Equity In Every Drop: Series Two

Series two includes six episodes focused on the issues and advocacy priorities of our Pure Farms, Pure Waters campaign.

In this episode of Equity In Every Drop, host Thomas Hynes is joined by Dr. Christopher D. Heaney, Ph.D., an associate professor at Johns Hopkins University Bloomberg School of Public Health. Dr. Heaney’s research focuses on the human health impacts of concentrated animal feeding operations, more commonly known as factory farms. Throughout the episode, they explore the significant hazards these facilities pose to both workers and nearby fenceline communities, including respiratory issues, the spread of multi-drug-resistant bacteria, and environmental contamination.

Dr. Heaney discusses his research on the link between high-density animal production and human health, sharing his journey from personal curiosity to academic inquiry. He stresses the urgent need to address these health risks and the importance of considering the lived experiences of affected communities when crafting regulatory policies. The conversation also touches on broader issues of environmental justice, with an emphasis on the need for a proactive approach to protect public health from the impacts of industrial livestock operations.

Another key topic is the promising, yet controversial, biogas technology used to capture methane from livestock waste to produce renewable energy. While this technology may seem like an innovative solution, Dr. Heaney raises concerns about its potential risks. He warns that these biogas facilities could worsen health problems for nearby residents, particularly through the release of pollutants such as hydrogen sulfide. He also points to the unsettling possibility that these facilities could become as hazardous as fossil fuel industries, especially in the event of catastrophic failures due to natural disasters like hurricanes, which frequently affect regions like North Carolina.

Dr. Heaney further advocates for more robust and proactive community engagement and public health surveillance. He stresses the importance of active surveillance and systematic testing, which could provide early warnings for emerging health threats, particularly those related to zoonotic diseases, which can transfer from animals to humans. In a global health context, such surveillance is crucial as the world continues to face the challenges posed by pandemics and their widespread effects.

Stay tuned! New monthly episodes will be posted here and anywhere you get your podcasts. Click “Subscribe” in the episode widget above to access links to popular podcast apps.

Thank you for listening, sharing, and supporting our mission to ensure everyone’s right to clean water. Together, we demand equity in every drop.

---

Waterkeeper S2, Ep4 – The Hidden Health Hazards of Factory Farms

Thomas Hynes: Welcome back to Equity In Every Drop. Our guest today is Dr. Chris Heaney, an associate professor in the Department of Environmental Health and Engineering at Johns Hopkins University. And the director of the Community Science and Innovation for Environmental Justice Initiative within the Johns Hopkins Center for a Livable Future.

His research focuses on environmentally mediated impacts on health and well being, specifically community land use, waste disposal, and food production practices. 

 Dr. Heaney, thank you so much for being here today. 

Dr. Chris Heaney: Thanks, Tom. It’s a pleasure to be here. 

Thomas Hynes: Well, we’ve been doing these episodes for a little while, and we’ve talked about a lot of different impacts that CAFOs, or factory farms, have on communities and on water quality. But, today we’re really excited to talk about some of the health impacts that these facilities and that this production has on individuals.

So, I was hoping you can begin by telling us a little bit about your work. 

Dr. Chris Heaney: Sure. Yeah, Tom. It’s a pleasure to be here. And we know a fair amount about these concentrated animal feeding operations or [00:01:00] industrial livestock production facilities. The processing plants that produce meat on the tables of families across the country, and the world, supplies a great benefit for many people in the source of protein.

However, the way that this food animal production system is structured also produces harms and hazards, both for the workers inside of the facilities and also residents who live in communities and neighborhoods where there’s a high intensity or high density of these industrial modes of producing livestock.

For workers, the hazards that we’ve observed include everything from the environmental conditions – from temperature extreme cold conditions inside of processing facilities, extreme heat inside of the live food animal production facilities – musculoskeletal, gross motor injuries, dust and air pollution that can create respiratory problems.

We know that the use of antimicrobial drugs, that is these antibiotics that you hope when [00:02:00] you go to a doctor and you need to treat a drug resistant infection, you hope that they work for you, your child, your family member. A large quantity of these antimicrobial drugs are actually used to produce food animals in this country. And so we’ve done a fair amount of work that shows the hazards and the implications of workers who are exposed to bio aerosols, bacteria inside these food animal production facilities. They can colonize themselves and bring those bacteria home, and they tend to be multi-drug resistant. That is resistant to three or more classes of antibiotic drugs that we hope would be available on the counter for our physicians to be able to treat infections. 

So, we also learn from the workplace setting and understanding the hazards for workers, we also recognize that the people who live closest to those facilities could experience some of the similar hazards that is related to air pollution, related to the offsite migration through [00:03:00] air, water, and workers these antimicrobial resistant bacteria can make their way out into communities. 

Water pollution is another big concern. So, the fact of life, if you live at the fenceline of a large scale industrial livestock production facility or livestock processing facilities that you will likely be experiencing, and this is what we hear the lived experiences are fair amount of environmental health hazards related to air, water, and soil contamination. 

Thomas Hynes: Yeah. It’s interesting because we talk a lot about the downstream effects, but it hadn’t really occurred to me that this is a huge health hazard for all of those individuals working in the facilities. We think about how the animals are being treated and how the communities surrounding it are being treated.

But this is a real hazard for the folks on the ground. And I think, you know, I’m bringing my own perspective to this. I live in New York City and everything in my life just sort of magically appears. We have no view into how anything is produced or gets to our table. [00:04:00] And this is another element of that, that these are people who are really putting their lives at risk to give us that protein and that great benefit.

And I appreciate you raising that concern. How’d you get involved in this work? 

Dr. Chris Heaney: Yeah, well, similar to you, I didn’t grow up in a big city like New York, but I grew up in, generally, sort of a suburban community in the Research Triangle Park area of North Carolina. And I had an understanding the food system to the extent that it was supplying foods that might appear on our kitchen table at our family. But you know, as a part of just daily life and living in North Carolina and going to a university, being fortunate enough to be able to go to a university like the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and getting to know different parts of the state and exploring that with our family, we used to take family trips down to the coast, and on the route from Durham down to the North Carolina coast. We would, my brother and I, look at each other when we passed a certain section of Interstate 40 in the rural part of the eastern [00:05:00] portion of the state and say, what’s that smell? And for years we didn’t really know, or we sort of, anecdotally, dating myself before the internet, but come to find out that it’s because of the agricultural production that replaced the fall of tobacco.

And it was livestock production and it was a swine industry. And this was sort of in the 1990s and the 2000s. And during my time at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, I was lucky enough to meet a faculty member in the School of Public Health who was partnering with communities who lived there in the rural eastern portion of North Carolina, and was listening to the concerns of workers, listening to the concerns of fenceline neighbors of industrial livestock operations, and trying to, from the standpoint of a School of Public Health, a very prestigious School of Public Health at the University of North Carolina, trying to say, how could we deliver some answers to these research questions that are remaining unanswered.

A lot of the concerns of communities that it’s any industry, if it’s an industrial fossil fuels facility, if it’s an industrial scale waste management [00:06:00] facility, like a wastewater treatment plant or a landfill. Often people living there experience things and they talk around their kitchen tables, their churches, their parish halls, their schools, when they meet up to drop off kids, they say, are you experiencing the same thing?

And there’s this collective recognition of these environmental problems, but what doesn’t always follow are the kinds of resources, capacities, scientific and otherwise, to be able to document and answer them. And so I was fortunate enough to meet this faculty member, Steve Wang, who made his whole career out of this.

And I was lucky enough to work with him for years, where he designed the studies in partnership with community organizations like the North Carolina Environmental Justice Network. People like Naima Muhammad and Gary Grant and community organizations like the Rural Empowerment Association for Community Help, REACH in Duplin County, North Carolina, with community leaders like Devon Hall.

And they together, the academics, Steve Wang and air [00:07:00] pollution experts, figured out how to design studies that could get rigorous objective answers to, well, what is the nature of these malodorant gas plumes that emanate and take over your neighborhood and where are they coming from? And can you attribute them back to the source?

And so they had decades of work that attributed those air masses as coming back and being emitted by swine CAFO confinement buildings. That’s the buildings, the houses inside which high densities of swine are produced. And also in North Carolina, it’s these large open cesspits that are termed lagoons and the sprayfields where they land apply the waste in a liquid form that projects the waste typically up into the air.

And then those air masses can overtake fenceline neighboring communities and showed very elegantly with these participatory epidemiologic studies that involve repeated measures over time, repeatedly answering the question, how is your air pollution changing on a, 15 minute by 15 minute or [00:08:00] hourly basis?

And how does that relate if people are doing very systematic documentation of changes in their physical symptoms, mucous membrane irritation, respiratory symptoms, profile of mood states, and making routine twice daily measurements of their pulmonary function blood pressure. And he was able to show that the coming and going of these air masses and these air pollution plumes is strongly related to adverse physical, mental psychosocial, and respiratory and blood pressure health endpoints. 

And a lot of this evidence was what was collected, synthesized and integrated into a long history of efforts to seek policy change, to seek reform of the permits of these facilities, which could hopefully inform regulations of air emissions, water emissions, soil emissions, which might protect the health, be more protective of the health of neighbors in portions of [00:09:00] the country like eastern North Carolina, whereas Devon Hall from REACH says, it’s the hog capital of the world. There are more pigs than people in places like Duplin County, North Carolina. So that’s how I got involved with sort of, started off growing up very personal for me, experiencing it with my family, not knowing what the questions are, not knowing what the answers are to the questions that, you know, as I turned to my brother and said, what’s that smell?

But having a lived experience. Fleetingly, briefly, as you said, didn’t grow up in the hog capital of the world, in Tippman County, but having the opportunity to be able to evolve academically and scientifically so that we could design research that would be highly responsive to those lived experiences of people at the fenceline of these industrial food animal production systems.

Thomas Hynes: We say that’s the smell of money. That’s the name of the film that the first guest we had on this series made about this issue, Jamie Berger. And that’s sort of the pessimistic tongue-in-cheek, money driven perspective, not Jamie’s perspective, but that’s what of the [00:10:00] industry, that’s money you’re smelling. There’s a lot of very interesting things you said there, but the one that kind of just jumped out at me, that, again I make no secret of my ignorance, but I was very ignorant to this notion that this replaced tobacco, that tobacco obviously got it. I mean, people still smoke cigarettes, but there’s been a huge sea change in my lifetime from cigarettes sort of being ubiquitous to cigarettes, obviously still existing, but that industry and that I didn’t, I never put that together. Is that, that the hog farms kind of filled that geographic vacuum and that, one health hazard for another, I mean, that’s just, yeah…

Dr. Chris Heaney: Yeah. I mean, so the expansion of the industrial swine production system in North Carolina had its roots in the late eighties and then rapid expansion of the nineties. And then in the early two thousands, there was enough work in this community academic partnership between scientists at the School of Public Health at UNC Chapel Hill and fenceline [00:11:00] communities and a statewide North Carolina Environmental Justice Network that they were able to successfully argue that this pattern, that the permitting of these swine CAFOs with their lagoons and sprayfields disproportionately impacted people of color in African American individuals as well as people of low wealth.

And so they were able to do a very elegant, first of its kind analyses that made a pretty convincing case that this represented an environmental injustice, that these swine concentrated animal feeding operations and their permits were not being equally distributed across a state like North Carolina.

They were being concentrated in regions of the state where there was a larger proportion of people of color and low wealth. So, this is something, this pattern was something that really was eye opening and it helped the communities successfully argue for a statewide moratorium on the issue of any new permits [00:12:00] for swine concentrated animal feeding operations, lagoons, and sprayfields.

So this industry and the ability to, across the state of North Carolina, with a certain menu of economic drivers, right for an economy is a very large contributor and it’s a part of the shifting dynamic over the decades of sort of agricultural crop production and things that are happening domestically, in terms of shifting crop priorities. But what occurred with swine was around that time from the late eighties, nineties, and then sort of a cap or a statewide moratorium preventing the issuance of any new permits for swine CAFO liquid waste management systems. Now in parallel and slightly following the expansion of swine CAFOs in North Carolina, we have the expansion of industrial poultry facilities which came at sort of a little bit overlapping at the tail end.

And it was, it’s been much more challenging to be able to understand the rate of expansion, the geographic [00:13:00] concentration because of some of the challenges in the fact that these are dry poultry litter waste management rather than wet liquid waste management systems. So, in North Carolina, they don’t have the same permit structure as the division of water quality maintains for the swine concentrated animal feeding operation or other animal facilities, which meet a certain threshold for animal equivalent units, and if they have a liquid waste management system. But the poultry industry also has expanded. And I think recently using some very elegant satellite imagery analyses being able to show that the expansion has occurred in North Carolina and similar areas as the expansion of swine concentrated animal feeding operations. And that these do represent very large quantities of swine and poultry production and their products, which are consumer goods. 

Thomas Hynes: And when you talk about a moratorium, that’s just putting a limit on expansion. And there’s still millions of hogs [00:14:00] going to the bathroom in untreated ways every minute of every day, that just addresses the growth of the problem, right? 

Dr. Chris Heaney: Yeah, that’s generally true. I think, and the other thing is that through our partners at the Rural Empowerment Association for Community Health and their network of members, they come together every month and they have the Duplin Environmental Health Awakening Project or DHAP meetings monthly, and they’re public.

But the attendees tend to be the REACH members over the decades who’ve been supporting REACH and their community efforts to engage, inform, and educate. And also they do a fair amount of research, community academic research. But some of the testimony that’s brought forward at those monthly DHAP meetings is that people are noticing that when they leave their home on their on their property and they go out to the local highway, the state highway or local road, and they would pass by a series of placards that would be at the entry points of [00:15:00] different farm properties, that they would say historically had just had the placard for say a swine corporate integrator, right, like, Murphy Brown or a Smithfield or a Prestige. But wondering why are they now seeing placards for poultry production, a Butterball, or another poultry integrator. And as those questions rise to the top of the monthly meetings and they share them with academic partners, and we start to look at satellite imagery and say, well, where did you see that and let’s take a look. 

We’re starting to notice that the statewide moratorium on the expansion of swine CAFOs, being capping any additional permits being issued essentially stops the ability for there to be growth of an economy, of an economic driver, right? So, what appears to have occurred is that an individual who may have been a contract grower, may have been a producer of, say, a particular integrator of swine, right, of a certain life stage but cannot expand, right, because you can’t [00:16:00] expand a lagoon, you can’t expand the size of a lagoon, you can’t expand or change, meaningful portions of that operating permit around the liquid waste management system may be offered the ability to expand by producing a different animal species.

And so there’s the sense of co-location, the same producer on the same plot of land that may have been producing a hundred, hundreds to thousands of swine. Now, through our community academic work and that of others, appears to be on the same property, producing hundreds to thousands, if not tens of thousands of poultry.

And so that’s something that has, going back to thinking about that, well, who’s working there? What are the public health concerns? What are the environmental health concerns? And something that I think all of us is have lived through, and there’s a lot of global consciousness about, these pathogens, these viruses, which could be epidemic, potentially pandemic or pandemic, and something we’ve known for a very long [00:17:00] time since, the pandemics of the 1918s, is that these influenza viruses love a lot of different mammals and a lot of different animal species.

And if you think about the classic triangle for some of these, it’s birds or avian species. It’s swine and it’s people. And so, the concern with growing high numbers at high-stocking densities of swine with people who work there and live nearby and high densities and high numbers of poultry that could be chickens, broiler chickens, it could be turkeys, is that if you had the introduction of influenza viruses, you could have ideal conditions for very high selective pressure that these viruses love in order to adapt to different animal species. 

And if you’re playing those numbers at a high frequency over many years, and we’ve noticed this co-location trend goes back, [00:18:00] almost a decade now at what point are you going to potentially be seeing that selective pressure cross from avian poultry into swine on the same property? There are people that work and live nearby. And when these influenza viruses get well-adapted to the swine host, we know that they’re much more capable of being problematic and causing disease in humans. They’re much more well-adapted to cause severe disease and death in humans, as we saw with the 2009 pandemic, H1N1 strain, which had global pandemic implications. So this is something that going back to our community partners, and their lived experiences, that people who are leaving their home and driving down the road or noticing speaking up at a community meeting in a monthly meeting saying, Hey, anybody else notice this? And what is this number one? And number two, if we’re asking that question with the right people around the table, academic experts and others who may have familiarity with [00:19:00] environmental health, public health, infectious diseases really having legitimate questions that, that could be of the public’s interest of societal concern about what’s happening in different parts of our state, like North Carolina, and also nationwide and worldwide. And this is not something unique to the U.S. The scale of industrial livestock production in the U.S. is of a certain level.

But in Asia and South Asia and China, there are now not just, single-level confined animal feeding operations, but multi-story confined animal feeding operations, which are again, raising this concern, this question. There could be legitimate benefits in terms of some of the principles around biosecurity and biocontainment. But, if there is a challenge with the introduction of an agent or a virus of concern. At that scale of production, and if there’s co-location of the animal species where that virus likes to go through that kind of selective [00:20:00] pressure, it could have big implications for the public. 

Thomas Hynes: Okay. There’s a lot here. That’s terrifying. That was great. And there’s a lot of very scary things in there. One because it’s probably the most recent thing you said, if you think working on a hog farm sounds bad, imagine working in a 10 story hog farm. But what I’m hearing from you is that the moratorium, I mean, that’s not really a moratorium because you’re just filling in that expansion with other animals.

So you are in essence expanding, like, the industry is obviously expanding where they’re saying they’re in a moratorium, they’re being bad actors. And so that’s on its face to me, galling and terrible and unhelpful. But then you put in this other paradigm and I’m laughing because I’m scared.

You put in this other paradigm of being like, well, this is also like ideal breeding grounds for, am I using the word zoonotic correctly? I mean, I don’t know, or just like, yeah. Yeah, zoonotic diseases and pandemics and listeners might remember that just a few years ago [00:21:00] we had one that shut down the entire world.

So this is terrible. They’re actually making the problem worse in a way because now you’re adding in this viral breeding ground opportunity. Under the quote, unquote moratorium, that’s actually just an expansion under another name. Wow. That’s terrible.

Dr. Chris Heaney: And I think one of the big concerns and there’s a lot of questions that are being worked out or sorted out for the benefit of the public is about just this latest highly pathogenic avian influenza, HPAI, right, that colloquially is, bird flu that’s affecting dairy cattle.

But leading up to it being a concern in dairy cattle, it was crisscrossing the globe and different mammalian species and taking on concerning patterns of being able to successfully adapt to mammals, which are much more closely related and much more well-adapted in terms of their physiology to sort of being able to make a jump into other warm-blooded mammals like cows and pigs and humans.

And that is something that is sort of a [00:22:00] public ‘right to know’ in terms of what are the concerns and I think right now, one of the issues with the ongoing highly pathogen avian influenza investigation and the extent of its dissemination through dairy cattle answers to questions, is it also affecting poultry herds? If so, where, how broad, how extensive? The real big challenge is in testing. And who is driving decisions to design testing and surveillance. And is it passive surveillance? Is it active surveillance? What do I mean by that?

Is it that, you wouldn’t have testing occur unless a producer, say, a dairy CATO were to volunteer information. That their herd has had changes in the physical health status of the dairy cows. Maybe their milk has turned and had shown visible signs. Maybe their production output is declined.

You wouldn’t have testing [00:23:00] unless a producer came forward like that. Right. And it’s very different than say, having proactive testing where you’re offering tests for free, you’re providing assurance that regardless of results, that any of the production outputs or any of the economic, potential economic costs would not have adverse impacts for any single producer, any, sector itself. And you may also, that would look very different than having cross-government agency coordination, right? Having USDA the animal public health information service or APHIS, having them be collaborating with the Centers for Disease Control, having them collaborate with the Food and Drug Administration, in order to design some active surveillance. Because what we’re hearing from workers on the other side is that they’re not sure if it’s a problem.

They don’t know whether the facilities at which they work could be affected by this. They are experiencing, probably just like many people across [00:24:00] the country, they themselves are experiencing respiratory infections. They’re deciding, do I go to work or not? An act of surveillance testing information might help workers to navigate that. Producers navigate that.

And so that’s something that we’ve been really cognizant of, and we’ve learned from listening to our community partners like Devon Hall at REACH and the North Carolina Environmental Justice Network and other community partners on Delmarva. On the Delmarva Peninsula with Maria and Michael Payan and with community health providers like Imani Dorival, who sees these industrial livestock operation workers come into her clinic and they have respiratory diseases. And it’s often key small pieces of information. which are related for example, the HPAI disease signs and symptoms. The fact that it was an ocular or an eye infection was a part of the presentation. In addition to respiratory mild respiratory symptoms is something that, that they didn’t know a lot of the local workers, a lot of [00:25:00] the healthcare workers and the industrialized like operation workers didn’t know to look for that.

And when that information is shared that’s when you could start to have more of the dots connected and potentially have some active surveillance that say you might trigger a rapid test for influenza A or influenza B, whenever there’s signs and symptoms like that, that are atypical for typical respiratory infections.

And so, that’s something that is another part of this, the lived experiences of industrial livestock operation workers. And at what point, if we’re getting data  that suggests that, yes, it does look like their exposure represents a hazard and it is related to their work tasks at these facilities. At what point can we have a coordinated proactive response, which is protective of their health as workers and cognizant of a need to be thinking about the communities and neighborhoods and populations surrounding these facilities and places where there’s intensive production. 

Thomas Hynes: I mean, the concerns [00:26:00] and the considerations that you’re raising are very, and they’re very thoughtful, honestly.

I mean, you, we’re not just talking about water quality here. We’re talking about people’s jobs. We’re talking about employee health and yeah, and I understand that, there’s two different sides of the economics there’s the industrial sort of I guess integrators or just like the parent companies. And then you have these small farmers on the ground who have super tight margins and need to feed their families. And, and I get that it’s all, yeah it’s a tangly complicated problem. We were talking earlier about this research and testing people’s health twice a day and this and that and this very elegant findings and things like that.

You said that kind of informs a moratorium on hog production, swine production, but that’s sort of not really the whole story. Are you surprised it hasn’t led to more changes? Because it sounds like the research and the science is like so clear from where you’re standing that you’re like, okay, these dots could not be connected more clearly.

I don’t mean to put words in your mouth, but are you surprised it hasn’t led to more change? 

Dr. Chris Heaney: Yeah, I think [00:27:00] that’s one of the things that we hear from our community partners a fair amount is we’re not seeing change. We’re not seeing the neighborhoods and the landscape where people live and come together, at the monthly Duplin Environmental Health Awakening Project, they’re not seeing things change.

And that is concerning to them and they keep raising those concerns. Whether it’s Duplin County, North Carolina or the Sussex County region on the Eastern shore or Midwest, central America, central part of the country here in Iowa, Minnesota, Wisconsin, or the far west out into the Dakotas, Oklahoma, and out into California and Washington state.

You hear the same concerns, is that the scale of production is not changing. The mode of production, which has produced over the years these ephemeral, difficult to predict transient air pollution events where people [00:28:00] describe every morning when I get ready to go to school, take the kids to school, go to the work, I crack the door and I’m negotiating with the air because I’m waiting to see what’s going to be there for me and my kids. 

And that hasn’t changed. And many, what we’re hearing testify now, and this is what we’re really trying to gear up and saying, what are the questions that need to be answered?

What scientific and technical capacity needs to be brought up to bear around this is that there’s concern that it could be further, there could be further consolidation, increases in the scale of herd sizes around the concept that there exists a technology to harvest methane from the organic wastes, the manures, the combined mixed slurry, which is the manure and the urine and the feces if it’s swine or if it’s dairy cattle or if it’s poultry [00:29:00] facilities where they’re attempting to take that organic material and mix it with wet inputs in order to make it suitable to go into an anaerobic digestion type of technology or a biodigester.

There’s a concern now that there is an engineered technology, an engineering technology that could be a potential producer of methane and we’re hearing all across the country, very consistent, very alarming reports from fenceline neighbors of these initial pilot scale build outs of the infrastructure around industrial livestock operation biogas facilities, be it individual operations that have consolidated and become larger and are gaining approval to be able to raise twice as many livestock, three times, four times as many livestock in some cases in order to get up to the scale of manure that be able to produce sufficient [00:30:00] methane that could then be harvested and then transported into trucked or pipelined infrastructure to be conditioned, purified, and then ultimately that methane joined with regional natural gas pipelines. And so, one of the concerns is that not only has nothing changed in terms of they’re still negotiating with the air when they go to their front doors, but they’re actually experiencing things that are, in their words, quite more acute. A greater magnitude, greater frequency due to some of this consolidation and increased scale that is being reported as occurring in order for a dairy cattle producer may have had a herd size of, 100 to 300. But then with the prospect of also being able to produce biogas, potentially as a part of that scaling up to produce a thousand to increase their herd size. 

And we’ve heard this not [00:31:00] only with communities around parts of the country where dairy cattle consolidation intensification occurred around biogas. We’ve also seen this in the kinds of infrastructure that are being developed around, for example, swine CAFO biogas, which the reports are, is that it’s not just a swine CAFO or swine CAFOs of a fixed number, right?

Roughly just over 2000 in the state of North Carolina, mostly concentrated in the eastern part of the state, but now it’s localized pipelines to connect and feed the biogas off of swine CAFOs that may have a biodigester and then larger connections up to centralized swine CAFO biogas conditioning facilities where the incoming swine CAFO biogas has a certain concentration of hydrogen sulfide.

It’s a certain concentration of ammonia. And it needs to be purified. It needs to be cleaned. It needs to be conditioned. And as a part of that conditioning [00:32:00] you’re concentrating this material at a centralized facility, which the testimony of the residents, it doesn’t look like anything that’s been in their communities before, because these were not fenceline fossil fuel industry communities.

This was rural farming America. Now, they’re living with large infrastructure that looks like there are flares. Where you’re off gassing. This is some things that if you drive from my house, Baltimore up to New York City, you would see on your way up to New York City, you would see, large fossil fuel, either natural gas or other kinds of refinery and processing conditioning facilities. 

And so, we’re hearing from rural America in Duplin County and in Sampson County, North Carolina, the people are now realizing what biogas plus industrial livestock production means. And, it actually means that they’re concerned that they’re living with a lot of the infrastructure of the fossil fuel industry in a place where North Carolina [00:33:00] experiences an increasing frequency of major storms and hurricanes.

And some of the testimony we’re hearing at these monthly meetings is we never worried that the swine CAFO was going to blow up before. We never worried that the infrastructure that we were going to be living with, that there’s another massive catastrophic flood, like Helene was affecting tragically and adversely the western part of the state. But if there was ever, massive build out of the fossil fuel-looking infrastructure around recovery and capture of methane from swine and other livestock industries, is that what’s going to happen there when the power goes off and we’re without power for weeks. And there’s pipelines that have large quantities of this gas?

What’s going to happen in our communities at that point? And so I think these are some of the concerns of the various range of not only are these fenceline neighbors as elegantly as, in the two thousands, nineties and two thousands of Steve Wang, was able to produce information that suggested this is an environmental injustice.

But there’s concern with the expansion of [00:34:00] the swine industry, co-location of the poultry industry that it was an additional cumulative impact of an environmental injustice. And then further now, what decisions are going to be made at a state level if there is a view that is publicly being promulgated that all livestock production and all livestock farms in North Carolina are part of the climate solution, right?

And so what our fenceline neighbors are now going to see, what are the impacts of these policies? What are the impacts of some of this climate infrastructure funding? What is the nature of that cumulative burden going to be? And are they going to be living before they know it with concerns that, as we’ve heard residents testify that they never, at least they never worried that the swine CAFO was going to blow up.

So, that’s part of the, how are things changing? What could we all do? What role, what skills, what capacities do we each have? Can we [00:35:00] listen? We listen to a lot of concerns. We listen to things that can affect the public in so many different realms. Economic productivity and economic growth is a part of that.

But, we should also be willing to listen to the disproportionate and potentially adverse impacts of people who are at the fenceline of those economies and say, if there now is an opportunity to bring an additional commodity out into the market – an energy commodity into the market, there’s a potential for there to be from the agricultural sciences from the economic sciences, an answer to is there a profitability and what kinds of either input subsidies would be needed in order for there to be an energy economic unit there – a BTU of natural gas, right?

Part of that should be listening to the burdens at the fenceline and fully and justly accounting [00:36:00] for those environmental and health burdens at the fenceline. In order to do that, we need to have those academic studies and that research from a public health perspective, from an environmental health perspective, in order to have that just accounting for the fenceline neighbors.

One final thing that I’ll mention is that in one of the culminating bright spots for many of the fenceline neighbors of swine CAFOs was the synthesis of the evidence and its adjudication around the nuisance lawsuits against Smithfield. And the plaintiffs, that is the neighbors of the swine CAFOs, having success at arguing their concerns with nuisance and adverse impacts on health. But, the statewide legislation, which was passed, which essentially said that the agricultural industry, you could not bring nuisance claims against the agricultural sector in the state.

Well, one of the things that community partners are now saying in North Carolina [00:37:00] is, the agriculture industry, there’s no redress for us now for our environmental adverse impacts and our public health adverse impacts, but we’re now seeing public marketing materials. There are billboards all across North Carolina that talk about “factory farms is green” and part of the climate solution for our farm grass.

And there’s a lot of industry sponsored material down the pilot bill out of this is a triple, you know, triple win. It’s a green climate solution that now farms are now energy producers. 

And so fenceline neighbors are saying, so if I live next to a fossil fuel industry, I would be able to have a legal redress to make a nuisance claim against a natural gas frack, natural gas, or a coal storage facility or an oil and gas refinery.

But because it’s an agricultural producer that’s producing this energy unit, they don’t have the ability to seek the same kinds of redress if the infrastructure ultimately looks the same. And one of the [00:38:00] things that we’re seeing that’s quite concerning is the concentrations of hydrogen sulfide in the gas that’s coming off these individual swine CAFOs could be approaching the concentrations that the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health deem as immediately dangerous to life and health. Because it’s concentrated and it’s coming off the swine CAFO lagoons, and that’s the reason it has to be conditioned.

And part of the state’s regulatory framework for air emissions at these Swine CAFO biogas conditioning facilities is they have to declare and publicly report what quantity of sulfur dioxide, which is an EPA Clean Air Act criteria air pollutant. They have to declare what their S02 emissions are. Why are they, we wondered why are they having to declare S02?

Well, part of the way that they condition and clean and remove the hydrogen sulfide is that it’s converted into S02. [00:39:00] So, the state air regulatory authorities are having to document and track the level and the quantity of sulfur dioxide emissions. And so that brings another concern among workers at these facilities, this centralized swine CAFO biogas storage facilities.

If there’s an emission and accidental release and all pipelines leak, that is something that the industry will admit. What are the levels going to be and what level of hazard is that going to represent for workers? What level of environmental hazard is that going to represent for fenceline neighbors of these kinds of facilities that are storing certain large quantities of the swine CAFO biogas prior to its conditioning?

So, these are things that are coming up at community discussions. There are initial pieces of data that are being provided, shared, and interpreted. But you know, your question about are things changing? I think we’re hearing concerns that things are not changing, that they’re perhaps, uh, the concerns are [00:40:00] becoming deeper. They’re becoming, it’s becoming more concerning about these legacy issues.

Thomas Hynes: Yeah. I mean, again it’s really great hearing you speak on this because your knowledge and your passion and your empathy all really are coming through. But every time you’re done talking, I’m like, wait, I heard like ten things I want to go back to.

And one is just that this picture you paint, and I, we talked before we started recording, like you have little kids, I have a little kid. It’s hard getting these kids out of the door at all. You’re talking about negotiating. I mean, it’s like, please just put your gloves on, do this. And then to negotiate with the air is just such an insult and an injury. And it’s an injustice and just the last thing most people need to worry about. And it’s certainly not something I ever think about. And it’s honestly, it just kind of is heartbreaking to me to think like, everybody’s already trying their best and working so hard just to live their life every day.

And to have the air be something you have to negotiate with is so heartbreaking and further, getting along [00:41:00] with what you said about. I mean, you think a hog farm is bad, but no one ever had to worry about it blowing up, it would be so nice if this was a tidy solution. It would be so nice if we had something positive to do with these lagoons of hog waste and this problem could become a solution that would be amazing. But, like we’re dealing with people who don’t have a great track record on doing this and they’re motivated by profit.

They’re not motivated by saying like, well, I’d like to help these poor people in Duplin County. They just are seeing dollar signs. Cause that’s how they’ve behaved. I mean, you were talking and I’m like, Oh yeah. When is the energy sector ever been bad to their neighboring communities? It’s like, anyway, it’s just it’s, I talk about cautiously optimistic.

I mean, I feel more cautious than optimistic. But yeah, what I also was struck by what you said was like, okay, if you’re going to do this, you need to listen to these people. You’re not saying no, you’re not saying it can’t work, but it has to work differently than this has worked heretofore or whatever, like it can’t work the way it’s [00:42:00] worked for decades as far as like community engagement and partnership and transparency and things like that. So it’s yeah it’s a lot. 

Dr. Chris Heaney: Yeah I think you’re really onto something there. We want to do better.

If we’re hearing concerns from neighbors and neighborhoods and communities at the fenceline of any industrial kind of facility you would hope that you could hear those concerns, there could be a rigorous inquiry into the validity of their concerns, and if the data and the findings suggest that they are valid that there could be, as anyone would expect in this country with our constitutional rights to achieve a full state of mental, physical, social, and emotional well-being that we should all have that inalienable right.

And, so that’s something that we think that is true no matter what the industrial source is, and there are lots of examples to give hope and success [00:43:00] stories of communities negotiating. Whether it’s using the science and the data to argue for more protection of the environment and health, regulatory enforcement or compliance with existing regulations through ongoing routine monitoring. Or, if it’s not, seeking changes to regulations around operating permits, it’s answering the question well, there’s a burden. It’s diverse, complex, and perhaps cumulative in nature. What’s the precedent for just community benefits agreements to provide appropriate compensation for people who are living with this and these kinds of conditions? And, there’s great success stories that colleagues of mine who I came up in the scientific ranks with like Dr. Sacobi Wilson at the University of Maryland has worked with community partners who’ve been successful at negotiating with big, large economic interests around ports outside of Charleston. But successfully arguing that the burdens, the community burdens that they experience as being unjust, and [00:44:00] needing some public governmental decisionmaking authority that could be commensurate with those burdens.

And so, there are examples and I mentioned Dr. Sacobi Wilson, because he’s worked with the Low Country Alliance for Model Communities or LAMC, and they’ve achieved a just community benefits agreement, which had transformative impact, positive impact for that neighborhood and the communities that were experiencing adverse impacts of the existing port infrastructure and then the desire to have it expand. And so whether it’s a port, whether it’s a fossil fuels industry, whether it’s a livestock production industry.

And a great example that I actually like to give on this sort of digester technology, the biodigester technology is that, it’s not new. It’s something that the Smithfield agreement in North Carolina resulted in pretty detailed studies by, academics at NC State University and others showing that this technology could work, but that’s not even where it starts. [00:45:00] It’s just, that’s where this biodigester technology was wedded with the livestock production organic wastes of the manures.

The analogy that’s most often made to talk to the public about the scale of manure that’s produced by swine capers in North Carolina is what are sewage treatment plants for people typically deal with and what’s their regulatory framework?

Actually the technology around biodigesters has been in the toolkit for municipal wastewater treatment plants for much longer. And so, where I live here in, the City of Baltimore is one of the places in the country where some of the earliest applications of this intermittent digestion technology was applied at the Back River wastewater treatment plant on the eastern edge of the city.

And the neighborhoods surrounding that facility have talked amongst each other, said, are you experiencing the same malodor? And they’ve organized and they’ve spoken out loudly. They’ve gotten organized and filed complaints with the [00:46:00] Department of Justice and negotiated standing for their complaints about malodor, nuisance, water quality, air quality, air pollution concerns. And there have been consent decrees around facilities that have adopted this Antibiotic Digestion Technology, which can be, as you’re saying it may be that yes, we need these technological ideas on the table, but it’s in their scale and application.

And in the acknowledgment of the impacts for people who live at the fenceline proximal to them, where I believe we’ve got more to do. 

Thomas Hynes: Who have not been acknowledged or considered very well to date.

Dr. Chris Heaney: And I think the playbook that we’ve heard is that this is a technological solution. This is an economic opportunity that livestock production facilities are now a driver of green energy. Companies have started to notice this to try to see could they procure carbon offsets by investing in livestock sector [00:47:00] biogas.

So I think one thing that we need to be really acknowledging is are we missing a voice? Whose is it? Is it a classically already well-documented, overburdened environmental justice community or communities? And how do we faithfully represent their interests at the table and what would it look like to have a commensurate economic and environmental and public health and well-being benefits for the experiences of those communities?

Thomas Hynes: Well, this has been a very great conversation. And, I joke with my wife that I have toxic optimism instead of toxic masculinity. But I heard the beginning of the talk, we’re talking about tobacco and when I was growing up, it just felt like, well, cigarettes exist and they kill people and we know, and there’s nothing anyone can do about it. They’re too powerful and nothing will ever change. And things have changed. And I don’t mean to put that lens on this problem, but it feels very similar. And obviously, geographically, it’s pretty similar, but it feels like this is like a huge [00:48:00] tangled problem with a lot of money and influence and power behind it.

And we understand the connections, we understand the causes and the impacts, and yet nothing seems to get done. But I hope that in 10 or 15 years or hopefully less time, we look back and say, oh, look, it went the way of tobacco like things did change. And I don’t know exactly how we get there, but I’m hoping that conversations like this and the work that you’re doing, obviously more importantly, get us closer to that.

This has been a great conversation and I’m very happy to have spoken with you today. 

Dr. Chris Heaney: Thanks so much!