, the industry in Iowa has continued to expand, in part because of the increasing value of hog manure as fertilizer.

In 2008, a year in which pork producers lost money, the state issued 194 permits for the construction or expansion of animal feeding operations - the third-highest annual total since the state started licensing animal feeding operations in 1986. In recent years, however, for each confinement building requiring a construction permit, almost three others have been built below the 2,500-market-hogs-per-year threshold that triggers the requirement.

“At least some of those are attempts to avoid regulations,” said Tom McCarthy, a senior environmental specialist with the DNR. “It's definitely a loophole in the law.”

McCarthy and Tinker say confinements are less prone to water pollution than the open feedlots they replaced.

“I don't have documented evidence to prove it, but I firmly believe water quality is better because we don't have rain cleaning our hog lots,” Tinker said.

Wiley said rain never falls directly on the manure generated by his hogs. It's stored in concrete enclosures beneath the slatted floors of the buildings until it is knifed into the soil to a depth of 4 to 6 inches, he said.

“We are not the exception. This is the rule. We want safe water for our families,” he said.

Having raised hogs the old-fashioned way in open feedlots, Wiley sees great advantages in confinement hog production - a system that lends itself to intense management and yields economies of scale that maximize profits during favorable market conditions.

The system's efficiency is obvious in terms of pigs per sow per year. “In the old days, we used to average two litters of about nine piglets per year. Now we get 2.4 litters of 12 piglets,” Wiley said.

Wiley said he takes care in selecting sites for new buildings, conferring with potential neighbors to forestall future conflicts.

Critics cite odor, siting

Jayne Clampitt, who smells hog manure 70 percent of the time at her rural Independence home, wishes her neighbors were as solicitous.

“I feel like a prisoner in my own home,” said Clampitt, 40, who lives with her husband, Greg, and their three children on a hobby farm in Buchanan County's Westburg Township, which is also home to seven hog confinements that raise more than 100,000 pigs a year.

The seventh - erected in the fall of 2007 just a half mile from Clampitt's home and within 500 feet of the Crumbacher Wildlife Area - drove her into anti-confinement activism, Clampitt said.

“I started speaking out in favor of clean water and fresh air,” said Clampitt, who testified last year in Washington before the Pew Commission on Industrial Farm Animal Production, which asserted that livestock confinements adversely affect public health, the environment, animal welfare and rural communities.

Clampitt, who moved to Westburg Township 16 years ago when only a few thousand hogs lived there, also has lobbied the Iowa Legislature - unsuccessfully - to close the loophole in state law that allowed Donny Strauel, owner of DJS Farms in Jesup, to build a hog confinement building 500 feet from Crumbacher Wildlife Area.

“It's worse than skunk - you feel like it's on your skin and in your mouth,” said the former farm girl who raises 30 beef cattle a year and is not categorically averse to manure.

Clampitt said the pervasive unpleasant smell, combined with the hostility of neighbors since she began speaking out, has forced her family to consider leaving the home in which they have heavily invested.

Iowa Citizens for Community Improvement, one of the more persistent critics of factory farms, has urged the Legislature to tighten rules governing the siting of hog confinements.

Local input and water-quality issues should be more heavily weighted in such decisions, said the group's spokesman, David Goodner of Iowa City.

“Separation distances need to be increased, ideally up to a mile of a neighboring residence,” Goodner said.

In an effort to avert tighter rules, the Coalition to Support Iowa's Farmers helps and encourages livestock producers to be good neighbors, said its executive director, Aaron Putze.

The coalition, which has helped nearly 1,000 Iowa farmers since 2004, emphasizes selecting good locations for livestock operations, implementing environmental safeguards to protect air and water quality, following applicable rules and regulations, and enhancing relations with neighbors, Putze said.

Water quality a concern

Conservationist-farmer Paul Johnson of Decorah, a member of the Iowa Environmental Protection Commission, said he believes less manure enters Iowa's water in the confinement era than in the era of open feedlots.

“But we still have a whole lot of nitrogen from animal manure and a long way to go to convert it to good use,” said Johnson, a former chief of the Iowa Department of Natural Resources and the U.S. Natural Resources and Conservation Service.

The weakest link in modern manure management, he said, is the application of manure to crop fields in early spring and late fall “when the ground is most vulnerable.”

The matrix of drainage tile beneath the fields and the absence of plant roots to absorb nutrients, combined with the heavy rains that often occur in spring and fall, make the practice tantamount to “spreading manure within a few feet of a creek,” Johnson said.

Former legislator David Osterberg of Mount Vernon, an associate professor in the University of Iowa department of occupational and environmental health, doubts that the industrialization of hog production has improved the quality of Iowa's water, which he describes as “bad and not getting better.”

It won't improve, he said, until the state more stringently regulates the size and density of confinement operations and the application of manure to the land.

The Sierra Club's Veysey said the state's water is the common property of all Iowans, and its protection must take precedence over the interest of individual businesses.