Fighting misinformation in the hog farming Industry
On Friday, The Guardian published an article titled, ‘The North Carolina hog industry’s answer to pollution: a $500m pipeline project’. Extension Agent Eve Honeycutt set out to set the record straight.
“I recently read an article in The Guardian that made me want to shed some light on the facts and misinformation that was in that article,” said Honeycutt.
The hog farming pipeline project will capture the methane gas released by the lagoons which store the waste produced by the hog farms. The captured methane gas will travel to a central processing facility and distributed through existing natural gas pipelines.
“This is a wonderful project. It is a true testament of the way agriculture is becoming more modern,” said Honeycutt.
Hog farmers have had to contend with nuisance lawsuits in recent years in addition to higher costs of farming with little to no increase in the sales price for their products.
“A slew of misinformation caused enormous public pushback,” said Honeycutt. “Even though they see it as a bad thing, but in reality, it’s a good thing,” said Honeycutt about the pipeline.
One of the pushbacks from public perception is that the new pipelines would leak and cause impacts to the local ecosystem.
“We’re not talking about a pipeline that carrying oil or gasoline or any sort of refined product. This is methane, this is a gas that’s coming through there,” said Honeycutt. “A leak of any kind would be uncommon in a system like this. It would not endanger any sort of ecosystem because of the nature of the product inside.”
Current legislation requires that renewable energy come from swine and poultry waste. The push to pipe the methane gas from the hog waste lagoons would produce renewable energy that would meet the requirements of that legislation.
“Hog farmers are part of the community. They don’t want anyone else to be affected by anything. They care about the people of their community and don’t have any incentive to do otherwise,” said Honeycutt.
Hog farming is a heavily governed industry plagued with nuisance lawsuits and public perception riddled with misinformation. Without the industry, eastern North Carolina would lose a large economic support system.
“The farming community as a whole has been on a downward spiral,” said Honeycutt. “To remove commercial animal agriculture from this area would be a huge economic blow that we’d never recover from.”
