Hog Wash

Just in case you needed something to help you enjoy that last weekend of 2006 check out this great article on the pork industry and how it's decimating the environment of the Southeast. And here's the environmental economics angle: if the prok producers actually had to pay to treat the millions of tons of toxic pig excrement they would lose money. Instead, they dump it into rivers largely untreated, killing millions of fish and destroying ecosystems. Happy New Year!!

Comments

[tom s.]

Damn those prok producers!

Actually, a fine article. I'm a regular reader as you always find things I am ignorant of (and some I wish I never knew, but that's another thing) - keep up the good work.

[joshua corning]

mmmmmmmm (drool drool) prrrooook (drool)

[allen claxton]

(I haven't read the full article yet, so I'm going to blindly flail into this regardless.)

I imagine that it's not just a matter of paying the full price, but also the limited ability of people to seek out alternatives. (Full price, of course, being a goad to do so.) Why aren't hog farmers looking to the excrement as an asset? Do the economics not work, or has it simply not been worked out yet? There's a guy in Illinois who collects waste from a couple of nearby hog farms for his own composting operation. Why isn't there a guy like that in the Southeast?

[J.S.]

allen- read the article- the sewage is super toxic- this is the largest industrial animal torture operation, I mean factory farm, in the country- really, read the article.

J.S.

[mark]

My PC won't allow me to paste a link into this comment field, but search for this:

EQIP Project Generates Some Real Energy (February 1, 2006) | NRCS This Week | NRCS

Hog farm creating electricity from manure.