Stinky poop on the way to the beach

When you drive to the beach in NC you go through pig country:

With 10.1 million swine, North Carolina is the second-largest pork producer in the nation. The farms produce large amounts of manure and urine, which are flushed from barns into open-air waste ponds and later applied to fields as fertilizer. The lagoons have polluted waterways when they flooded and angered neighbors concerned about their health.

Last week, researchers at NCSU were set to "announce five new technologies for cleaning up hog waste that could help resolve concerns over environmental waste from lagoons." The rest of the article (click on the continuation link) compares the low cost of the current treatment plan (stinky, fish kills, etc.) with the high cost of the cleaner alternatives. The suggestion is made that the alternatives are considered too expensive by the hog farms. We call this "internalizing the negative externality." (I know that there was some benefits work done in addition to the costs, but I haven't heard much mention of a comparison.)

The research took five years and was paid for by pork producers Smithfield Foods and Kansas City, Mo.-based Premium Standard Farms Inc. under a 2000 agreement with the N.C. Attorney General's Office.

Under the agreement, Smithfield Foods provided $15 million for the project and agreed to implement the new technologies on all of its company-owned farms. Premium Standard Farms gave $2.3 million.

State officials will determine if independent hog farmers are to switch from the old lagoons and spray fields to a single alternative method or a combination of the new systems.

Concerns have already been raised about the affordability of the alternatives.

They appear to cost two to five times as much as the lagoon and spray-field methods. The developers of two technologies have been given time to refine their processes and try to cut costs.

Neither method, however, is as cheap as digging a waste pond and spraying hog urine into fields as fertilizer.

Comments

[Duncan Brown]

John,

Are you asking me to quantify the benefit? You know how innumerate I am. Isn't that your job? (You could at least rough out an extimate, I bet.)

Surely someone has thought out (the costs of current hog waste techniques).

[J.S.]

Better situation- stop eating pork and let's tax meat producers for their true externalities so that pork prices reflect the immense damage these obscene operations (that dump their waste in rivers evertime there is a flood) inflict.

[Duncan Brown]

Yes, JS, but how big a tax would it take?

[Hanns-Andre Pitot]

Farmers could also use the good old method of using bedding when raising these pigs. Under these conditions, there wouldn't be any liquid manure, but solid manure that couldn't get into water bodies.