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Monday, September 20, 2010
Environment - "Opponents warn of dangers of hog industry growth Indiana's hog industry has grown -- but CAFO opponents from North Carolina warn Hoosiers wouldn't want it to reach the level seen in their state"
That is the headline to a major story by Seth Slabaugh in the Sept. 13, 2010 Muncie Star-Press. It begins:
MUNCIE -- Gov. Mitch Daniels' onetime goal of doubling Indiana's pork production hasn't happened. And that's lucky for Indiana residents and waterways, according to an environmental activist from North Carolina, where the result of a much larger inventory of hogs has been devastating."In one fish kill alone in three days we lost a billion fish on the Neuse River," Rick Dove of the Waterkeeper Alliance and the Neuse Riverkeeper Foundation told Hoosier CAFO opponents at a recent Indiana CAFO Watch conference in Muncie.
"If you have one or two CAFOs (concentrated animal feeding operations), you will probably have very few problems with the waterways and the air," Dove said. "But when you get to the point where you're producing fecal waste equivalent to 100 million people and dumping it on the ground ... then you've got people getting sick and fish dying."
Indiana hasn't had catastrophic fish kills from hog waste like North Carolina. But the severity of fish kills in East Central Indiana related to hog manure being applied to farm fields is on the rise, including 46,962 dead fish in Randolph County's Little Mississinewa River in 2008.
Much of the expansion in Indiana's pork industry since Daniels took office has occurred in East Central Indiana, with Jay and Randolph counties leading the state in new permits for swine CAFOs. When Daniels took office five years ago, he made a commitment to double pork production in Indiana; that goal has since been changed to 3 percent growth per year.
"If you keep building CAFOs, it (fish kills) will be in the hundreds of thousands and then millions, and then it will be in the billions," Dove said during the conference at the Unitarian Universalist Church.
Posted by Marcia Oddi on September 20, 2010 11:16 AM
Posted to Environment