As NC reviews hog farm permits, groundwater and environmental justice play a role
The N.C. Department of Environmental Quality is asking the public to comment on its draft permits that oversee hog, cattle and a limited number of poultry operations across the state as part of a five-year review.
A pair of topics that will likely serve as key points of contention during public hearings across the state over the next few weeks are monitoring groundwater for contamination, particularly in floodplains, and claims that the farms place an unfair burden on communities with a higher proportion of Black, Hispanic or low-income residents.
DEQ is reviewing general permits that regulate hog farms, but also separate general permits for cattle farms and for poultry farms that keep litter from their birds wet. That does not include the vast majority of the state’s poultry farms, which keep litter from their birds dry and are effectively unregulated.
The current review also includes permits for digester operations on hog, cattle and wet poultry farms. Lagoons equipped with digesters are covered and methane coming off of the waste is captured and processed before the rest of the waste is spread on nearby fields. There are eight such systems permitted in the state, according to DEQ.
Roy Lee Lindsey, the CEO of the N.C. Pork Council, said the trade group believes the hog farm permit is working well and doesn’t need sweeping changes. If anything, Lindsey said, farmers need a provision that limits how long DEQ can review proposed changes to farm equipment requested by farmers akin to the 90 days regulators have to approve or deny a digester under the general permit.
Environmental groups don’t see it that way. They argue that hog farms have a disproportionate impact on communities where Black and Hispanic people live in Eastern North Carolina, sending odors into the air but also causing groundwater contamination. And they’d like to see more efforts to both measure that contamination and make information about the facilities public.
“The permit does not address directly, or indirectly, the disproportionate impact that these facilities have on communities of color in Eastern North Carolina, and these draft permits continue to endorse the use of the lagoon and sprayfield system,” Blakely Hildebrand, a senior attorney at the Southern Environmental Law Center, told The News & Observer.
Hildebrand and other advocates argue that North Carolina hog farms’ keeping waste in a lagoon and spraying it onto nearby fields is an outdated method of waste management. The lagoon and sprayfield system, they say, results in nearby communities suffering the odor from farms and increases the likelihood that farmers will apply too much waste to nearby fields and pollute nearby waterways.
There are 1,916 farms with some kind of hog operation on their property, 114 with a cattle operation and eight with a wet poultry facility, according to DEQ.
Environmental justice
An environmental justice report compiled by DEQ found that the largest concentrations of hogs by weight of the animals — and thus their waste — are located in communities where Hispanic populations are nearly twice the state average, where the population of people who are not white is about 50% compared to the state average of 37% and where the percentage of people living well below the poverty line is 45% compared to the state average of 33%.
The densest clusters of hogs are typically found on the state’s coastal plain, often in Bladen, Duplin, Sampson and Wayne counties, according to DEQ’s report.
“We are pleased to see an environmental justice report that, at least on a first read, seems to dig into the demographics and really understand what’s going on in these communities, but that’s only half the task,” said Hildebrand, who filed a civil rights complaint against DEQ alleging its digester permit violated the civil rights of people in Duplin and Sampson counties.
The Pork Council argues that the industry is not having an uneven impact on communities across the state, going as far as commissioning a 2017 study in which it drew radiuses around hog facilities and measured the populations living within them. It argues that hog farms are not located in places where residents are predominantly Black and that white people tend to live closest to the facilities.
In response to DEQ’s draft environmental justice report, Lindsey, the Pork Council CEO, told The News & Observer that all of the state’s hog farms were built and permitted before the state enacted a moratorium on new facilities in 1997. Lindsey argues that demographics may have shifted around the hog farms since the moratorium, but the hog industry isn’t responsible for those changes.
“That’s not us locating farms where you’re a targeting a minority population, whatever it may be,” Lindsey said.
Lindsey also said it is not surprising that DEQ found larger numbers of Hispanic people living around farms because many workers are Hispanic, as are workers at the slaughter houses that farms were intentionally built near.
“Why wouldn’t the folks who work in our plants , work on our farms live near where they work? So we don’t think that tells you that there’s any issue there. We think it’s a reflection of society and common sense,” Lindsey said.
Groundwater monitoring
Still, Hildebrand and other environmental advocates say that the information from DEQ’s environmental justice report means the department now has a responsibility to protect those communities where it has identified a potential uneven burden of the farms’ impacts.
That includes steps that help with accountability like requiring farmers to submit their records to DEQ electronically rather than maintaining physical copies. It would also include groundwater monitoring in the 500-year floodplain in an effort to identify places where lagoons are seeping or waste is being overapplied to fields.
“Groundwater monitoring is really critical in this part of the state where so many residents depend on well water for their drinking water,” Hildebrand said.
The provision requiring farmers in the 100-year floodplain to monitor groundwater is one of three from the 2019 general permit for hog farms that the N.C. Farm Bureau is challenging in the State Court of Appeals. That case also challenges farmers making annual reports to DEQ on the grounds that the department already has access to the information, as well as a requirement that farmers whose fields contain a certain level of phosphorous need to measure how much is being lost, potentially resulting in limits to how much waste a farmer can apply to that field.
Lindsey said that he doesn’t believe it makes sense to include those three provisions in the draft permit until the Court of Appeals has returned its ruling. The court heard the Farm Bureau’s case in early September.
On the groundwater monitoring, Lindsey said, “This is an added cost that again we don’t see a real return on the value of that to the state, to the farmer, to anyone. It’s more just a cost on the farm’s side.”
Hearings will be held on the following dates at the following locations, with registration beginning at 5:30 p.m. and the hearings starting at 6 p.m.:
Thursday, Oct. 5, at James Sprunt Community College, 133 James Sprunt Drive, Kenansville, NC 28349
Oct. 10 at Wayne Community College, 3000 Wayne Memorial Drive, Goldsboro, NC 27534
Oct. 24 at Statesville Civic Center, 300 S. Center Street, Statesville, NC 28677
October 26 virtually at https://www.deq.nc.gov/animalpermits2024
Comments can also be emailed to publiccommentsDWR@deq.nc.gov or submitted via voicemail at 919-707-3705. DEQ is accepting comments through November 3.
This story was produced with financial support from the Hartfield Foundation and 1Earth Fund, in partnership with Journalism Funding Partners, as part of an independent journalism fellowship program. The N&O maintains full editorial control of the work.
