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USDA Encourages Ag Producers, Residents To Prepare For Hurricane Delta
The U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) is reminding communities, farmers, ranchers and small businesses in the path of Hurricane Delta that USDA has programs that provide assistance in the wake of disasters. USDA staff in the regional, state, and county offices stand ready and are eager to help.
USDA has partnered with FEMA and other disaster-focused organizations to create the Disaster Resource Center, a searchable knowledgebase of disaster-related resources powered by subject matter experts. The Disaster Resource Center website and web tool now provide an easy access point to find USDA disaster information and assistance.
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Publication date: Fri 9 Oct 2020
These Photos of Submerged North Carolina Livestock Farms Are Devastating
North Carolina’s rivers basins, now swollen with rainwater from Hurricane Florence, are home to thousands of large indoor hog and poultry farms, as well as cesspools of liquid hog waste. Predictably—just as happened two years ago in the wake of Hurricane Matthew—floods and factory-scale livestock farming are proving to be a toxic and deadly (for the animals) mix.
Millions of Animals Have Perished
TOM PHILPOTT SEPTEMBER 18, 2018
This is your chicken during a flood. Rick Dove/Waterkeeper Alliance
North Carolina’s rivers basins, now swollen with rainwater from Hurricane Florence, are home to thousands of large indoor hog and poultry farms, as well as cesspools of liquid hog waste. Predictably—just as happened two years ago in the wake of Hurricane Matthew—floods and factory-scale livestock farming are proving to be a toxic and deadly (for the animals) mix.
A group called the Waterkeeper Alliance sends pilots into the air in after North Carolina flood events to document the damage done to these operations. The group uploads aerial photo to a Flickr feed, which will be updated regularly over the next several days. The first flights went up Monday, after Florence’s rainstorms had petered out, and the imagery is stark. Below are some just-posted images the group took during Monday’s flights.
In this one, the four long, narrow structures are indoor poultry barns, almost completely submerged.
Rick Dove / Waterkeeper Alliance
This one shows a similar scene, in West of Trenton, NC: four poultry barns, mostly under water.
In the one below, a massive hog operation with multiple barns and a manure lagoon—that rectangular pink thing, top right—has barely escaped inundation. But note that river flows from the storm have not peaked, and more severe flooding could yet happen.
In this one, a hog operation in West of Trenton, NC, the barns are mostly underwater and the manure lagoon has been topped by flood waters.
Matt Butler / Sound Rivers
Then there’s the startling photo below, sent to me by Matthew Starr, the Upper Neuse Riverkeeper for Sound Rivers, taken from the air yesterday. It depicts a liquid manure from a hog lagoon being pumped directly into floodwater.
Larry Baldwin / Crystal Coast Waterkeeper
Since the rivers are still cresting, it’s too early to tell how much much toxic manure will flow into North Carolina’s waterways in Florence’s wake, or how many animals will perish. Early indications are chilling. Sanderson Farms, the nation’s third-largest chicken producer, issued a statement Monday revealing that 60 of the 880 chicken barns that grow birds under contract for the company had flooded, killing an estimated 1.7 million birds of the around 20 million the company currently holds in the state. The statement added:
In addition, approximately thirty farms, housing approximately 211,000 chickens per farm, in the Lumberton, North Carolina, area are isolated by flood waters and the Company is unable to reach those farms with feed trucks. Losses of live inventory could escalate if the Company does not regain access to those farms.
That means around 6 million additional chickens are currently cut off from feed deliveries and could soon perish.
In the next episode of Bite podcast, which will air Friday, I catch up with Watereeper Alliance about what they’re seeing as they document the destruction. I also talk to retired eastern North Carolina chicken farmer Craig Watts—who until January 2016 grew birds under contract with another giant chicken company, Perdue—about the stress and financial risks incurred by contract farmers during these increasingly frequent catastrophes.
Just two years ago, months after Watts retired, Hurricane Matthew wrought similar destruction upon North Carolina’s CAFO-intensive, river-crossed coastal plain. According to Waterkeeper’s Starr, “in the two years since, no action was taken by the [meat] industry” to shut down operations in flood-prone areas.
North Carolina’s Hog And Poultry Farmers Are Directly In The Path of Hurricane Florence. Are They Ready?
Previous storms prompted manure-related environmental disasters. This week, North Carolina could get very smelly.
September 11th, 2018
by H. Claire Brown
As of Tuesday afternoon, more than a million people are under mandatory evacuation orders in Virginia, North Carolina, and South Carolina as Hurricane Florence draws closer to the coast. Meteorologists are predicting that the Carolina coasts will start seeing tropical storm-force winds late Wednesday night, with hurricane-force winds arriving at around noon on Thursday and official landfall likely on Thursday night. North Carolina Governor Roy Cooper declared a state of emergency on Friday.
The governor also lifted restrictions on weight-limited vehicles like semi-trucks so that farmers could harvest crops ahead of the storm. Heather Overton, assistant director of public affairs at the North Carolina Department of Agriculture & Consumer Services, says the agency sent 12 regional agronomists to survey farmers around the state. They estimate about two-thirds of the state’s tobacco and three-quarters of the corn have already been harvested, but sweet potato and peanut harvests are just getting underway.
“Farmers are working to get as much out of the fields as they can,” Overton says. “We urge them and everybody else to take the situation seriously.”
Hog and poultry farmers have more to worry about than flooded barns.
Meanwhile, the state’s pork and poultry farmers are stocking up on feed and fuel and moving animals to higher ground. “Some of the farms will have sent their birds to the processing plant a little early to move them off the farm,” says Bob Ford, executive director of the North Carolina Poultry Federation. “We’re in pretty good shape,” he adds. The pork industry seems similarly nonchalant: Andy Curliss, the North Carolina Pork Council CEO told Bloomberg he’d only be concerned if the state got more than 25 inches of rain.
In reality, hog and poultry farmers have more to worry about than flooded barns. Animal agriculture produces about 10 billion pounds of wet waste a year in North Carolina, and a lot of that waste is stored in open lagoons. During Hurricane Floyd in 1999, those lagoons broke open and dumped waste into public waters, an environmental catastrophe that was later blamed for algal blooms and fish kills. During Hurricane Matthew in 2016, 14 lagoons flooded and millions of animals died. Yet in a blog post admonishing readers to “beware of misleading narratives and check facts,” the North Carolina Pork Council argued that the vast majority of lagoons operated as advertised during Matthew, which minimized the damage.
Overton says North Carolina hog farmers have begun spraying manure onto fields to free up space in the lagoons should major rainfall accompany Florence. Transferring waste from the pit to the field helps minimize the risk of a flooded lagoon, but the state’s Department of Environmental Quality regulates the amount of manure farmers are allowed to apply. Overton says that farmers have had several days to prepare. “From what we understand, they are in pretty good shape.”
North Carolina doesn’t always know where poultry farms are located.
Farmers are required to stop applying manure at a certain point after weather watches and warnings are issued by the National Weather Service—typically hours before the severe weather begins. This can put them in a double-bind: leave the manure in the lagoons and risk a breach caused by flooding, or break the law by applying it on the farm too late and risk letting it run off into the public water supply when the storm comes. There’s a powerful incentive to break the rules.
“We have consistently, in advance of similar storms even of lesser intensity, witnessed illegal spraying after that prohibition is triggered,” says Will Hendrick, staff attorney for the Waterkeeper Alliance, an environmental advocacy group. “That’s part of what we will be on the lookout for during our pre-storm monitoring.”
Hendrick’s team will also be monitoring agricultural flooding from the air so that it can alert state agencies to mobilize a response. He points out that the state of North Carolina doesn’t always know where poultry farms are located—they’re not required to apply for a permit.
“I don’t think anyone is as optimistic as to assume that there won’t be considerable damage in North Carolina,” Hendrick says. “We’re going to do our best to determine it, assess it—and in particular, the damage that’s caused by threats to water quality.”
ENVIRONMENT, FARM, HOME FEATURE, SYSTEMS,CAFO DISASTER PREPAREDNESS HURRICANE FLORENCE NATURAL DISASTERS NORTH CAROLINA