Downwind in Mississippi - hog farming

Sierra, March, 2001 by Marilyn Berlin Snell

The struggle to keep a community from going to the hogs

Everett Kennard is hard to read. A fifth-generation Mississippi farmer, he lives on Kennard Road with his family, just up the hill from his folks, Boswell and Margaret. He has thick, strong arms; a hefty championship football ring; and a reddish-brown crewcut, prickly as cut grass. He keeps his arms folded in front of him when he talks and has a smile nowhere in evidence.

So it comes as a shock, as I sit one sweltering morning in his lawn swing, when he chokes up describing the bouts of asthma his son Keyes has been through since a massive hog facility opened half a mile from their home in 1997. "The hardest thing I've ever had to endure as a parent," says Kennard, "is watching my son trying to get air, and he can't." Kennard adds that though his 19-year-old has always had asthma, it got much worse after Bill Cook Swine set up shop next door. The 52-year-old Kennard is now battling Cook, a childhood friend who lives 13 miles from his concentrated animal feeding operation, or CAFO. They have taken their feud all the way to the Mississippi Supreme Court, which ruled that Cook needed an air-quality permit from the state's Department of Environmental Quality, in addition to the water-quality permit he already had, in order to operate. The DEQ has not yet enforced the 1998 decision, and the facility continues to run full bore. "I'm sorry to say it, but I'm selfish," says Kennard. "This wasn't a `let's clean up the environment' issue for us. It was a health issue."

The Kennards aren't alone in their fight against factory farming, which took hold in 1996 when Prestage Farms--a major North Carolina-based pork producer and broker--began contracting with Mississippi farmers to raise hogs. Residents who live near the state's 63 CAFOs (60 of which contract with Prestage Farms) have complained of the unholy stench as well as possible health and environmental risks.

Their concerns appear to be well founded. A study by the Iowa Center for Agricultural Safety and Health discovered that the air surrounding CAFOs contains concentrated amounts of more than 160 compounds, including hydrogen sulfide, ammonia, organic acids, phenols, and alcohols. According to research by the Mississippi Department of Health, acute exposure to high levels of hydrogen sulfide can cause loss of consciousness and even death. The report adds that symptoms associated with high levels of ammonia exposure include "severe irritation of the eyes, respiratory tract, and skin." The Iowa study found high rates of respiratory problems among the people who live near facilities with 4,000 hogs or more. The Kennards live next to 7,000 hogs.

In George Orwell's Animal Farm, the head hog sums up the pig's lot: "Let us face it," he says, trying to raise an animal army against his inhumane warders, "our lives are miserable, laborious, and short." This revolutionary pig's 12-year life was hog heaven compared to that of his factory-farmed brethren today: From the moment a piglet is born until the 250-plus-pound hog is sent off to slaughter spans all of six months. For the entire time, the animal is confined in an 8-by-2.5-foot metal pen with slatted concrete flooring. It is fed constantly with antibiotic-laced meal that speeds growth and fights off disease. Its waste, up to ten pounds per day, drops through the slats where it collects before being periodically pumped into open-air cesspools.

The facility near the Kennards has eight fully enclosed metal buildings resembling airplane hangars, which hold around 880 hogs each. Massive fans, six to an enclosure, blow air out and directly across the six-acre cesspool. The animals here produce around 35 tons of excrement a day, which roils in its own gases in the cesspool before some of it is sprayed, untreated, onto nearby hay fields owned by Cook. The day I drive by the highly mechanized facility the gates are locked and the place is still, inanimate. There is movement, however, in the spray field, where a sprinkler is shooting liquefied hog effluent 20 feet into the air. According to several Oktibbeha County residents present, the smell of this day's issue is relatively minor, since the wind is northwesterly and hits us at our backs. Even so, the stink makes me gag.

The Kennards live northwest of Cook's hog barns, cesspool, and hay fields. A barbed-wire fence separates their land. Marking the boundary between the cesspool and the hay fields is Browning Creek, which flows past the Kennards and on through Cook's property before it feeds into the 43,000-acre Noxubee National Wildlife Refuge just across a dirt road from Bill Cook Swine. Environmentalists have expressed concern that the earthen bank of the cesspool will not withstand the 25-year flood the National Weather Service anticipates for the Noxubee area. To date, there have been no catastrophes; but then again, since the facility was built there hasn't been a quarter-century flood.

In the spring, crabapple, wild plum, and dogwood bloom in the refuge. In May, alligators rouse in Noxubee's swamps and lakes. In August, when I visit, cattle egrets nest in massive cypress tree canopies. Every evening in the fall, close to 30,000 egrets fly in from surrounding fields at sunset to bed down for the night. They come in feathery waves, their white silhouettes flickering on the water. When the egrets pass close, and they often do, you can hear their wings beat.