GardenBanter.co.uk - View Single Post - Energy, health care, agriculture, climate change, global outbreaks like swine flu

Billy[_7_] · 15-05-2009, 08:10 PM posted to rec.gardens.edible

In article
. easynews.com,
Steve wrote:

On Fri, 15 May 2009 09:21:25 -0500, wrote:

Hogs are housed in
buildings which limit the entrance of "wild type" bacteria and viruses,
mostly by
preventing outside disease carrying animals from getting in to the areas so
they are
much more likely to NOT have disease and much more likely to be healthy
(stress
aside)

Despite the facts that pigs reach slaughter weight in less than six
months and their diet is laced with drugs to control disease, 13.7% of
them die before slaughter because of the poor conditions and harsh
treatment.

Hogs produce three times more excrement than human beings do. The
500,000 pigs at a single Smithfield subsidiary in Utah generate more
fecal matter each year than the 1.5 million inhabitants of Manhattan.
The best estimates put Smithfield's total waste discharge at 26
million tons a year. That would fill four Yankee Stadiums. Even when
divided among the many small pig production units that surround the
company's slaughterhouses, that is not a containable amount.

Smithfield estimates that its total sales will reach $11.4 billion
this year. So prodigious is its fecal waste, however, that if the
company treated its effluvia as big-city governments do -- even if it
came marginally close to that standard -- it would lose money. So many
of its contractors allow great volumes of waste to run out of their
slope-floored barns and sit blithely in the open, untreated, where the
elements break it down and gravity pulls it into groundwater and river
systems. Although the company proclaims a culture of environmental
responsibility, ostentatious pollution is a linchpin of Smithfield's
business model.

A lot of pig shit is one thing; a lot of highly toxic pig shit is
another. The excrement of Smithfield hogs is hardly even pig shit: On
a continuum of pollutants, it is probably closer to radioactive waste
than to organic manure. The reason it is so toxic is Smithfield's
efficiency. The company produces 6 billion pounds of packaged pork
each year. That's a remarkable achievement, a prolificacy unimagined
only two decades ago, and the only way to do it is to raise pigs in
astonishing, unprecedented concentrations.

Smithfield's pigs live by the hundreds or thousands in warehouse-like
barns, in rows of wall-to-wall pens. Sows are artificially inseminated
and fed and delivered of their piglets in cages so small they cannot
turn around. Forty fully grown 250-pound male hogs often occupy a pen
the size of a tiny apartment. They trample each other to death. There
is no sunlight, straw, fresh air or earth. The floors are slatted to
allow excrement to fall into a catchment pit under the pens, but many
things besides excrement can wind up in the pits: afterbirths, piglets
accidentally crushed by their mothers, old batteries, broken bottles
of insecticide, antibiotic syringes, stillborn pigs -- anything small
enough to fit through the foot-wide pipes that drain the pits. The
pipes remain closed until enough sewage accumulates in the pits to
create good expulsion pressure; then the pipes are opened and
everything bursts out into a large holding pond.

The temperature inside hog houses is often hotter than ninety degrees.
The air, saturated almost to the point of precipitation with gases
from shit and chemicals, can be lethal to the pigs. Enormous exhaust
fans run twenty-four hours a day. The ventilation systems function
like the ventilators of terminal patients: If they break down for any
length of time, pigs start dying.

From Smithfield's point of view, the problem with this lifestyle is
immunological. Taken together, the immobility, poisonous air and
terror of confinement badly damage the pigs' immune systems. They
become susceptible to infection, and in such dense quarters microbes
or parasites or fungi, once established in one pig, will rush
spritelike through the whole population. Accordingly, factory pigs are
infused with a huge range of antibiotics and vaccines, and are doused
with insecticides. Without these compounds -- oxytetracycline,
draxxin, ceftiofur, tiamulin -- diseases would likely kill them. Thus
factory-farm pigs remain in a state of dying until they're
slaughtered. When a pig nearly ready to be slaughtered grows ill,
workers sometimes shoot it up with as many drugs as necessary to get
it to the slaughterhouse under its own power. As long as the pig
remains ambulatory, it can be legally killed and sold as meat.

The drugs Smithfield administers to its pigs, of course, exit its hog
houses in pig shit. Industrial pig waste also contains a host of other
toxic substances: ammonia, methane, hydrogen sulfide, carbon monoxide,
cyanide, phosphorous, nitrates and heavy metals. In addition, the
waste nurses more than 100 microbial pathogens that can cause illness
in humans, including salmonella, cryptosporidium, streptocolli and
girardia. Each gram of hog shit can contain as much as 100 million
fecal coliform bacteria.

Smithfield's holding ponds -- the company calls them lagoons -- cover
as much as 120,000 square feet. The area around a single
slaughterhouse can contain hundreds of lagoons, some of which run
thirty feet deep. The liquid in them is not brown. The interactions
between the bacteria and blood and afterbirths and stillborn piglets
and urine and excrement and chemicals and drugs turn the lagoons pink.

Even light rains can cause lagoons to overflow; major floods have
transformed entire counties into pig-shit bayous. To alleviate
swelling lagoons, workers sometimes pump the shit out of them and
spray the waste on surrounding fields, which results in what the
industry daintily refers to as "overapplication." This can turn
hundreds of acres -- thousands of football fields -- into shallow mud
puddles of pig shit. Tree branches drip with pig shit.

Some pig-farm lagoons have polyethylene liners, which can be punctured
by rocks in the ground, allowing shit to seep beneath the liners and
spread and ferment. Gases from the fermentation can inflate the liner
like a hot-air balloon and rise in an expanding, accelerating bubble,
forcing thousands of tons of feces out of the lagoon in all
directions.
The lagoons themselves are so viscous and venomous that if someone
falls in it is foolish to try to save him. A few years ago, a truck
driver in Oklahoma was transferring pig shit to a lagoon when he and
his truck went over the side. It took almost three weeks to recover
his body. In 1992, when a worker making repairs to a lagoon in
Minnesota began to choke to death on the fumes, another worker dived
in after him, and they died the same death. In another instance, a
worker who was repairing a lagoon in Michigan was overcome by the
fumes and fell in. His fifteen-year-old nephew dived in to save him
but was overcome, the worker's cousin went in to save the teenager but
was overcome, the worker's older brother dived in to save them but was
overcome, and then the worker's father dived in. They all died in pig
shit.

The chairman of Smithfield Foods, Joseph Luter III, is a funny, jowly,
canny, barbarous guy who lives in a multimillion-dollar condo on Park
Avenue in Manhattan and conveys himself about the planet in a
corporate jet and a private yacht. At sixty-seven, he is unrepentant
in the face of criticism. He describes himself as a "tough man in a
tough business" and his factories as wholly legitimate products of the
American free market. He can be sardonic; he likes to mock his critics
and rivals.

"The animal-rights people," he once said, "want to impose a
vegetarian's society on the U.S. Most vegetarians I know are
neurotic." When the Environmental Protection Agency cited Smithfield
for thousands of violations of the Clean Water Act, Luter responded by
comparing what he claimed were the number of violations the company
could theoretically have been charged with (2.5 million, by his
calculation) to the number of documented violations up to that point
(seventy-four). "A very, very small percent," he said.

Wow. What a great post :O)
--

- Billy
"For the first time in the history of the world, every human being
is now subjected to contact with dangerous chemicals, from the
moment of conception until death." - Rachel Carson

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=En2TzBE0lp4

http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/1050688.html