Excerpt
Environmentally, 1995 was an eventful year in North Carolina. Six animal waste spills from large confined swine operations generated an outcry about environmental degradation. The largest of these spills, and the first reported, dumped 21 million gallons of effluent into the New River.
Because we feel that other states may share similar experiences in the future, we have chosen to highlight North Carolina's experiences with large swine operations, and the ways in which industry and government have acted to deal with the problems, in this issue of the Journal.
North Carolina has some 9.3 million hogs, making it second only to Iowa in swine numbers. This growth has primarily occurred since 1991. The industry grew at a pace of 30 percent each year from 1991 to 1995. Even the public outcry over spills in 1995 have had little impact as the swine industry continues to grow at a pace of more than 10 percent annually.
Most of the expansion has occurred in about a dozen counties in eastern North Carolina. Two counties, Duplin and Sampson, have accounted for 45 percent of the total growth. There are 1,273 hogs per square mile in Duplin and 1,218 …
Footnotes
Area Resource Conservationist NRCS, Goldsboro, NC.
- Copyright 1997 by the Soil and Water Conservation Society
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