Molly Ivins May 31

AUSTIN, Texas — The porcine effluent problem inspires my fellow scribes to great heights of creativity:

"Manure happens. Two trillion, 730 million pounds of it every year." — John Lang, Scripps Howard News Service

"To some, it may seem humorously appropriate to have a national manure summit on Capitol Hill." — Eunice Moscoso, Austin American- Statesman

"It's a rare salesman who can keep a straight face while he tells you that pig shit doesn't stink." — Robert Bryce, The Texas Observer

OK, so the subject of manure brings out bathroom humor in the best of us. It's still a problem.

Try this: According to a Senate study, a single 50,000-acre hog farm now being built in Utah could produce more sewage than the city of Los Angeles. Except that there aren't any treatment plants on hog farms. These giant hog factories, many of them Japanese-owned, are spreading across the country, stinking to high heaven in Missouri and elsewhere.

But environmental activists are taking them on. According to The New York Times, a county in Kentucky has banned them at least temporarily, and as many as 20 counties in Kansas have voted in referendums against allowing these farms.

Naturally, many of them are moving to Texas. Ochiltree County, up at the top of the Panhandle, is expected to produce 1 million pigs a year within two years. According to The Texas Observer, Texas Farm has a $200 million expansion program there — more than 105 pigs for every man, woman and child in the county. Almost all the hogs will be exported to Japan. Nippon Meat Packers ($4.9 billion in revenue last year), Murphy Family Farms (a major misnomer, given that Murphy is America's largest pork producer), Premium Standard Farms, Vall Inc. and Seaboard Farms all have facilities in Texas and are planning to expand them either here or elsewhere.

Havin' a pig or two around the place is a fine thing; they make nice noises and are very intelligent. But hog factories really are factories, and because of the pollution they produce, they need to be regulated just as much as chemical plants, oil refineries and coal-fired power plants. It appears that farms have replaced factories as the big polluters of the nation's waterways, according to the Environmental Protection Agency's 1994 National Water Quality Inventory.

As often happens with ag issues, the corporate factory farms are hiding behind the family farmer, stirring up various farm organizations to claim that regulation will "drive the family farmer out of business." When you're looking at as many as 250,000 hogs on one farm, you are not necessarily looking at a "family farm." In fact, the hog factories are driving family farmers out of business.

According to the publication BioCycle, 30 years ago, there were a million hog farms in the country — now, there are only 160,000.

In 1996, there were fewer than 5,000 hog operations that kept 2,000 or more head, but those farms accounted for more than half of the 57 million hogs produced.

Sen. Tom Harkin of Iowa has introduced a bill that would give the Agriculture Department regulatory authority over manure treatment and its use as fertilizer. The livestock and poultry industries are against it whole hog.

Meanwhile, the EPA has come up with a less stringent plan. The administration proposes a far-reaching strategy to protect the waterways from manure pollution, but it will require years of debate before real restrictions are in place. According to a study by Harkin, as reported by the Associated Press, in 1996, there were 40 manure spills just in Iowa, Missouri and Minnesota, killing hundreds of thousands of fish. That was twice as many spills as in 1992 for those states.

The Harkin report also found that the amount of animal manure produced in the United States is 130 times greater than the amount of human waste — 5 tons of animal droppings for every single American. And there are no national standards for dealing with it. When you think of the strict sewage treatment standards that cities have to meet, it's just ridiculous to allow animal waste to go untreated and pollute the rivers, lakes and streams.

True, most animal waste appears one plop at a time, spread over vast tracts of land. But the manure piled up around cattle feedlots, huge poultry barns and hog factories is extremely dangerous. According to EPA tests reported by John Lang, feedlot manure containing fecal coliform bacteria has contaminated the ground water in 17 states. Harkin's report pointed out that the "dead zone" in the Gulf of Mexico — 7,000 square miles that cannot support most aquatic life — is now linked to agricultural runoff.

A story broken last year by the Seattle Times provides another reason for concern about fertilizer runoff. It turns out that manufacturing industries are disposing of hazardous wastes by turning them into fertilizer. Low-level radioactive waste, dangerous chemicals, heavy metals, arsenic, cadmium, lead, dioxin — all of it is being put into fertilizer. Again, there are no federal regulations, reporting requirements or labeling requirements.

CROW EATEN HERE: All of which reminds me of a whopper of a mistake I made a few months ago in discussing the pesticide problem. I said that farmers were using more than a ton of pesticide per acre. Uh, actually, that's probably closer to 1 ton per square mile, averaging around 2.7 pounds per acre per year. Thanks to all who wrote in about it.

Molly Ivins is a columnist for the Fort Worth Star-Telegram. To find out more about Molly Ivins and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate web page at www.creators.com.

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