Franken-Lies-And-the-Lying-Liars-Who-Tell

Twenty years ago, the hogs produced in this country were raised by family farmers.
Today, three companies produce 60 percent of all the hogs in America. And they do it in factory
farms, or CAFOs: Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations.
Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations are, perforce, Concentrated Animal Shitting
Operations. Every hog produces ten times as much feces as a human being. Imagine if you
produced ten times as much shit as you do right now. You'd probably be able to read this entire
book on the can, instead of just this one chapter. A single CAFO in Utah is home to
850,000 hogs, producing as much shit as the city of New York. New York City has fourteen
sewage treatment plants. CAFOs have none. This presents something of a problem.
In order to dispose of hog waste, farmers have, since time immemorial, used it as fertilizer.
It's a nice idea. The pig eats an ear of corn and, two or three minutes later, takes a
dump. The shit is then used as fertilizer to grow more corn, which is then fed to the pig, producing
more shit, and so on and so forth. It's the circle of life. The concentration of hundreds
of thousands of animals in a small area has disrupted this delicate balance by overloading the
shit side of the equation. The waste from a hundred thousand pigs cannot be recycled in the
same way. This is where our lagoons come into play.
A typical factory farm lagoon holds anywhere from five to twenty-five million gallons
of untreated pig shit. As you might imagine, it smells a bit. In fact, according to pilots,
you can smell a CAFO shit lagoon from an altitude of three thousand feet. The smell also
travels horizontally. People lucky enough to live in the vicinity of an industrial hog farm are,
with each breath, made keenly aware of the cause of their declining property values. If you
live downwind of a CAFO, the value of your property drops thirty percent. If you drink a
glass of orange juice, it tastes like hog shit.
"I've seen grown men cry because their homes stank," says Don Webb, a very sad retired
hog farmer.
The shit stink is exacerbated by the practice of spraying excess shit into the air and
onto fields of Bermuda grass when the lagoons threaten to overflow. The industry maintains
that spraying the shit onto Bermuda grass is a productive way of recycling the sewage, although
the grass is so toxic that it will kill any animal that eats it. At any rate, most of the
sprayed shit just goes into the environment, seeping into the groundwater, into the air, and
into rivers and streams.