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to Pork's

Dirty Secret: The nation's top hog producer is also one of America's worst

polluters

Boss Hog

America's top

pork producer churns out a sea of waste that has destroyed rivers, killed

millions of fish and generated one of the largest fines in EPA history. Welcome

to the dark side of the other white meat.

JEFF TIETZ

field Foods, the largest and

most profitable pork processor in the world, killed 27 million hogs last year.

That's a number worth considering. A slaughter-weight hog is fifty percent

heavier than a person. The logistical challenge of processing that many pigs

each year is roughly equivalent to butchering and boxing the entire human

populations of New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Houston, Philadelphia, Phoenix,

San , San Diego, Dallas, San , Detroit, Indianapolis, ville,

San Francisco, Columbus, Austin, Memphis, Baltimore, Fort Worth, Charlotte, El

Paso, Milwaukee, Seattle, Boston, Denver, Louisville, Washington, D.C.,

Nashville, Las Vegas, Portland, Oklahoma City and Tucson.

field Foods actually faces a more difficult

task than transmogrifying the populations of America's thirty-two largest cities

into edible packages of meat. Hogs produce three times more excrement than

human beings do. The 500,000 pigs at a single field

subsidiary in Utah generate more fecal matter

each year than the 1.5 million inhabitants of Manhattan. The best estimates put field'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.

field

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 field's business model.

A lot of pig shit is one thing; a lot of highly

toxic pig shit is another. The excrement of field 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 field'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.

field'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 field'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 field

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.

field'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 field Foods, ph 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 field 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.

Luter grew up butchering hogs in his father's

slaughterhouse, in the town of field,

Virginia. When he took over the family business forty years ago, it was a

local, marginally profitable meatpacking operation. Under Luter, field was soon

making enough money to begin purchasing neighboring meatpackers. From the

beginning, Luter thought monopolistically. He bought out his local competition

until he completely dominated the regional pork-processing market.

But Luter was dissatisfied. The company was still

buying most of its hogs from local farmers; Luter wanted to create a system,

known as " total vertical integration, " in which field controls every stage of production,

from the moment a hog is born until the day it passes through the

slaughterhouse. So he imposed a new kind of contract on farmers: The company

would own the living hogs; the contractors would raise the pigs and be

responsible for managing the hog shit and disposing of dead hogs. The system

made it impossible for small hog farmers to survive -- those who could not

handle thousands and thousands of pigs were driven out of business. " It

was a simple matter of economic power, " says Tabor, chief of staff

for Iowa's

attorney general.

field's

expansion was unique in the history of the industry: Between 1990 and 2005, it

grew by more than 1,000 percent. In 1997 it was the nation's seventh-largest

pork producer; by 1999 it was the largest. field

now kills one of every four pigs sold commercially in the United States.

As field

expanded, it consolidated its operations, clustering millions of fattening hogs

around its slaughterhouses. Under Luter, the company was turning into a great

pollution machine: field

was suddenly producing unheard-of amounts of pig shit laced with drugs and

chemicals. According to the EPA, field's largest farm-slaughterhouse

operation -- in Tar Heel, North Carolina -- dumps more toxic waste into the

nation's water each year than all but three other industrial facilities in

America.

Luter likes to tell this story: An old man and his

grandson are walking in a cemetery. They see a tombstone that reads here lies charles w. johnson, a man who had no

enemies.

" Gee, Granddad, " the boy says, " this

man must have been a great man. He had no enemies. "

" Son, " the grandfather replies, " if

a man didn't have any enemies, he didn't do a damn thing with his life. "

If Luter were to set this story in Ivy Hill Cemetery in his hometown of field, it would be an object lesson in

how to make enemies. Back when he was growing up, the branches of the

cemetery's trees were bent with the weight of scores of buzzards. The waste

stream from the Luters' meatpacking plant, with its thickening agents of pig

innards and dead fish, flowed nearby. Luter learned the family trade well. Last

year, before he retired as CEO of field, he took home $10,802,134. He

currently holds $19,296,000 in unexercised stock options.

One day this fall, a retired Marine Corps colonel

and environmental activist named Rick Dove, the former riverkeeper of North Carolina's Neuse

River, arranged to have me flown over field's operation in North Carolina. Dove, a focused guy of

sixty-seven years, is unable to talk about corporate hog farming without

becoming angry. After he got out of the Marine Corps in 1987, he became a

commercial fisherman, which he had wanted to do since he was a kid. He was

successful, and his son went into business with him. Then industrial hog

farming arrived and killed the fish, and both Dove and his son got seriously

ill.

Dove and other activists provide the only effective

oversight of corporate hog farming in the area. The industry has long made

generous campaign contributions to politicians responsible for regulating hog

farms. In 1995, while field was trying to

persuade the state of Virginia

to reduce a large fine for the company's pollution, ph Luter gave $100,000

to then-governor 's political-action committee. In 1998, corporate

hog farms in North Carolina

spent $1 million to help defeat state legislators who wanted to clean up

open-pit lagoons. The state has consistently failed to employ enough inspectors

to ensure that hog farms are complying with environmental standards.

To document violations, Dove and other activists

regularly hire private planes to inspect corporate hog operations from the air.

The airport Dove uses, in New Bern,

North Carolina, is tiny; the

plane he uses, a 1975 Cessna single-prop, looks tiny even in the tiny airport.

Its cabin has four cracked yellow linoleum seats. It looks like the interior of

a 1975 VW bug, but with more dials. The pilot, Joe Corby, is older than I

expected him to be.

" I have a GPS, so I can kinda guide you, "

Dove says to Corby while we taxi to the

runway.

" Oh, you do! " Corby

says, apparently unaccustomed to such a luxury. " Well, OK. "

We take off. " Bunch of turkey buzzards, "

Dove says, looking out the window. " They're big. "

" Don't wanna hit them, " Corby

says. " They would be . . . very destructive. "

We climb to 2,000 feet and head toward the densest

concentration of hogs in the world. The landscape at first is unsuspiciously

pastoral -- fields planted in corn or soybeans or cotton, tree lines staking

creeks, a few unincorporated villages of prefab houses. But then we arrive at

the global locus of hog farming, and the countryside turns into an immense

subdivision for pigs. Hog farms that contract with field differ slightly in dimension but

otherwise look identical: parallel rows of six, eight or twelve one-story hog

houses, some nearly the size of a football field, containing as many as 10,000

hogs, and backing onto a single large lagoon. From the air I see that the

lagoons come in two shades of pink: dark or Pepto Bismol -- vile, freaky colors

in the middle of green farmland.

From the plane, field's farms replicate one another as

far as I can see in every direction. Visibility is about four miles. I count

the lagoons. There are 103. That works out to at least 50,000 hogs per square

mile. You could fly for an hour, Dove says, and all you would see is corporate

hog operations, with little towns of modular homes and a few family farms

pinioned amid them.

Studies have shown that lagoons emit hundreds of

different volatile gases into the atmosphere, including ammonia, methane,

carbon dioxide and hydrogen sulfide. A single lagoon releases many millions of

bacteria into the air per day, some resistant to human antibiotics. Hog farms

in North Carolina

also emit some 300 tons of nitrogen into the air every day as ammonia gas, much

of which falls back to earth and deprives lakes and streams of oxygen,

stimulating algal blooms and killing fish.

Looking down from the plane, we watch as several of

field's

farmers spray their hog shit straight up into the air as a fine mist: It looks

like a public fountain. Lofted and atomized, the shit is blown clear of the

company's property. People who breathe the shit-infused air suffer from

bronchitis, asthma, heart palpitations, headaches, diarrhea, nosebleeds and

brain damage. In 1995, a woman downwind from a corporate hog farm in Olivia, Minnesota,

called a poison-control center and described her symptoms. " Ma'am, "

the poison-control officer told her, " the only symptoms of

hydrogen-sulfide poisoning you're not experiencing are seizures, convulsions

and death. Leave the area immediately. " When you fly over eastern North Carolina, you

realize that virtually everyone in this part of the state lives close to a lagoon.

Each of the company's lagoons is surrounded by

several fields. Pollution control at field

consists of spraying the pig shit from the lagoons onto the fields to fertilize

them. The idea is borrowed from the past: The small hog farmers that field drove out of

business used animal waste to fertilize their crops, which they then fed to the

pigs. field

says that this, in essence, is what it does -- its crops absorb every ounce of

its pig shit, making the lagoon-sprayfield system a zero-discharge,

nonpolluting waste-disposal operation. " If you manage your fields

correctly, there should be no runoff, no pollution, " says Dennis Treacy, field's vice

president of environmental affairs. " If you're getting runoff, you're

doing something wrong. "

In fact, field

doesn't grow nearly enough crops to absorb all of its hog weight. The company

raises so many pigs in so little space that it actually has to import the

majority of their food, which contains large amounts of nitrogen and

phosphorus. Those chemicals -- discharged in pig shit and sprayed on fields --

run off into the surrounding ecosystem, causing what Dan Whittle, a former

senior policy associate with the North Carolina Department of Environment and

Natural Resources, calls a " mass imbalance. " At one point, three

hog-raising counties in North

Carolina were producing more nitrogen, and eighteen

were producing more phosphorus, than all the crops in the state could absorb.

As we fly over the hog farms, I notice that springs

and streams and swamplands and lakes are everywhere. Eastern North Carolina is

a coastal plain, grooved and tilted towards the sea -- and field's sprayfields almost always

incline toward creeks or creek-fed swamps. Half-perforated pipes called

irrigation tiles, commonly used in modern farming, run beneath many of the

fields; when they become unplugged, the tiles effectively operate as

drainpipes, dumping pig waste into surrounding tributaries. Many studies have

documented the harm caused by hog-waste runoff; one showed the pig shit raising

the level of nitrogen and phosphorus in a receiving river as much as sixfold.

In eastern North Carolina, nine rivers and

creeks in the Cape Fear and Neuse

River basins have been

classified by the state as either " negatively impacted " or

environmentally " impaired. "

Although field

may not have enough crops to absorb its pig shit, its contract farmers do plant

plenty of hay. In 1992, when the number of hogs in North Carolina began to skyrocket, so much

hay was planted to deal with the fresh volumes of pig shit that the market for

hay collapsed. But the hay from hog farms can be so nitrate-heavy that it

sickens livestock. For a while, former governor Jim Hunt -- a recipient of

hog-industry campaign money -- was feeding hog-farm hay to his cows. Locals say

it made the cows sick and irritable, and the animals kicked Hunt several times,

seemingly in revenge. It's a popular tale in eastern North Carolina.

To appreciate what this agglomeration of hog

production does to the people who live near it, you have to appreciate the

smell of industrial-strength pig shit. The ascending stench can nauseate pilots

at 3,000 feet. On the day we fly over field's

operation there is little wind to stir up the lagoons or carry the stink, and

the region's current drought means that lagoon operators aren't spraying very

frequently. It is the best of times. We can smell the farms from the air, but

while the smell is foul it is intermittent and not particularly strong.

To get a really good whiff, I drive down a narrow

country road of white sand and walk up to a field lagoon. At the end of the road

stands a tractor and some spraying equipment. The fetid white carcass of a hog

lies in a dumpster known as a " dead box. " Flies cover the hog's

snout. Its hooves look like high heels. Millions of factory-farm hogs -- one

study puts it at ten percent -- die before they make it to the killing floor.

Some are taken to rendering plants, where they are propelled through meat

grinders and then fed cannibalistically back to other living hogs. Others are

dumped into big open pits called " dead holes, " or left in the

dumpsters for so long that they swell and explode. The borders of hog farms are

littered with dead pigs in all stages of decomposition, including thousands of

bleached pig bones. Locals like to say that the bears and buzzards of eastern North Carolina are

unusually lazy and fat.

No one seems to be around. It is quiet except for

the gigantic exhaust fans affixed to the six hog houses. There is an

unwholesome tang in the air, but there is no wind and it isn't hot, so I can't

smell the lagoon itself. I walk the few hundred yards over to it. It is covered

with a thick film; its edge is a narrow beach of big black flies. Here, its

odor is leaking out. I take a deep breath.

Concentrated manure is my first thought, but I am

fighting an impulse to vomit even as I am thinking it. I've probably smelled

stronger odors in my life, but nothing so insidiously and instantaneously

nauseating. It takes my mind a second or two to get through the odor's first

coat. The smell at its core has a frightening, uniquely enriched putridity,

both deep-sweet and high-sour. I back away from it and walk back to the car but

I remain sick -- it's a shivery, retchy kind of nausea -- for a good five

minutes. That's apparently characteristic of industrial pig shit: It keeps

making you sick for a good while after you've stopped smelling it. It's an

unduly invasive, adhesive smell. Your whole body reacts to it. It's as if

something has physically entered your stomach. A little later I am driving and

I catch a crosswind stench -- it must have been from a stirred-up lagoon -- and

from the moment it hit me a timer in my body started ticking: You can only

function for so long in that smell. The memory of it makes you gag.

Unsurprisingly, prolonged exposure to hog-factory

stench makes the smell extremely hard to get off. Hog factory workers stink up

every store they walk into. I run into a few local guys who had made the

mistake of accepting jobs in hog houses, and they tell me that you just have to

wait the smell out: You'll eventually grow new hair and skin. If you work in a field hog house for

a year and then quit, you might stink for the next three months.

If the temperature and wind aren't right and the

lagoon operators are spraying, people in hog country can't hang laundry or sit

on their porches or mow their lawns. Epidemiological studies show that those

who live near hog lagoons suffer from abnormally high levels of depression,

tension, anger, fatigue and confusion. " We are used to farm odors, "

says one local farmer. " These are not farm odors. " Sometimes the

stink literally knocks people down: They walk out of the house to get something

in the yard and become so nauseous they collapse. When they retain

consciousness, they crawl back into the house.

That has happened several times to n and

Charlotte Savage, an elderly couple whose farmland now abuts a field sprayfield -- one of several meant

to absorb the shit of 50,000 hogs. The Savages live in a small, modular kit

house. Sitting in the kitchen, Charlotte tells me that she once saw n

collapse in the yard and ran out and threw a coat over his head and dragged him

back inside. Before field

arrived, n's family farmed the land for the better part of a century. He

raised tobacco, corn, wheat, turkeys and chickens. Now he has respiratory

problems and rarely attempts to go outside.

Behind the house, a creek bordering the sprayfield

flows into a swamp; the Savages have seen hog waste running right into the

creek. Once, during a flood, the Savages found pig shit six inches deep pooled

around their house. They had to drain it by digging trenches, which took three

weeks. Charlotte

has noticed that nitrogen fallout keeps the trees around the house a deep

synthetic green. There's a big buzzard population.

The Savages say they can keep the pig-shit smell

out of their house by shutting the doors and windows, but to me the walls reek

faintly. They have a windbreak -- an eighty-foot-wide strip of forest --

between their house and the fields. They know people who don't, though, and

when the smell is bad, those people, like everyone, shut their windows and slam

their front doors shut quickly behind them, but their coffee and spaghetti and carrots

still smell and taste like pig shit.

The Savages have had what seemed to be hog shit in

their bath water. Their well water, which was clean before field arrived, is now suspect. " I

try not to drink it, " Charlotte

says. " We mostly just drink drinks, soda and things. " While we talk,

n spends most of the time on the living room couch; his lungs are

particularly bad today. Then he comes into the kitchen. Among other things, he

says: I can't breathe it, it'll put you on

the ground; you can't walk, you fall down; you breathe you gon' die; you go out

and smell it one time and your ass is gone; it's not funny to be around it.

It's not funny, honey. He could have said all this somewhat

tragicomically, with a thin smile, but instead he cries the whole time.

field is not

just a virtuosic polluter; it is also a theatrical one. Its lagoons are

historically prone to failure. In North Carolina

alone they have spilled, in a span of four years, 2 million gallons of shit

into the Cape Fear River, 1.5 million gallons into its Persimmon Branch, one

million gallons into the Trent River and

200,000 gallons into Turkey Creek. In Virginia,

field was

fined $12.6 million in 1997 for 6,900 violations of the Clean Water Act -- the

third-largest civil penalty ever levied under the act by the EPA. It amounted

to .035 percent of field's

annual sales.

A river that receives a lot of waste from an

industrial hog farm begins to die quickly. Toxins and microbes can kill plants

and animals outright; the waste itself consumes available oxygen and suffocates

fish and aquatic animals; and the nutrients in the pig shit produce algal

blooms that also deoxygenate the water. The Pagan

River runs by field's

original plant and headquarters in Virginia,

which served as ph Luter's staging ground for his assault on the

pork-raising and processing industries. For several decades, before a spate of

regulations, the Pagan had no living marsh grass, a tiny and toxic population

of fish and shellfish and a half foot of noxious black mud coating its bed. The

hulls of boats winched up out of the river bore inch-thick coats of greasy

muck. In North Carolina, much of the pig waste

from field's operations makes its way into

the Neuse River; in a five-day span in 2003 alone,

more than 4 million fish died. Pig-waste runoff has damaged the

Albemarle-Pamlico Sound, which is almost as big as the Chesapeake Bay and which

provides half the nursery grounds used by fish in the eastern Atlantic.

The biggest spill in the history of corporate hog

farming happened in 1995. The dike of a 120,000-square-foot lagoon owned by a field competitor ruptured, releasing 25.8 million

gallons of effluvium into the headwaters of the New River in North Carolina. It was the biggest

environmental spill in United

States history, more than twice as big as

the Exxon Valdez oil spill six years earlier. The sludge was so toxic it burned

your skin if you touched it, and so dense it took almost two months to make its

way sixteen miles downstream to the ocean. From the headwaters to the sea,

every creature living in the river was killed. Fish died by the millions.

It's hard to conceive of a fish kill that size. The

kill began with turbulence in one small part of the water: fish writhing and

dying. Then it spread in patches along the entire length and breadth of the

river. In two hours, dead and dying fish were mounded wherever the river's

contours slowed the current, and the riverbanks were mostly dead fish. Within a

day dead fish completely covered the riverbanks, and between the floating and

beached and piled fish the water scintillated out of sight up and down the

river with billions of buoyant dead eyes and scales and white bellies -- more

fish than the river seemed capable of holding. The smell of rotting fish

covered much of the county; the air above the river was chaotic with scavenging

birds. There were far more dead fish than the birds could ever eat.

Spills aren't the worst thing that can happen to

toxic pig waste lying exposed in fields and lagoons. Hurricanes are worse. In

1999, Hurricane Floyd washed 120,000,000 gallons of unsheltered hog waste into

the Tar, Neuse, Roanoke, Pamlico, New and Cape Fear

rivers. Many of the pig-shit lagoons of eastern North Carolina were several feet underwater.

Satellite photographs show a dark brown tide closing over the region's

waterways, converging on the Albemarle-Pamlico Sound and feeding itself out to

sea in a long, well-defined channel. Very little freshwater marine life

remained behind. Tens of thousands of drowned pigs were strewn across the land.

Beaches located miles from field

lagoons were slathered in feces. A picture taken at the time shows a shark

eating a dead pig three miles off the North

Carolina coast.

From a waste-disposal perspective, Hurricane Floyd

was the best thing that had ever happened to corporate hog farming in North Carolina. field currently has

tens of thousands of gallons of open-air waste awaiting more Floyds.

In addition to such impressive disasters, corporate

hog farming contributes to another form of environmental havoc: Pfiesteria piscicida, a microbe that, in

its toxic form, has killed a billion fish and injured dozens of people.

Nutrient-rich waste like pig shit creates the ideal environment for Pfiesteria

to bloom: The microbe eats fish attracted to algae nourished by the waste.

Pfiesteria is invisible and odorless -- you know it by the trail of dead. The

microbe degrades a fish's skin, laying bare tissue and blood cells; it then

eats its way into the fish's body. After the 1995 spill, millions of fish

developed large bleeding sores on their sides and quickly died. Fishermen found

that at least one of Pfiesteria's toxins could take flight: Breathing the air

above the bloom caused severe respiratory difficulty, headaches, blurry vision

and logical impairment. Some fishermen forgot how to get home; laboratory

workers exposed to Pfiesteria lost the ability to solve simple math problems

and dial phones; they forgot their own names. It could take weeks or months for

the brain and lungs to recover.

field is no

longer able to disfigure watersheds quite so obviously as in the past; it can

no longer expand and flatten small pig farms quite so easily. Several state

legislatures have passed laws prohibiting or limiting the ownership of small

farms by pork processors. In some places, new slaughterhouses are required to

meet expensive waste-disposal requirements; many are forbidden from using the

waste-lagoon system. North Carolina, where

pigs now outnumber people, has passed a moratorium on new hog operations and

ordered field

to fund research into alternative waste-disposal technologies. South Carolina, having

taken a good look at its neighbor's coastal plain, has pronounced the company

unwelcome in the state. The federal government and several states have

challenged some of field's

recent acquisition deals and, in a few instances, have forced the company to

agree to modify its waste-lagoon systems.

These initiatives, of course, come comically late.

Industrial hog operations control at least seventy-five percent of the market. field's market dominance is hardly at risk:

Twenty-six percent of the pork processed in this country is field pork. The company's expansion does

not seem to be slowing down: Over the past two years, field's annual sales grew by $1.5

billion. In September, the company announced that it is merging with Premium

Standard Farms, the nation's second-largest hog farmer and sixth-largest pork

processor. If the deal goes through, field

will own more pigs than the next eight largest pork producers in the nation

combined. The company's market leverage and political clout will allow it to

produce ever greater quantities of hog waste.

field points

to the improvements it has made to its waste-disposal systems in recent years.

In 2003, field announced that it was

investing $20 million in a program to turn its pig shit in Utah into alternative fuel. It now produces

approximately 2,500 gallons a day of biomethanol and has begun building a

facility in Texas

to produce clean-burning biodiesel fuel.

" We're paying a lot of attention to energy

right now, " says Treacy, the field

vice president. " We've come such a long way in the last five years. "

The company, he adds, has undergone a " complete cultural shift on

environmental matters. "

But cultural shifts, no matter how genuine, cannot

counter the unalterable physical reality of field Foods itself. " All

of a sudden we have this 800-pound gorilla in the pork industry, " Successful Farming magazine warned -- six years ago.

There simply is no regulatory solution to the millions of tons of searingly

fetid, toxic effluvium that industrial hog farms discharge and aerosolize on a

daily basis. field

alone has sixteen operations in twelve states. Fixing the problem completely

would bankrupt the company. According to Dr. Mallin, a marine scientist

at the University of North Carolina at Wilmington who has researched the

effects of corporate farming on water quality, the volumes of concentrated pig

waste produced by industrial hog farms are plainly not containable in small

areas. The land, he says, " just can't absorb everything that comes out of

the barns. " From the moment that field

attained its current size, its waste-disposal problem became conventionally

insoluble.

Joe Luter, like

his pig shit, has an innate aversion to being contained in any way. Ever since

American regulators and lawmakers started forcing field to spend more money on waste

treatment and attempting to limit the company's expansion, Luter has been

looking to do business elsewhere. In recent years, his gaze has fallen on the

lucrative and unregulated markets of Poland.

In 1999, Luter

bought a state-owned company called Animex, one of Poland's biggest hog processors.

Then he began doing business through a Polish subsidiary called Prima Farms,

acquiring huge moribund Communist-era hog farms and converting them into

concentrated feeding operations. Pork prices in Poland

were low, so field's

sweeping expansion didn't make strict economic sense, except that it had the

virtue of pushing small hog farmers toward bankruptcy. By 2003, Animex was

operating six subsidiary companies and seven processing plants, selling nine

brands of meat and taking in $338 million annually.

The usual

violations occurred. Near one of field's

largest plants, in Byszkowo, an enormous pool of frozen pig shit, pumped into a

lagoon in winter, melted and ran into two nearby lakes. The lake water turned

brown; residents in local villages got skin rashes and eye infections; the

stench made it impossible to eat. A recent report to the Helsinki

Commission found that field's pollution

throughout Poland

was damaging the country's ecosystems. Overapplication was endemic. Farmers

without permits were piping liquid pig shit directly into watersheds that fed

into the Baltic Sea.

When ph

Luter entered Poland, he

announced that he planned to turn the country into the " Iowa

of Europe. " Iowa

has always been America's

biggest hog producer and remains the nation's chief icon of hog farming. Having

subdued Poland, Luter

announced this summer that all of Eastern Europe -- " particularly Romania " -- should become the " Iowa of Europe. " Seventy-five

percent of Romania's

hogs currently come from household farms. Over the next five years, field plans to spend $800 million in Romania to

change that.

Posted Dec 14, 2006 8:53 AM

www.MajestyFarm.com

If you will not fight for the right when you can easily win

without bloodshed, if you will not fight when victory will be sure and not so

costly, you may come to the moment when you will have to fight with all the

odds against you and only a precarious chance of survival. There may be a worse

case. You may have to fight when there is no chance of victory, because it is

better to perish than to live as slaves.

Winston Churchill