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Waste (Mis)management
In addition, a sprayfield is difficult to manage properly in wet climates like that of coastal North Carolina. Spraying in wet conditions virtually guarantees that the majority of the waste sprayed will run off into nearby waters. And those same rainy conditions can also fill waste lagoons with rainwater, requiring hog farmers to either spray onto wet fields or risk having their lagoons overflow. During North Carolina
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A sprayfield overloaded with hog waste, a common sight in wet conditions.
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's rainy season, spraying onto wet fields is difficult to avoid. North Carolina law requires no monitoring to determine the amount of waste which runs off sprayfields.
Sadly, the fine old farming tradition of recycling waste as valuable fertilizer is often misleading in the case of hog factories in North Carolina. Hog waste can be a valuable
source of important nutrients (e.g., nitrogen and phosphorus) and, as such, can be used to fertilize economically valuable
crops and grasses. However, in the majority of cases, producers spray hog waste on fields of bermuda grass, which has a high nitrogen uptake but low economic value because the market
is already saturated with bermuda grass. Transporting the grass to use elsewhere is economically inefficient beyond a certain distance from the field. Furthermore, if the grass is
grazed by livestock animals, as little as 10% of the nutrients in the bermuda grass will actually be converted into meat -- the rest is deposited on the field as animal waste. (Put another
way, about 90% of what an animal eats leaves its body as waste.) This leaves a producer
right back where he/she started from -- trying to "get rid" of hog waste instead of using it to obtain a value-added product.
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