Time for NC to go ‘whole hog’ on the Swine Farm Buyout Program
Photo by Matt Butler
The NC Swine Farm Buyout Program protects the environment and well-being of our communities. Farmers and the pork industry want it. Now it’s time for our lawmakers to invest.
In eastern North Carolina, a combination of outdated agricultural practices at hog farms mixed with increasingly unstable weather patterns exacerbated by climate change has combined to create serious environmental problems.
The 4,100 hog manure pits in the state are often dangerously close to water sources and contaminate waterways with toxic waste—everything from salmonella and antibiotics to nitrates and ammonia flows into drinking water, harms aquatic life and makes the humans who consume it ill. For those who live in the communities near these farms—50 percent of which are in Duplin and Sampson counties alone—noxious fumes from the waste lagoons render the area practically uninhabitable.
The impact of this kind of factory farming—known as Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations (CAFOs)—is even more devastating when the hog farms lie in the floodplain. A floodplain is an area most vulnerable to flooding and protecting these areas by removing sources of pollution should be a priority. The good news is that North Carolina developed a highly successful program more than two decades ago that protects both the environment and the livelihoods of hog farmers: the NC Swine Farm Buyout Program.
The voluntary program, created in 1999, uses state funds to buy out interested hog farmers whose land lies on the 100-year floodplain and then converts portions of the land to conservation easements. The farmers can grow row crops or raise pasture-fed livestock on the land but cannot rebuild a factory farm. The program has spent $18 million and successfully converted 43 farms, but ran out of money in 2007, with 100 farms remaining on the waiting list. The NC Pork Council, which recognized the immense success of the program and wanted to fully support it, secured funding for more lagoon closures—100 since 2007.
The program is supported by the state’s pork industry, popular with industrial hog farmers looking to farm more sustainably, crucial to protecting North Carolina’s water and air, and has been proven to work, so why isn’t the North Carolina General Assembly clamoring to fund the NC Swine Farm Buyout Program?
An estimated 45 to 62 hog farms are still left on eastern North Carolina’s 100-year floodplain and may be only one hurricane away from flooding and releasing a debilitating amount of toxic waste into the water supply. Investing in the NC Swine Buyout Program can stop this from happening, and it’s not just a hypothetical: during 2016’s Hurricane Matthew, 32 of the 43 farms previously purchased would have flooded.
Lawmakers in North Carolina are sitting on billions of dollars of unappropriated funds. There are more than enough resources to properly fund the NC Swine Buyout Program. North Carolinians who are environmentally conscious know that what impacts one of our neighbors impacts each of us. Thirty-seven of these lagoons are less than half a mile from a school; 136 are less than half a mile from public water well.
North Carolina’s future — and the health of all North Carolinians —relies on having clean water to drink. The future of our agriculture industry, likewise, relies on extending a helping hand to farmers who want to implement more practices to protect our water.
Lawmakers should allocate a one-time amount of $10 million for this already successful program. Budgets, after all, are a moral document. Investing in the health, safety, and economic vitality of North Carolina’s communities through the Swine Farm Relief Program is the right thing to do.