Pork's Dirty Secret (2006)

http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/story/12840743/porks_dirty_secret_the_nations_top_hog_producer_is_also_one_of_americas_worst_polluters/print

by kqr2 • 16 years ago

141 103 16 years ago

rollingstone.com

warfangle2• 16 years ago

Google Maps: http://maps.google.com/maps?q=tar+heel+nc&ie=UTF8&hq...

You can see clearly pictured one of the pink lagoons mentioned in this article. If you zoom out a little, you see scores of them.

Edit: most of the fields you see surrounding them are producing crops that are dangerous to eat due to their nitrate levels (according to the article)

_delirium2• 16 years ago

The detailed descriptions of the process in this article make for a sort of fascinating train wreck. On the one hand, the sheer scale of the operation is impressive. On the other hand, it seems to have this strange air of shoddiness. When I think of factory farming, I tend to think of a future age of hyperefficient farming, with cows milked by machines and everything precisely regulated. But this seems more like an age of very dense farming that is held together with duct tape and rusting bailing wire, not much of a sci-fi vision. I mean, huge lagoons of pig excrement with trucks falling into them?

warfangle2• 16 years ago

Absolutely. I think forcing these factory farms into more wholesome practices might accomplish a few things:

1) More research into sustainable farming techniques 2) More research into automation that makes these sustainable techniques feasible at a market cost

Unfortunately, the companies that can afford to do that research are too busy using their money to genetically modify their crops and pump their livestock full of drugs.

If the government forced these guys to cut back through sanctions, the cheapest food might not be the most unhealthy anymore. Issues of environmental and public health concerns are one area where I actually agree with stronger governmental powers vs corporations - people won't vote with the dollars because it's a) necessary to live and b) they usually live so far away from the heinous conditions that they don't even know about it - or worse, don't care.

bmj2• 16 years ago

I'm not sure it's possible for factory farms to change, especially when raising animals. If you talk to someone who raises animals in a sustainable way (if you don't personally know a farmer, read Joel Salatin), they will tell you there is absolutely an upper limit to what can be produced sustainably. I purchase all of the meat my family eats from a local farmer (who only sells directly to consumers) and he said while he could easily double the number of customers, he wouldn't be able to maintain the same practices (this includes everything to what the animals eat--grass only in the case of ruminants--to where the animals actually lived--all are pastured in the style popularized by Salatin).

I could be old-fashioned and myopic, though. Maybe someone can figure out a way to have the best of both worlds.

Regarding cost, I no longer worry about the amount of money my family spends on groceries. Yes, we spend $5/pound for beef, and $2.50/pound for chicken, but this is stuff we are putting in our bodies--it's what keeps us alive. I feel that price shouldn't be the driving factor in what we eat.

khafra• 16 years ago

"Forced through sanctions" sounds pretty harsh when all the government would have to do to seriously change factory farming practices is reduce the subsidies on their inputs.

indiejade• 16 years ago

Written mostly based on some old research gathered from this piece (also based on the parent article):

"A Few Good Reasons to Not Partake of the Swine": http://indiejade.livejournal.com/23835.html

Ergo: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1124822

Adam503• 16 years ago

That train wreck has already happened to North Carolina once. Hurricane Floyd. The great pig feces flood. Only cat 2 winds but 20 inches of rain.

    *  51 storm-related deaths in North Carolina, 90 on the East Coast, making this the deadliest storm sinceHurricane Agnes in 1972, where 122 died.

    * 30,500 hogs, 2,000 cattle, 250 horses, 2.1 million chickens, and 737,000 turkeys lost in North Carolina.

    * Four hog waste lagoons burst and 47 overflowed; 24 water treatment plants flooded.

    * Over 7,000 homes were destroyed; 17,000 rendered uninhabitable, and at least 10,000 people were displaced in NC alone. Almost 70,000 people in the state applied for emergency assistance.

    * Overall damage in NC exceeded six billion dollars, making it NC's most costly natural disaster ever, exceeding Hurricane Fran in 1997. New Jersey also listed Floyd as its worst natural disaster.

    * Thirty-seven counties in eastern NC with a combined area of 18,000 square miles (an area twice the size of Vermont) flooded.

    * Ten states were declared disaster areas...."

http://www.cfspress.com/overwhelmedbyfloyd.htm

sstone• 16 years ago

There is an interesting documentary related to this: Food Inc.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QqQVll-MP3I

dzlobin• 16 years ago

Everyone should see this, and read some Michael Pollan. FWIW Commercial pork is absolutely tasteless and shouldn't be eaten anyway, look around your local markets for some berkshire or other heritage pork, and discover what pork really tastes like.

mattew• 16 years ago

Everyone should vote with their wallets. I make a concerted effort to purchase pork that has been raised in a sustainable and compassionate manner. I eat at restaurants like Chipotle who care about the farmers that they do business with. Where and what you buy is the way to change things.

chipsy• 16 years ago

I've tried cooking some cheap pork recently and have to admit that about 50% of the time it's left me with a vague sickly feeling regardless of how I prepared it.

This article has pushed me over the line; I'll probably toss the batch I have. It was one of the bad ones anyway.

Zarkonnen• 16 years ago

This reads like Dante's inferno.

malte4• 16 years ago

For everyone interested in this topic I strongly recommend "Eating Animals" by Jonathan Safran Foer:

http://www.amazon.com/Eating-Animals-Jonathan-Safran-Foer/dp...

I became a vegetarian before reading this book, but reading it only made me more convinced that to stop eating meat and fish was one of the best decisions in my life.

utnick• 16 years ago

can you summarize what the book says about fish? is there an article similar to this about fish farming?

malte4• 16 years ago

You are lucky. There is an extract from the part dealing with fish farming on the Guardian's website:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2010/feb/23/jonathan-s...

dmm2• 16 years ago

Factory farming is terrible. I would recommend that anyone interested in this find some local farmers and talk to them about how the raise their animals.

I can get local grass-fed beef for $4.50/lb that is from very happy cows. Expensive as hell but pretty much an ideal food.

Federal regulations play a role in this too. Anybody other than a factory farmer is at an immense disadvantage when it comes to meeting the often arbitrary and pointless regulations.

Check out "Everything I Want To Do Is Illegal: War Stories From the Local Food Front" by Joe Salatin if you're interested.

GFischer5• 16 years ago

Over here in Uruguay we have 18 million grass-fed cows (they live better than many persons!), probably as healthy as any you have ever eaten.

Yet, we have quotas on selling to the US, because they have to maintain the subsidies on farming (it doesn't make sense if growing cattle in the US is so much more expensive). And the EU is way worse than the US in its subsidies - I've seen cattle in Austria, it is VERY expensive to raise it there - of course you want to maintain some local livestock for strategic purposes if nothing else, but it is still extremely inefficient.

And I pay about U$ 1/lb for very good grass-fed beef :)

Hopka• 16 years ago

It's also interesting what the company says in return: http://www.smithfieldfoods.com/RollingStone/

mmaunder• 16 years ago

If the article is incorrect then Smithfield can and should sue Rolling Stone for libel. But they're not going to because it's true.

toothcomb8• 16 years ago

It's what they don't deny that still worries me. I was hoping that the family being consumed by the lagoon was a non truth. I read it as tragic comedy (shame on me)

viggity2• 16 years ago

The want the whole thing to go away, even if you're in the right, a lot of times it isn't worth suing. Look at Barbra Streisand - some dude took pictures of her beach house, she was upset and sued him over it. So instead of the handful of people seeing the photos, the law suit hit all the news stations and tens of thousands of people saw the pictures.

Confusion2• 16 years ago

What kind of position is that?! Someone accused you of wrongdoing and the only valid defense is suing the other? What happened to correcting each other? Accepting that misinterpretations and mistakes are human?

danparsonson5• 16 years ago

For further comparison, BBC article about the Polish farms operated by the same company here: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/4035081.stm.

alecco• 16 years ago

A couple of for-show plants in US to cover the madness in now exported to Mexico and other countries with lax or unenforced pollution laws.

Remember the original swine flu? Not the 2009 H1N1 human outbreak, the ones before that killing vast numbers of pigs in industrial farms.

helium• 16 years ago

Hmm. Why don't they let someone come film a random(typical) hog farm to document the conditions?

malte4• 16 years ago

A few weeks ago, German newscasts aired some footage secretly recorded from a poultry farm that was a major supplier of one of the biggest (and well-known) meat processors in Germany.

The material really was disgusting: workers beating animals to death, throwing transportation boxes (thus, breaking the animals' bones) etc.

I'm not a hardliner-PETA-animal-rights-activist, but I think there is good reason to not naively believe those statements of companies like Smithfield.

davidw3• 16 years ago

I like to eat pigs and live in Italy. Salsiccia and polenta is particularly good, and I'd be happy to grill some up for any visiting hackers, served of course with plenty of good red wine.

What's this got to do with Hacker News, in any case?

fiaz• 16 years ago

I agree with you. It is not the usual HN type article, and it is far removed from the usual articles that draw me to HN.

_delirium2• 16 years ago

The interest for me is mainly in the view of this giant industrial process, and the surprising ways in which it isn't as efficient or streamlined as I would've expected. I can see how it's a bit outside the usual range, but for me it seems more technology focused than most of the TechCrunch articles that get linked, for example.

danparsonson5• 16 years ago

Non-tech stories are hardly unprecedented: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1155108

If you're an inhabitant of Earth then large-scale environmental damage driven by global spending habits concerns you too. Sorry about that!

davidw3• 16 years ago

"What concerns me" does not make it hacker news, IMO. There are plenty of other sites where people can discuss what concerns them ad nauseam.

Edit: let me expand that a bit more. There are many things that I think are far more important than startups and hacking. Politics (in the US, Italy, the EU and worldwide), the economy (as above), the environment, child rearing, and so on and so forth. However, these tend to be "flame-bait" topics which are best left to other sites lest they overrun this one.

GiraffeNecktie• 16 years ago

From the guidelines:

What to Submit

On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity.

nosse2• 16 years ago

Personally I find the reaction to this article a lot more interesting than the article itself. Are my hackercomrades weak for this kind of manipulation or not? So in a way this is interesting article to have here, but I would not wish more.

toothcomb8• 16 years ago

I think the article is fascinating.

It shows you how big operations can go wrong, if safeguards are not put in place. The numbers here are mind numbing, this is collossal murder.

There has been a series of programmes on industrial modern farming on the bbc recently in the UK. Which focussed on the best parts of technological innovation in farming. Whereas this article exposes all that's wrong with factory farming.

As an Englishman I find it hard to comprehend the scale of things in the states. It horrifies me. The London circular felt huge to me, until I witnessed a freeway. Now it appears small and the cars look like toys.

We had the BSE outbreak in the UK, which has led to a change in consumer opinion. BSE was reportedly a result of canibalism. Recyling your outputs to inputs is a nice idea, but it's risky practice.

There's no mention of the quality of life these pigs are living. My uncle used to run a small factory pig farm in the UK and that was horrendous enough. That put me off of pork. Later working at an egg farm ensured that, I no longer ate eggs or chicken. There is something incredibly powerful about seeing things first hand. Animals deserve a better life than that, they surely deserve to see daylight.

The computer industry, has it's own issues with energy usage and pollution. The silicon valleys are known for poisoning rivers. There are parallels here. Consumeres need to be aware, to put pressure on industry. We can be ethical consumers, we can vote with our wallets. We can speak out, against injustices and barbaric practices.

Hacker news is full of talk about start ups and web entrapaneurs. Money is not the be all and end all. There is a social and environmental dimension to every business.

If the article does not shock you, or fill you with bile, then alas I feel there is something inherently wrong with you.

I do not delight in discovering injustices, whether it's Ethiopian farmers getting ripped off for the price of coffee or animals suffering. And I have a compulsion to put these injustices right, if I can. Though sometimes our impulses can blind our moral judgement.

I read a book that was published over a decade ago, that reported that every one of North America's great lakes had been overly polluted. A lot of the world's seas have been overfished, there are many dead zones, look on Google Earth.

You'd hope that with the advancement of science and the freedom of knowledge we could become a better race of people. This really saddens me. I believe the hacker spirit, is one that aims for solutions (possibly perfection), and I hope that that same spirit is well concidered and respectful.

davidw3• 16 years ago

> The silicon valleys are known for poisoning rivers.

Which rivers did "the silicon valleys" poison?

anamax3• 16 years ago

> I read a book that was published over a decade ago, that reported that every one of North America's great lakes had been overly polluted.

Things change in a decade.

> The silicon valleys are known for poisoning rivers.

While fabs are full of toxic things and some of the disposal early on was suboptimal (I'm still waiting for the Sunnyvale city govt to create its own Love Canal by grabbing some of this land for housing), "silicon valleys" have not poisoned rivers.

And no, that's not a metaphor. A metaphor is an analogy between thoughts, ideas, or things.

If you're not correct on the details that I can check/know personally ....

nickpp• 16 years ago

If you want to see the continuation in Eastern Europe (Romania):

http://www.awionline.org/www.awionline.org/pubs/Quarterly/07...

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/06/business/global/06smithfie...

nosse2• 16 years ago

"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."

This made me go woooot!? Clearly an article written to raise emotions than discuss anything serious.

PETA crawling to HN, scary shit.

jrwoodruff• 16 years ago

Yea, I got the same impression. While there is definitely truth to this article - anyone that's lived near any size of pig farm can tell you there is - this is hardly an objective look at modern farming, more of a modern version of Upton Sinclair's 1906 classic,'The Jungle.'

danparsonson5• 16 years ago

Have a look at the other articles linked in the comments - perhaps they will present the same information in a more balanced way for you. The subject under discussion is very serious, even if this particular write-up of it does not suit your tastes.

As an aside, did it occur to you that your post is written in the same style, of one trying to raise emotions rather than discuss something seriously?

4ensic• 16 years ago

Oh, "pork" the noun, not the transitive verb. Darn.

jeremymims6• 16 years ago

Around 10 billion animals are killed each year in the United States. It's a truly astounding figure. Let's not kid ourselves that something unfathomably evil is going on.

It's great that some people get their animal products from the sustainable farm down the road. That is better. But let's also not pretend it even makes a dent.

During World War II, about 70 million people were killed over the course of the conflict (1939-1945). In just the United States alone, we will kill that number of animals in less than three days. If you were to compare the entire loss of American life in that war, it would take you about 20 minutes to achieve in our factory farm system.

If you still don't see it as evil, animal agriculture is far and away the number one source of global warming pollution (http://www.un.org/apps/news/story.asp?newsID=20772&CR1=w...).

dmm2• 16 years ago

Humans evolved eating meat. There is significant evidence that a diet high in meat and saturated fat rather than the neolithic agents sugar and grains is among the healthiest available.

Why is killing animals to produce food for people an "unfathomably evil" thing?

starkfist3• 16 years ago

There's actually no evidence for that position that was not produced by someone funded by a meat producer.

jeremymims6• 16 years ago

Yes, humans evolved to eat some meat in their diets at points in time where other foods were scarce. This does not mean that meat is something we should eat often or as a primary source of food. And it does not mean that we can't survive without it.

In addition to the incomparable suffering that animals who spend their entire lives in factory farms experience, a few good reasons are:

1. It is the number one cause of global warming

2. It's one of the main causes of deadly health problems in humans (heart disease, cancer, obesity related diseases).

3. It's a big reason why people go hungry. You can grow way more food to feed people through plant based agriculture. When you allocate land to meat production, you deprive people of food.

4. The reason why 60% of the rivers in America are classified as "impaired" due to runoff.

There are lots more reasons if you look and I suggest you do.

Just because we've done something for a long time doesn't mean we should keep doing it. Wouldn't you say that the conditions of the world have changed considerably since we were hunter-gatherers a few thousand years ago? Well, we need to evolve. The very best thing you can do for the planet, other humans, and yourself is to eat less meat.

jeremymims6• 16 years ago

Perhaps you can easily wrap your head around the idea of killing 10 billion living creatures a year. I have a really hard time even imagining we're capable of being that efficient at killing. It's almost all from factory farming which you agreed in an earlier comment is "terrible". Maybe you wouldn't go so far as to say it's evil. I will.

Everyday, science learns that humans aren't all that special in our capacity to feel pain, plan for the future, find enjoyment out of life, care for our offspring, etc. This is one of those issues where eventually we will all be horrified at what we allowed to happen.

But any time that we make a judgement call that some being's suffering and untimely death is okay because it's lesser than us, that says more about us than it does about those beings. As a species, we've certainly been wrong about these things before.

danielmims11• 16 years ago

Humans did not "evolve eating meat." Yes, they began to eat meat relatively recently, but only during winter periods after migrating into colder climates. Even then, humans ate almost no meat when plant food was abundant, during warmer seasons.

Anatomically the case for human herbivorism, or at least heavy-plant omnivorism, is strong. Check it (I hope this formats okay):

      Meat-eaters: have claws
      Herbivores: no claws
      Humans: no claws

      Meat-eaters: have no skin pores and perspire through the tongue
      Herbivores: perspire through skin pores
      Humans: perspire through skin pores

      Meat-eaters: have sharp front teeth for tearing, with no flat molar teeth for grinding
      Herbivores: no sharp front teeth, but flat rear molars for grinding
      Humans: no sharp front teeth, but flat rear molars for grinding [we're talking about actually sharp teeth, not so-called human “canine” teeth]

      Meat-eaters: have intestinal tract that is only 3 times their body length so that rapidly decaying meat can pass through quickly
      Herbivores: have intestinal tract 10-12 times their body length.
      Humans: have intestinal tract 10-12 times their body length.

      Meat-eaters: have strong hydrochloric acid in stomach to digest meat
      Herbivores: have stomach acid that is 20 times weaker than that of a meat-eater
      Humans: have stomach acid that is 20 times weaker than that of a meat-eater

      Meat-eaters: salivary glands in mouth not needed to pre-digest grains and fruits.
      Herbivores: well-developed salivary glands which are necessary to pre-digest grains and fruits
      Humans: well-developed salivary glands, which are necessary to pre-digest, grains and fruits

      Meat-eaters: have acid saliva with no enzyme ptyalin to pre-digest grains
      Herbivores: have alkaline saliva with ptyalin to pre-digest grains
      Humans: have alkaline saliva with ptyalin to pre-digest grains

Source: A.D. Andrews, Fit Food for Men, (Chicago: American Hygiene Society, 1970)

tcskeptic2• 16 years ago

There are also 300 million people living in the US, another truly astounding figure. People eat meat, and have forever. Just because there are now more people around to eat meat now does not make the process of making meat (also called killing animals...) suddenly become evil. You can make an argument that factory farming methods are inhumane, and we can have a rational discussion. But your appeal to the magic of large numbers is meaningless to me, just because 10 billion animals get killed for food each year does not make it "unfathomably evil".

(And also, you are going to compare loss of life in war to animals killed for meat.... Seriously?)

jeremymims6• 16 years ago

For the record I'm not calling you evil. So this isn't an ad hominem attack... unless you're a factory farmer, in which case, you probably are. ;-)

People eat more meat at more meals than they ever have in history. The truth is that it's unsustainable and it causes huge long term problems for our environment. The fact that we have always done it doesn't really matter. We know we can live without it and be healthy. The question is should we continue to do it and if so, at what cost? And as hackers, we might ask if there's a way around it.

Comparing loss of human life in the deadliest war that humans have ever fought (where most of us have no problem labeling certain actors evil) perfectly illustrates the magnitude of the "magic" large numbers. The very best killing apparatus that war has ever seen is beat by factory farming in one country in 3 days. I find that to be truly incredible.

Maybe you don't want to stop eating meat. But maybe you do care about some of the problems the world faces because of it (water shortages, global warming, human famine, rainforest depletion, run-off into other food and streams, mad cow or swine flu, etc).

For many people this is a truly emotional issue. A judgement about factory farms feels like a judgement about themselves. I was once at a very expensive conference (like $2k a ticket) and after a speaker suggested that people cut their meat intake to solve some the world's problems about a 1/3 of the people got up and left. But most people who don't eat meat today did at one point in their lives. I'm part of a family that until I left college ate meat at every meal.

It's not enough to say we're going to keep doing what we're doing because we've been doing it forever. As hackers and entrepreneurs we know that human behavior can change and we often try to be the ones who cause it. We don't happily accept the status quo. So why do so many of us readily do so when it comes to eating meat?

danielmims11• 16 years ago

You're going to deny that the degree of something isn't relevant to its severity? Seriously?

mike_organon2• 16 years ago

Why aren't some of these problems solved by property rights? The article shows case after case of nearby property owners having what seem to be clear cases of health problems and other property violations caused by the pigs. If there isn't a causal link that can be shown in court, then we don't know this is the problem.

mike_organon2• 16 years ago

I recently saw the movie Temple Grandin, a bio of an autistic woman who works with cattle. Her website concerns humane and efficient treatment of livestock. Some fascinating articles. http://grandin.com/

limist• 16 years ago

As a vegetarian, when someone with science training asks me why I'm so, my answer is, "The 2nd law of thermodynamics." This is the 2nd law writ large.

JulianMorrison2• 16 years ago

Time to make cell-cultured meat happen, I think. Given that the technology is pretty close to possible, I think that treating sensate creatures as meat factories has lost it defensibility.

cmars232• 16 years ago

Mad max references aside, I wonder if anyone has seriously considered just processing the waste into something useful. If they prevented some of of the careless inorganic stuff from getting in there (batteries, wtf?) couldn't this be an excellent source of fuel & fertilizer?

wanderr• 16 years ago

I can't seem to find a free version online, but This American Life's TV show, the episode called "Pandora's Box" is very eye opening. They go to a modern pig farm and it's as disturbing and disgusting as this article makes it sound.

I thought it was very interesting that they had to scrub down before they could enter for fear that they might introduce germs to the pigs.

Pork's Dirty Secret (2006)

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