NY Times, October 17, 1999 Hurricane Reveals Flaws in Farm Law By PETER T. KILBORN KENANSVILLE, N.C. -- In the aftermath of Hurricane Floyd, loose regulations that helped eastern North Carolina become the nation's biggest producer of turkeys and the second biggest of hogs have come back to haunt the state's public health and its environment. Officials say that the September storm that hit the region harder than anywhere else, killing 48 people and leaving behind more than $1 billion in largely inescapable damage, also left a vast amount of damage that might have been averted: incalculable and continuing hazards in ground water, wells and rivers from animal waste, mostly from giant hog farms. For years, farmers had been free to build hog and poultry operations as big as they wanted and wherever they liked. They were allowed to dig huge pits for animal waste, without regard to the water table or the health and sensibilities of neighbors. In the hurricane, feces and urine soaked the terrain and flowed into rivers from the overburdened waste pits the industry calls lagoons. The storm killed more than two million turkeys, chickens and livestock in the region, and waste from the farms is expected to keep leaching into the water supply until next spring. "We do have a practical problem here," Gov. James B. Hunt Jr. said. Normally by mid-October, Hunt said, farmers would have reduced the levels of waste in the lagoons, where it evolves naturally into nutrients that are sprayed on crops. But the lagoons are brimming with flood-bloated waste, and there is less use for it now. The growth of crops slows in the fall, and many fields have been saturated or rendered fallow by the storm. [On Thursday the State Department of Environment and Natural Resources announced an "emergency waste management strategy" for hog and poultry farms in an effort to keep waste out of the water supply. The agency is allowing farmers to spread waste to more fields, but it prohibited reconstruction of severely hurricane-damaged waste lagoons in the flood plain. In the current soaked condition of the land, some waste sprayed on the fields will spread. "We recognize this policy could contribute to water quality problems through the winter," said Bill Holman, the state's assistant secretary for environmental protection. "There are so many swine operations we have a long way to go."] (Clip) Full story at: http://www.nytimes.com/library/national/101799floyd-environment.html Louis Proyect (The Marxism mailing list: http://www.panix.com/~lnp3/marxism.html)
