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

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S2 Ep 2: The Impact of Factory Farms on Water Quality

Thomas Hynes: [00:00:00] Our first guest today is Dr. Michael Mallin. Dr. Mallin is a research professor at the Center for Marine Sciences at the University of North Carolina, Wilmington, and has been working on the issues of CAFOs and factory farms and their impacts since the 1990s.

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

Dr. Michael Mallin: My pleasure to be here.

Thomas Hynes: So, why don’t you tell me a little bit about your work and how you got involved in this? 

Dr. Michael Mallin: Alright. Always been interested in pollution, of course since I started my career, but specifically regarding CAFOs, that interest came about in a big way in the mid to late 1990s here in coastal North Carolina. We were struck by a number of hurricanes and not only hurricanes themselves, but we had a year 1995, which we had just had major heavy rainfalls. And we had some absolutely spectacular, if you want to use that term, swine lagoon breaches, and, which literally led to millions and millions of gallons of raw waste coming down streams, coming into the rivers, and actually in [00:01:00] some cases making it down to the estuaries itself.

So, what happened was that no one had ever recorded these effects before in the scientific literature. So, my laboratory and my colleague, Dr. Joanne Burkholder at NC State University combined our laboratory forces and sampled these major spill events. I think there was like, early on, three of them that we sampled very heavily. And thus we were the first ones to demonstrate the acute impacts of the CAFO industry and how the lagoons were basically, you can say, call them ticking time bombs. Full of waste.

Thomas Hynes: That’s a term we use a lot. From our colleague Rick Dove, Sorry, please go on. 

Dr. Michael Mallin: Yeah. Yeah. So anyway, we did these samples and collected and got a very robust data set. And we published these first papers in the Journal of Environmental Quality, and they’re obviously peer reviewed publications. So that sort of set the stage for that. And over the years, obviously, we got more [00:02:00] hurricanes. 1999, there was a triple threat of hurricanes. And some lesser ones following that. We continued to work on that. Later on in conjunction with the Waterkeepers, they funded us to do some sampling work to understand the chronic effects of CAFOs.

So we were sampling stocking Head Creek, which is in a very heavy swine and poultry CAFO area. And we did some really intense sampling there. And again this is not hurricane, not flood seasons, but this is just normal operations. And, uh, we published, uh, two papers from there and we saw very strong impacts of the CAFOs.

Um. The waste lagoons once they reach a certain level of waste, that’s pumped out onto surrounding fields, or sprayed out onto, to be clear,that sprayed out onto surrounding fields with the theory that, well, the vegetation will take up the waste, [00:03:00] and so on. The big problems with that is that these facilities are on the coastal plain.

The coastal plain is characterized by very porous soils, i. e. constituents simply go down through the soils. 

Thomas Hynes: That’s a nice way of saying 

Dr. Michael Mallin: yeah. 

Thomas Hynes: Go on, sorry. 

Dr. Michael Mallin: Yeah, sure. And anyways, the other problem is that on the coastal plain, the water table is high. So you’re spraying out on the field and these constituents like nitrate in particular and fecal bacteria. Alright, that’s this coming out there and that is something that washes off the fields with rain, just like stormwater runoff. You get this in stormwater runoff in suburban areas and traditional agriculture. It’s the same concept with the CAFO spray fields, alright, so, on top of that, it goes down and it goes right into this upper groundwater layer. Because there’s not much soil in between there to soak it up. Once it’s in the groundwater doesn’t sit there. Groundwater moves as a net [00:04:00] movement downslope toward the nearest stream, or if it’s a lake or whatever, toward the nearest body of water.

That movement gets enhanced if it’s followed by more rain because the rain pushes down on the water table on the soil and if the water table is already close to the surface you get puddling and I know you have seen aerial photographer of the big purple patches on there. That cannot sink into the soil anymore because the water table is too high. So what happens is that surface stuff moves downstream and pressing on the water table. The water table is forced to move in a stronger fashion downstream and it carries the nitrate, some phosphorus, and some of the bacteria. 

So when you figure this I do want to mention the bacteria because it’s a human health issue. Certainly. 

Thomas Hynes: Right. 

Dr. Michael Mallin: We share many of the same pathogenic [00:05:00] bacteria and viruses and protozoans as do our domestic animals. That’s why we have problems with things like bird flu, swine flu. So, in the case of this, once this is sprayed out on the fields, it goes into the water. Somebody downstream, kids playing in the water or what have you, or dogs or whatever, are subject to getting an infection from these waters.

Thomas Hynes: Contact with right, not even drinking it or eating the fish or just touching it. 

Dr. Michael Mallin: That’s correct. And not just touching it like that, but the problem that comes if you have an open wound cut on your hand or something, or if you splash it in your eye or splash in your mouth or something, that’s what leads to infections.

So, or in your nose, certainly. Yeah. Yeah. So, uh, that’s the human health issue there. 

Thomas Hynes: Tell me more about the chronic problems that these I mean, it probably sounds obvious, but let’s just, let’s cover what these rivers of fecal [00:06:00] bacteria getting into the groundwater seems kind of self evident that would be a problem, but explain to me why that is a problem.

Dr. Michael Mallin: Okay. So, we just discussed the human health aspects of it. And it’s not only human health, but animal health because they can get diseases down there too, downstream too. 

So, what about the ecosystem problems? The ecological problems out in the environment. So, the other constituents in these lagoons or in the spray water you have nitrogen, you have phosphorus, right?

They’re well known fertilizer, certainly. And then there is this organic material. That environmental engineers, that they know this very well from human sewage, it’s called BOD, Biochemical Oxygen Demand. 

And basically there’s organic carbon that goes into the water, and if it’s poorly treated, what happens is that the bacteria love it.

The field bacteria, not the pathogens. I’m talking about just the normal bacteria out there. They love to feed on this stuff. [00:07:00] All right, so they’re feeding on this organic group, this BOD, all right? And what they’re doing, they’re sucking dissolved oxygen out of the water. Now, for a point source, point sources are regulated by the NPDES or National Pollutant Discharge Elimination System. If it’s a wastewater treatment plant or a private industry, the amount of BOD that they release into the environment is strictly regulated by the state.

And they have to report, they have to sample it and report those numbers. CAFO operators don’t have to do any of that.Nope. No, sir. They don’t have to sample a damn thing. So, all this raw stuff that they’re spraying out to this waste, it contains very high levels of this BOD. That stuff also goes out into the streams. That washes downstream and it goes into the rivers. So, here in we’re in the, basically the Cape Fear Valley.

All right, it’s lowland, blackwater systems, and the Cape [00:08:00] Fear, for instance, is under what’s called a TMDL or Total Maximum Daily Load. It’s a legal term for low dissolved oxygen. 

Thomas Hynes: Is that like a pollution diet or like a nutrient diet? Like, that’s like this can only handle this much.

Dr. Michael Mallin: Yes, good. Absolutely. Yeah. Yeah. So the rivers here are already stressed. That’s why they’re under this low dissolve document or this BOD TMDL. All right. So when you start adding this the BOD from what’s essentially nonpoint sources, these CAFOs, the state will try and tell you all their point sources are regulated.

No, that’s BS. Point sources come out of a pipe. These things just are sprayed out on the field and they’re washed into the streams and so on. Unregulated. Yeah, that’s what they say is just nonsense. So you have that happening. Then you have your nitrogen and phosphorus. So, nitrogen certainly is well known to stimulate algae blooms.

And we’ve certainly seen them and [00:09:00] measured them in small streams. From the nitrate and the ammonia that’s washed in from the sprayfields. So you’ve got the algae blooms there. Which is obviously a problem in itself. Now phosphorus is also a problem. What phosphorus does bacteria, where, okay, let me backtrack a sec.

I told you that, uh, the algae blooms are stimulated by the nitrogen and in the black water systems, not so much by phosphorus, but what’s stimulated by phosphorus is the bacteria. And I mean the normal bacteria out there, ambient planobacteria and fecal bacteria, both of them, they are stimulated by phosphorus.

They have a high need for phosphorus. So if phosphorus washes in from the sprayfields, or something, it makes them multiply even more. So, phosphorus feeds the bacteria, which multiply. And higher bacteria, that leads to higher BOD, which we just discussed, which leads to higher BOD. Lower dissolved oxygen.

Thomas Hynes: And [00:10:00] what kind of impact does that have on I mean, I know that harmful algal blooms or they have harmful right in the name. What does that mean for human beings? Like, what does that impact on the ecosystem even before it gets into human health? 

Dr. Michael Mallin: Yeah. So, when you have an area like the coastal plain where most of these facilities are in summertime, the dissolved oxygen is normally stressed already.

Okay. So, and then you add this to this, a secondary stress comes down, dissolved oxygen. The organisms, especially the benthic organisms, the critters that live on the bottom, the invertebrates, insect larvae or various crustaceans that live on the bottom. Of course, they need a certain amount of dissolved oxygen.

They get stressed. Their community gets stressed if dissolved oxygen levels drop down too much. When dissolved oxygen levels, as far as fish go, dissolved oxygen drops down there, they can swim. They’re out of there. They can [00:11:00] swim until they find an area with sufficient dissolved oxygen.

But a lot of these benthic critters can’t do that. And remember those benthic critters are a major part of the diet. For these fish on the coastal plain, right? So it’s a, it’s an ecosystem effect. It’s multiplicative. You might say, 

Thomas Hynes: Yeah. And we have this is less of a perfect analogy, but like I live in New York City and we have, you may have heard a lot of rats and rat poison. A is ineffective, but it also kills the hawks and the falcons and the owls. All the charismatic flying raptors that we love. I digress. I will always steer every conversation back to New York City, so I’m going to bring us back.

Dr. Michael Mallin: I’ll keep that in mind. 

Thomas Hynes: How is this allowed to happen? I mean, this seems like, again, coming from the outside in, it’s like, wow, this is how could you let these rivers of hog waste and chicken waste and all of these known dangerous pathogens get into the water table.

How is this allowed to happen? How has this been [00:12:00] happening? 

Dr. Michael Mallin: Okay. Alright, first of all let’s go back to this business about the point source versus nonpoint source pollution. The Clean Water Act, back in ‘72 that regulated the point sources, the federal EPA allowed the states to regulate the point sources.

And they then tell the sewage plant operators or the industrial operators again, how much BOD they can release. How much nitrogen or phosphorus or cadmium or mercury or whatever kind of chemical they’re putting in there. That’s measurable. It’s in a pipe. It’s going out there.

You could stick a bottle there and measure that, send that to a state certified laboratory and you know what’s going out there. 

That’s easily regulated. Uh, agriculture is not, it’s, it’s nonpoint, so it’s very diffuse. Out there, scientists, some, some scientists know this, know the amount of pollution that comes out [00:13:00] of there. 

Some don’t want to say anything bad about it because they may be funded by agricultural industry. Okay, so there are, some are very reluctant to do this besides that, agriculture has very powerful lobbying. State and federal. 

Thomas Hynes: And I don’t know if this is the right word, but it almost has like good branding too.

Right. Because, the biggest thing I want people to take away from the work that you’re doing and our Riverkeepers are doing and Waterkeeper Alliance says, it’s like, hey man, these are not family farms.

Like this is not, but that’s what we think. They’re like, are you going to go against the farmers? 

Where are you going to get your food? You crazy? And it’s like, no, this is like a factory without natural light or air ventilation that is like ruining waterways in some communities and having like, really huge impact with no oversight. I mean, I’m obviously paraphrasing here, but that branding and that, almost like public relations is like, oh no, that’s an independent family farm.

You can’t go after them. That’s not pollution. Like, how are you going to get [00:14:00] your food? And you know, that is not the case at all.

Dr. Michael Mallin: No, and I wish that there would be more focus on organic family farms that raise the animals in organic fashion. I mean, wherever I can, if I’m going to place that has the certified organic steaks or whatever like that’s what I’ll go for rather than factory farm type raised systems.

So, I wish that there was more focus on them in the media. 

Thomas Hynes: Yeah. Yeah. Hopefully we’re trying to get some of that across here because it really is. We toss around the word CAFOS internally. And I know that’s like in this world, that makes a lot of sense to us, but we’re on this, on this format here on this podcast, we’re really trying to hammer home.

Like these are factory farms. These are factories. These are industrial operations. 

This is not, uh, that American pastoral, uh, like this American idea. That is not the case.

And we’ve talked a little bit about the impact on the invertebrate [00:15:00] critters and how that affects like the larger water system and what’s happening to sort of the chemical balance of these ecosystems.

What’s the impact on human health though? Like how does this affect Folks, for lack of a better term. 

Dr. Michael Mallin: Yeah. So, as I mentioned a lagoon, waste lagoon and whatever they spray out is going to have very high levels of fecal bacteria, 

Thomas Hynes: Which doesn’t sound good. Right. 

Dr. Michael Mallin: Fecal viruses. And nasty protozoans.

So it sort of runs the gamut there. So obviously you don’t, if you’re a human being, you don’t want to be exposed to, again, to such microbes. And again, the most obvious way of getting exposed is through the mouth, the nose, eyes, and open wounds. Okay, so you have that. Now, there is something else that, that has gone on.

It used to be a very major problem. So it started getting a lot of publicity, and I think at least some of the operators started backing off on it. But the operators were giving antibiotics [00:16:00] to the swine and the poultry, but these weren’t to cure disease. No. They were giving the antibiotics because somebody found out that if you give them a low levels of antibiotics, it helps them put on weight faster.

Right. 

So they could go to market faster and do that now. 

Okay, so what does that mean to human health?

When we human beings have some kind of disease and, and we’re taking antibiotics, they say, finish your antibiotics. Okay? 

Because you want to knock out the virus. All those pathogenic bacteria in there.

You don’t want to just take some of them because what that’ll do, that’ll kill the weakest bacteria. The stronger ones will survive and they will multiply. 

Okay? Because you wanna knock out all that is building up antibiotic resistance. 

That’s exactly the same thing that’s happening in at least some of the CAFOs. When they’re feeding low level antibiotics, they’re creating bacteria that are becoming antibiotic resistant.

Thus, of course, [00:17:00] the animals are then pooping this stuff out and going to the lagoons or then spreading, spreading it out on the field. That’s going on to the environment. 

Now once that washes into a stream, goes downstream. Some other animal then drinks it or whatever, and it intermingles with their own intestinal flora.

And that helps increase their antibiotic resistance then. So we’re creating, I know you’ve heard the term, Super bugs. All right. And a lot of times that is a result of this antibiotic resistance. 

So that, then, is a very important human health problem. 

Thomas Hynes: And that is transmitted through the waste into the water and not through the consumption of the meat, or is it both? 

Well, theoretically, if you cook the meat, it should kill the bacteria. Now, I’ll tell you something else. We have we have photographs of this

when you’re sampling out in the field in Duplin County, here in North Carolina, and I have photographs of cows [00:18:00] grazing out under a spray field.

And where the operators out there just spraying waste out of the lagoon and the cows are just wandering underneath the spray eating… 

Dr. Michael Mallin: and they’re grazing.

Thomas Hynes: Yeah. 

Dr. Michael Mallin: So the cows are taking in this, these bacteria that are subject to this antibiotic resistance. So it’s intermingling with their own flora like that. 

And there are wild cows. These are cows that we’re going to, we’re either going to eat or drink their milk. Yeah, that’s exactly right.

Thomas Hynes: No wild cows. This is terrifying. And yeah, it’s just such a, it’s just such a crazy problem. And I think, and again, I go back cause it’s just , my like communications brain, it’s like, and they’re getting away with it because they have good branding. They’re like, like most people don’t even know this is a problem and it’s happening in such huge quantities and in, in such untransparent ways and without regulation.

And it kind of makes me insane. What can be done about this? 

Dr. Michael Mallin: First and foremost, let’s start at the very beginning. The [00:19:00] state and the feds, they have to mandate that producers either contract or pay for sampling around their facilities, that they have to sample the nearest stream to their spray fields. 

Thomas Hynes: nd that’s not happening now because I know like Rhat yeah, where are the river keepers around?

I mean, it’s been fought about and fought about it. Yeah, 

Dr. Michael Mallin: So, and not only that but they should be at least a couple times here. They should be sampling the groundwater to see the levels of nitrate, see the levels of fecal bacteria, and so on. Once, once you have a sampling program built up like that then that your streams out there, if you don’t get enough samples, that would be subject to potentially putting the stream on what’s called a 303D list.

That is the list of impaired waters. Each state has one, okay?

In fact, my laboratory was instrumental in getting one of those [00:20:00] labeled as such in coastal North Carolina, Stockinghead Creek, because we had found such excessive levels of fecal bacteria. 

Thomas Hynes: Is this something different than a Superfund site? 

Dr. Michael Mallin: It’s, it’s, it’s totally different, totally different. 

This, what this is, if it goes on this 303D list, the list of impaired waters, that means that the local, local governments, whatever they may be, they’re responsible for devising a program to reduce.

 The number of pollutants that put it on there, okay? So like, like I was saying for the Stockinghead Creek, we found excessive levels of fecal bacteria, which we reported to the state. And then they went out and they sampled the exact same stations we did, and lo and behold, they found the exact same thing we did.

So they were basically forced to put it on the 303D list. Now, that’s just, that’s, I mean, that’s the first step of doing it. Then they’re given a certain number of years in which to develop a program to clean it up or take other [00:21:00] actions to reduce this. 

And that number of years historically been kind of loosey goosey. Sometimes it’s not followed up properly by the agencies and so on. But at least that puts it on the map. Is this being legally impaired waters. Okay, so that, that’s basically the number one first step that they should do.

Thomas Hynes: So I think a lot about CAFOs. I’m always thinking about the hog farms. And I think it’s just because it’s so disgusting how much volume we’re talking about here.

And it’s just, it just seems particularly horrifying to me, but tell me more about poultry CAFOs and the risk that they’re posing. 

Dr. Michael Mallin: Okay, so poultry CAFOs and swine CAFOs, there’s a difference in how they treat their waste.

The swine CAFOs, almost all of them put it into the lagoon system, which is then sprayed out on surrounding areas. 

Poultry, most poultry facilities don’t have a lagoon. The only ones that do would be the egg laying facilities. And that can be a danger too. [00:22:00] But most of them that are like the broiler facilities, whatever you want to call them. Their waste is dry litter. 

They put it into, they mix it with a straw and put it under a shed and it’s called dry litter and then it’s spread out on the fields at some point. Okay, so once you spread it out on the field, of course, guess what, it’s still subject to rain.

Okay. It’s going to, if the storms are going to come and wash that into the water. 

So it’s still going to be putting out the fecal bacteria, the nitrogen and the phosphorus. So those are two major differences.

Now here in North Carolina, a major problem we do know the state tells us where the The swine CAFOs are all right, because they have these lagoons. So they consider it, okay, a point source roughly. And they have permit forum with the number of animals it’s permitted for. So that data is available to the public, to the scientific [00:23:00] community or to the NGO community or just private individuals.

Who wants to investigate? So that’s really, that’s out there. Now the poultry cave over in North Carolina, the department of agriculture does not give out the information of where they are located and how big they are because they are not considered to be in PDS, point sources.

 

Dr. Michael Mallin: Thus our swine number of swine lagoons and the number of swine in North Carolina basically leveled off a little over 9 million for the past 20 years or more. However the poultry facilities keep on coming. Not only in the coastal plain.

All right, so we have obviously most of the swines in the coastal plain. We have a whole hell of a lot of poultry in the coastal plain, but we also have some in Piedmont. In fact, if you fly from Wilmington to Charlotte, you have a window seat.

You can look out that window and literally 10 miles outside of Charlotte, there’s a whole lot of big, huge poultry facilities. 

And there’s [00:24:00] also a third subset of them in the foothills. Not up in the mountains, but in the foothills there’s poultry. And those keep coming in and coming. The amount of individual birds, which is in the many millions, keeps on increasing. over time. Now something that would be really helpful to everyone is for the state being required to report where those facilities are and the information on them, such as how many birds are they permitted for. 

Thomas Hynes: Yeah. And it sounds so you’re like, Hey, why don’t you just tell us where all of these factories of and piles of animal waste are like, can we just know where they are? Could like these solutions that you’ve suggested? I can’t, I’m like galled by the fact that they’re not already happening.

And I think that’s what’s so, staggering about this is that it’s like, yeah. This is not the price of doing business. It’s Oh, well, you go into your food, you got to get your food somehow. You got, break a few eggs to make an omelet. But like, I guess that’s like a mixed [00:25:00] metaphor because we’re talking about this anyway.

Like that, like regards, like this is not what’s happening here. This is not the cost of doing business. This is like, feckless and other words that I don’t want to say right now 

but it is so, maddening is a word I think I can use and insane. That and the things that you’re suggesting, you’re like, yeah, just like maybe monitor the water to see, like, maybe like let us know where these facilities are. Like Charlotte’s a big city, right? You have all these facilities and they’re not being regulated and they’re not being treated.

And, we’re going to talk to Kemp next and talk about like the impacts of like hurricanes on these things. Like even in good situations, this is a bad deal. And then like you put in this wild card, which is not really a wild card. It’s like a pretty reliable event in the Carolinas and increasingly so with these, these major storm events that are getting worse and worse and worse.

Like. This is reckless and this is pretty damning, but I really appreciate you being here with us today and giving us your expertise. It’s been really great talking to [00:26:00] you.

Dr. Michael Mallin: I’ve enjoyed it anytime. 

Section 2

 

Thomas Hynes: Our next guest is Kemp Burdette, the Cape Fear Riverkeeper from North Carolina. Kemp is a Wilmington native who grew up exploring the waterways and swamps of the area and has lived and traveled around the world as a U.S. Navy search and rescue swimmer, a Fulbright scholar, and a Peace Corps volunteer. Kemp, thank you so much for being here today.

Kemp Burdette: Yeah, happy to be here. Thanks for having me. 

Thomas Hynes: Yeah, absolutely. Let’s take a step back here and maybe just tell me a little bit about Cape Fear River and your work with Cape Fear River Watch and as Cape Fear Riverkeeper. 

Kemp Burdette: Sure. Yeah. The Cape Fear River is kind of empties into the Atlantic Ocean in Southeastern North Carolina at Cape Fear.

That’s where it got its name. And it’s a large watershed. It’s the largest watershed in North Carolina. The area where I work is over 6, 000 square miles. The entire watershed is about 9,000 square miles. So, a little bit larger than the entire state of New Jersey. About 6,500 miles of navigable [00:27:00] waterways that you could put a boat in and paddle around.

It kind of cuts through the heart of North Carolina. Really, it goes right through the center of the state in a kind of Northwest direction as you head upstream and it’s a big, really beautiful, diverse river. It’s got the highest level of biodiversity along the Eastern seaboard of the United States.

There’s about a 30 mile long estuary at the bottom. And then as you move up you have. Black and brown water tributaries, big swamps, the oldest cypress trees on planet earth. And then as you move even further up, you get into Piedmont streams, fast moving water rocky bottoms and sides.

And it’s just a beautiful, amazing, diverse, really special watershed. 

Thomas Hynes: it’s also 

Kemp Burdette: the most industrialized watershed in North Carolina. So, it has a lot of charms, but it also has some challenges. 

Thomas Hynes: Yeah, no, it, and you describe it it’s so well, but then you kind of, you’re describing this like bucolic beautiful place and then [00:28:00] you’re like, but don’t forget the industry.

There’s a lot of it here. That’s a real tension. Can you quickly tell us why you got involved in this work just to before we jump into our topic at hand? Like what brought you to this? 

Kemp Burdette: Yeah, I well I grew up here. I was born and raised here. And my folks were big water people. We were always on the water growing up and canoes and little skiffs. My folks lived on boats, before I came around and then after, we used to live on the water on a houseboat down here.

So I’ve always been real close to the water and real attached to the river and I’ve known the river pretty well for most of my life.

And, I think I was always kind of like a nature boy growing up, I was always that kid that was filthy dirty and was always picking up something, crawling around and that kind of thing. And, fishing or out camping or whatever. And I think. That was kind of what I would have kind of called myself.

It’s just a little nature kid, but I [00:29:00] don’t know that I was exactly an environmentalist at that point. I don’t think I was thinking to myself, well, this is something you’ve got to, fight hard to protect. I think I was just kind of looking at it. It’s like, this is an amazing spot and there’s a lot of cool stuff here.

But I went to college and I, a double major. I was a geology major and a history major. And I, kind of started to get, pretty attracted to the idea of actually protecting a space and learning about the kind of history of the environmental movement in the United States and seeing the impacts.

To this area. And then I went away and did a Fulbright scholarship up in Newfoundland. And I was actually studying maritime history and I was specifically looking at the cod fishery and the loss of the cod fishery to Newfoundland and how it had impacted, the, that entire province that had been at one point a very, Independent and vibrant province that, that, almost every person on the island was connected to the fishery in some way, you either a fisherman or a boatmaker or a net mender or a [00:30:00] broker of fish.

And when that fishery was lost due to a number of factors, including huge international fleets that completely ignored any type of fisheries management. Laws, Newfoundland really changed a lot. It really, it became one of the poorest provinces in Canada.

People were separated from their history and their culture there. And it was pretty striking to see. And I left there, I moved to Nicaragua, I was in the Peace Corps. I was working in sustainable agriculture and I saw a similar story there, just like how the neglect of your environment can really kind of lead to.

Communities that are in pretty bad shape. And so I think after those two experiences I became a little bit more of an environmentalist and I was a little bit more aware that like, you can’t just, you can’t just enjoy this stuff. You actually have to protect it. It’s not going to be here.

If people don’t work to protect all these things that I love, then they’ll be gone. 

Thomas Hynes: That’s a great answer. This is totally off topic, but isn’t, there’s a [00:31:00] book about, It’s called Cod. Yeah. Lansky. He’s an amazing writer. So moving to our topic at hand, this is kind of a segue of talking about, what I’m kind of hearing is , profits and business kind of like overfishing a place and just like unsustainable techniques.

Let’s talk about a different food source. And we all call them CAFOs here, but we’re just sort of for our listeners, we call them factory farms. How prevalent are factory farms or CAFOs, slaughterhouses, whatever you want to call them. How prevalent is this industry in your watershed?

Kemp Burdette: Yeah, factory farms are a huge issue in the Cape Fear Basin. And of course. There’s lots of different types of factory farms. And the two that we really see here are swine farms and poultry farms. And poultry includes both turkey and chickens. And then within chickens, you’ve got egg CAFOs, you’ve got fryers, you’ve got pullets, broilers.

You got a range of places where they go, but we’ll just call them [00:32:00] poultry and swine and. The Cape Fear Basin, as a watershed has the most dense concentration of swine CAFOs anywhere on the planet. Yeah it’s just a, when you get up into Duplin County, Sampson County Those are the two that are the top swine producers in the country.

And if you get up in a plane and you fly over those areas and you look down you can see hundreds of CAFOs, from one spot they just litter the countryside. And really big deal that poultry CAFOs in North Carolina are exploding right now. And it’s no surprise if you live around here, that poultry CAFOs are expanding most quickly in the same places where swine CAFOs are.

So Duplin, Sampson County, top two counties in the state for poultry CAFOs. They’re frequently cited right next to swine CAFOs. 

Thomas Hynes: Why is [00:33:00] that?

Kemp Burdette: I think, in some ways you can’t put anything in Duplin or Sampson County that’s not next door to a poultry or swine farm. That’s how many there are.

So, I think that’s just part of the nature of it is this, these entire counties are just blanketed with CAFOs. And the poultry industry is rapidly expanding. It’s really just explosive growth of that industry. And, every time I fly, I see a new, 20 acres being cleared and new foundation paths being poured, new barns going up.

So really big impacts here for sure. 

Thomas Hynes: And you go up with Southwings. 

Kemp Burdette: I fly most often with Southwings.

Thomas Hynes: Yeah, we were talking about that in the last episode. It’s just an amazing sort of like a novel approach to, I mean, we’re talking on a podcast, which is obviously not a visual format, but it is really an incredible and I think really effective technique.

I know I’m taking us off topic a little bit, but just to kind of get that bird’s eye view is just as somebody coming from the [00:34:00] Northeast, who doesn’t really think about factory farms a lot in my day to day life, like to see that bird’s eye view and just to learn about this work. It’s really an effective tool.

Just talk a little bit about like, wanting to get into the kind of work that you do testing and monitoring, but you know, I know this is kind of obvious to me and you cause we work here, but for our listeners, why is this a bad thing? Because people think of farms and they’re like, oh yeah, I mean, we’ve got to get our food somewhere.

I’m obviously taking the devil’s advocate side of this. I know that’s not the case, but explain why this is a problem. 

Yeah it’s really the concentration, right? It’s the concentration of animals on a single facility, and that’s what makes it a concentrated animal feeding operation at CAFO.

And it’s also the concentration of so many CAFOs, in such a small area. You see this. On all kinds of issues in all kinds of places, but anytime, an area is the world’s leading producer of something. You tend to [00:35:00] see negative impacts, right? It wouldn’t matter if we were producing jelly beans in the Cape Fear Basin at the scale that we’re producing hogs, there would probably be some issues.

Yeah. So, that’s just, it’s just the amount of waste. It’s. These facilities hold, thousands or tens of thousands or even in the case of poultry, millions of animals all inside. They stay inside their entire lives in these completely closed off facilities, no sunlight in the case swine, the waste falls through the floor has slats in it.

It falls through the floor. And it’s flushed by existing waste that is circulating all the time in these facilities. It’s flushed out into an open lagoon. Those lagoons are, they don’t have any kind of like synthetic liner or anything in them. They’re big, open cesspools of waste. And that waste is circulated back to the [00:36:00] uphill side of the house and periodically flushes waste again.

And that process just continues and continues. And so even though these lagoons are massive, lagoon is kind of an industry term, cesspools, even though they’re massive. They fill up, fairly quickly, and so they have to be emptied. And so the way that’s done in North Carolina is that waste is sprayed out onto the landscape.

 Under the guise of fertilizer, right? Not just to be like a jerk, right? Like they’re saying they’re doing a good thing with it. Right. 

Kemp Burdette: Right. It’s under the guise of fertilizing, which is really a complete. It’s a waste management system looking for a crop to be spread on so that you can call it fertilizer.

And then poultry, similar issue just, of waste generated on these facilities. The waste itself is a little bit different. It’s scraped out with big front end loaders and put into big piles. Those piles are. Always visible when you’re flying around North Carolina and these piles are [00:37:00] a mess, they can be, much larger than a house there you see stockpiles of litter sometimes where multiple facilities are all sending litter to one location and that litter is kind of being stockpiled there.

They’re, back to that explosive growth of poultry. The reason we’re seeing that explosive growth is because there’s no regulations on that industry. You don’t need a permit in North Carolina to build a poultry facility and start raising millions of birds. Insane. Yeah it’s really insane, but it totally explains why poultry has targeted North Carolina.

Because it’s the wild west here. They can do whatever they want to. There’s very little oversight. And so, if you want to abuse a system, go where the system is almost non existent. 

Thomas Hynes: God, that’s terrible. I but I do want to just talk a little bit more about How those lagoons just the waste which is really hard to get your head around, but you do a very good [00:38:00] job of painting a terrible picture. How that waste contributes to water pollution. In normal conditions.

And then because we’re talking this week, and I know that you earlier this week, we’re doing cleanup efforts for a recent hurricane. And I know that you’re like very busy right now. And there’s a lot going on in the southeast. Like, how does it come into play during the hurricane season, which is like a very regular and increasingly threatening situation.

So how does it work in quote unquote good times? And then what is this worst case scenario that we’re dealing with now? 

Kemp Burdette: Yeah. So, yeah. In good times, that waste from a swine CAFO, we’ll start with swine, is sprayed on the fields and, swine is concentrated in the eastern part of North Carolina, where the landscape is fairly flat and the water table is high.

It’s sprayed on the fields. Frequently those fields are ditched and they’re ditched in order to actually drop the water table enough so that you can actually plant crops there. So there is this [00:39:00] network of ditches all around the waste application fields. So waste is sprayed onto these fields and it’s frequently sprayed in very high volumes.

So the waste Ponds up, and then it runs off into all these ditches and then those ditches inevitably lead to larger ditches, and then to smaller streams, and to larger streams, and into waterways. And we’ve seen this, this is just, A fact of life in Eastern North Carolina. If you sample a stream near a CAFO, you are very likely to find extremely high levels of bacteria.

Like, I mean, we found bacteria levels that were 6, 000 times higher than the threshold set by the state to determine whether or not a water body is safe for human contact 

6, 000 times higher.

Thomas Hynes: drinking or anything like that for comp. That’s yeah. Just contact. 

Kemp Burdette: That’s so just astronomical [00:40:00] levels of bacteria in these streams, really high levels of nutrients.

And you see it from the air, you’re flying over a site, right? The sprayers go on and I mean, this is a sprayer that’s hooked up to a fire hose. So, it’s not like these are small things. This is a giant fire hose size hose with an industrial diesel power pump. That’s pumping out an enormous amount of waste.

And you see it, it’s this kind of pinkish brownish color. And it’s. It’s getting sprayed all over the landscape and the landscape looks like it’s been flooded. There’s an inch or two of water up there. The ditches, you can see water in the ditches and you can see that water leaving the site.

It’s just in the industry, of course, is saying, well, these are non discharge facilities. We don’t have a discharge permit, so therefore we don’t discharge, which is the big kind of farce here

Thomas Hynes: How can they say that?

Kemp Burdette: it’s, it’s just wild. And, and poultry is, a similar story, a little bit different on the mechanics.

The waste piles are left in fields. The kind of one [00:41:00] minimal rule in North Carolina is that a poultry pile can’t be left. out in the field uncovered for more than 15 days. That rule is routinely ignored. I can count on one hand the number of poultry violations that have been issued in North Carolina and I have seen personally and reported personally hundreds of violations of that rule.

So, again, no regulation, but these poultry piles are out in the field. They’re uncovered. it’s raining. All of that is getting washed off into ditches. And then, Even if that pile is spread, these big spreader trucks scoop it up and then they drive around with a rotating disc on the back that’s slinging out, poultry waste it’s frequently over applied on these fields.

So you have just an enormous amount of poultry waste, just sitting there waiting for the next rain to come and wash it off. It’s, if you look at. There are data sets and Dr. Mallin is very familiar with these data sets because he’s compiled them he’s run the lower Cape Fear River program.

[00:42:00] That’s monitored the Cape Fear River, basically the entire lower basin for close to 30 years now, and if you look at the data, you can see a steady increase in bacteria and nutrients and this watershed, despite. All we know about the dangers of bacteria and nutrients and despite the efforts, and I think, largely successful efforts to reduce the amount of nutrients and bacteria that are leaving NPDES permitted sites.

So your wastewater treatment plants have been clamping down on nutrients and bacteria. for decades. Other facilities that emit nutrients have been, as technology has improved, they’ve had to reduce and reduce and reduce their amounts. Sometimes by, orders of magnitude, they’ve reduced their discharges.

And yet you still see the basic numbers going up. And so that tells you the main source here 

For bacteria nutrients is unquestionably CATHOS.. 

Thomas Hynes: and that’s in the best of times. [00:43:00] That’s in good weather. What happens? Talking to Jamie Berger last week or last month and I was like, Oh, do you have hurricanes in North Carolina?

Like, I think I read that on a hockey jersey somewhere. So we’re in hurricane country. It’s hurricane season. These things are getting worse. So What’s that horrible equation bring us to? 

Kemp Burdette: Yeah, that, that’s, all bets are off when a hurricane comes. I mean, and honestly, it’s not even, it doesn’t even have to be a hurricane anymore.

It doesn’t even have to be a named storm. We just had an unnamed storm three weeks ago. drop between 20 and 25 inches of rain on coastal North Carolina. It wasn’t even a, it wasn’t even a named storm and set records here. But when a hurricane, comes across the Atlantic and hits North Carolina the way so many of them do, it basically heads right up the Cape Fear Basin.

So it fills that river up as it goes. And you start to have huge, floods that are, almost difficult to [00:44:00] describe because of the way they cover the landscape. But Hurricane Florence in 2018, dropped over three feet of rain in some areas. And when we flew after, we saw just.

Swine CAFO, after poultry CAFO, after swine CAFO that were completely inundated, completely flooded, all the animals in those barns were in those barns and drowned. Lagoons were overtopped, inundated, lagoons were failing altogether. Just in the flights we were able to take in a pretty chaotic situation after the storm, we saw two lagoons that failed altogether.

The entire contents were emptied out into waterways 

nearby. And there are entire communities downstream of these facilities.

So when you’re flying in a plane and you’re looking down at what used to be a town and now all it is is like rooftop sticking out of the water on you look at a capo and you see You know, the waste from that CAFO, uh, just flowing through those communities. 

So it’s flowing through schools and churches and daycares and nursing [00:45:00] homes and houses and businesses. And you can really see. 

How devastating that this is really bad stuff. This is highly. Toxic waste. There are pathogens. When the lagoons rupture all together and the sludge comes out, that’s actually the worst of the worst 

Right. So when those complete failures happen, all the sludge that’s. That’s kind of sunk over the decades to the bottom of that lagoon, has all the worst stuff in it, all the heavy metals that’s going to come out as well. And so, really dangerous for communities downstream. 

Thomas Hynes: Yeah, I mean, it it reminds me of this book.

It’s not about CAFOs. It’s more about traffic accidents, but it’s title is there are no accidents. And it reminds me of thing that Rick Dove Waterkeeper Alliance, I think former Neuse Riverkeeper would say like, these are ticking time bombs. Like these are not Like this is not an accident.

This is not like, Oh, who could have seen this? Like everyone could see that this could happen. This is a failure [00:46:00] of policy is a failure of design. Yeah, it’s just, yeah, go ahead. 

Kemp Burdette: Taking time bombs is the, is a great analogy but it’s maybe even worse because, the facilities that flooded in Florence, many of those facilities, Poultry especially are rebuilt now.

So not only did they flood in Florence But they came back and they rebuilt the same facility again That facility could have flooded in Matthew and was rebuilt just in time for Florence to hit It was flooded in Florence and now it’s rebuilt again. Just waiting for the next Hurricane, so and we came close this year already.

We’re not out of the woods yet we’re still not past the date of hurricane Matthew The second worst hurricane to ever hit eastern North Carolina hit in mid october, but Debbie just last month came real close to getting Up to like hurricane Floyd levels from the nineties, which was a devastating hurricane for this area.

So, there’s no doubt that hurricanes are getting bigger and they’re getting stronger and they’re moving [00:47:00] more slowly, which means, they’re going to drop more water, they’re carrying more water. The Gulf and the Atlantic are warmer and they’re getting, more frequent.

And so there’s absolutely, it’s absolutely not an if situation, it’s a when situation and it could be. It could be this year. We’re still squarely in the middle of the danger zone for Eastern North Carolina. And, I spend a lot of time checking the National Hurricane Center website this time of year.

Thomas Hynes: Yeah, I’m sure you do. I know that in your role, you wear a lot of different hats. And, but I know that one of them for all waterkeepers is, there’s like a community engagement component and like almost like a public education component to that end. Thank you for being here.

And but what is something you wish that the public understood better about factory farms and CAFOs and just, you Basically our food production industry in general. 

Kemp Burdette: Yeah. Well, I guess a few things, I wish they understood the scale in North Carolina. Because [00:48:00] the vast majority of people, don’t see CAFOs.

They’re the reason I fly so often is because that’s kind of the only way to get a good look at these things. You can smell them. When you drive to Raleigh and you drive down I 40, and if you’ve ever talked to anybody that’s come to North Carolina and driven that stretch of highway, almost inevitably, they say that highway stinks, and it’s because on either side of it on the way between Wilmington and Raleigh, it’s just lined with CAFOs. but you don’t see them, they’re set back off the road.

There are tree lines. That’s not an accident. The waste piles aren’t on, right on the highway. That’s not an accident either. And so I wish more people could get up in a plane and just take a look at the landscape and just kind of, do the math to understand the scale. And, the best kind of short summary of the scale of it that I have found really kind of, I heard Rick Dove, who’s been working on this [00:49:00] stuff for decades tell this story or a story a lot like it, Carolina has a little bit less than 10 million hogs.

Now we kind of go up and down. We’ve had as many as 10 million hogs in the recent past. So we’ve got, I’m going to, I’m going to use 10 million as the number because it’s a, it’s an even number. We’ve got 10 million hogs. We’ve got 10 million people. In North Carolina. North Carolina is one of the largest states in the country as far as population goes.

So, but all of those hogs are east of I 95. So you take the entire population of North Carolina and then you squeeze it into the eastern half of the state. So you take Charlotte and Greensboro and High Point and Raleigh and Durham and Asheville and Fayetteville. You take all these big cities and you squeeze them all into the eastern half of North Carolina.

So now you’ve got 10 million people in North Carolina just as a, as an illustration. And then remember that hogs produce roughly 10 times as much waste as a [00:50:00] human. So, you multiply that number times 10, so you, imagine that you had a hundred million people living in the eastern half of North Carolina.

that would be an enormous state, that would be as big as numerous large states.

Thomas Hynes: California and Texas. Like, yeah, more than two of them combined, I think. Yeah. 

Kemp Burdette: And then you imagine that every time those 100 million people flush their toilet, that waste was just distributed on the landscape in the eastern half of North Carolina.

Like that’s the level of waste that we have. And that’s only for hogs. The largest producer of waste in North Carolina is now poultry. Poultry has surpassed hogs because it’s a kind of a statewide issue. But just, the amount of waste is, It’s really difficult to comprehend cause, cause when you start to say, billions of tons, it really, people just, they don’t even know what that means.

So that’s the one thing I wish people knew just the scope, the [00:51:00] scale of it. I wish they knew how poorly regulated the industry is. Both swine and poultry. Poultry, completely unregulated. Swine, there is a general permit, so every, virtually every swine farm in North Carolina operates under one single permit.

That permit is renewed every five years. And, honestly it’s a pretty loose permit, you get inspected once a year that inspection is announced, days or weeks in advance. 

Thomas Hynes: Kind of defeats the purpose of that. Yeah. 

Kemp Burdette: right. Our regulatory agency in North Carolina has been systematically defunded over the last 10 or 12 years by a very ag friendly general assembly.

Right. And so, imagine if your household budget was cut in half, how that’s going to limit. You know what you’re able to do. It’s the same thing with a regulatory agency. So there’s less inspectors on the ground. There’s less people to review permits. There’s less people to [00:52:00] go out and follow up on citizen complaints.

It’s an industry has that kind of power. And that’s been one of the ways that they have made sure that, the industry is protected.

 

Thomas Hynes: I’ve said it already, but you do a great job of painting a terrible picture. And like that, that example of a hundred million people, Going to the bathroom without any water, wastewater treatment in a narrow strip of land. That’s the best I’ve heard.

 I can kind of get my arms around the problem and I agree that it, like, when you talk in these like billions of metric tons, it doesn’t really mean anything when you talk about like a tight concentration of a hundred million people without any wastewater treatment, just applying it to the land.

That really, I hadn’t heard that before. And I think that’s pretty Disgusting and effective. And yeah, just jarring. Want to ask you, again, so grateful for your time here today. This is, maybe not I don’t know what kind of question this is, but what changes would [00:53:00] you like to see?

Kemp Burdette: Well, I’d like to see first and foremost, I’d like to see. Poultry regulated in North Carolina. We’ve got to put the brakes on that industry. It is just exploding and there’s no reason for it to stop.

Right. Without regulations, we are the least regulated state in the country when it comes to poultry farms. And there’s absolutely no reason the industry wouldn’t look at North Carolina and say, that’s where we want to be, because we can do whatever we want to do there with very little oversight, very little consequence.

And that means more profits for us. So, that’d be the first thing I’d like to see. Back in the 90s, there were a number of disasters related to hurricanes. And out of those disasters, there was a lawsuit filed by the Attorney General. And I’m paraphrasing this a little bit, but basically, the Attorney General told Smithfield, Look, you’ve got to invest some money in figuring out better waste control technology.

Smithfield gave NC state a lot of money that came up with a number of ways to treat [00:54:00] swine waste. And then Smithfield basically said all those ways are too expensive and we’re not going to use them. And so, there’s a moratorium in North Carolina right now that basically says, unless you’re going to use one of these environmentally superior technology waste treatment systems.

You can’t have any more swine CAFOs. Now, like I said, we already have more here than anywhere else. So. That’s kind of cold comfort, but we could be doing a much better job of waste management. That would be another, easy first step make hog farms that create enormous amounts of waste, do things kind of like we do for human waste.

And then I think, we didn’t even have time to talk about slaughterhouses and slaughterhouse discharge. The slaughterhouse at Tar Heel, North Carolina is the largest one on the planet, big impacts on water quality in the Cape Fear River above the drinking water supply for about 550, 000 people.

And, Waterkeeper Alliance and the Cape Fear River Watch and, a number of other groups are currently. We sued the EPA to force the EPA to put [00:55:00] new effluent limitation guidelines in place for slaughterhouses and that process is underway and we’re pushing the EPA hard to do more than the bare minimum there.

Uh, but that would have a big impact. and then, ultimately.

Like I was saying, anytime you concentrate anything to the degree that we’ve concentrated swine and poultry CAFOs in eastern North Carolina, you’re going to have a problem. Ultimately we need to reduce the number of animals. That are concentrated in Duplin and Samson counties, because it’s going to be hard to imagine how we don’t continue to have problems related to animal waste when there’s so much of it in two counties in North Carolina.

So that would be a good start. Of course I’d love it if started focusing more on sustainable ag and less on, on factory farms. I’d love it if we started, focusing on, maybe moving away from the idea that Americans need to eat meat, at every single meal, every single day.

and snacks in [00:56:00] between. We know that globally speaking, that animal agriculture is a huge contributor to climate change.

And we know that climate change is impacting hurricanes. And we know that hurricanes are impacting animal agriculture and we’ve got this cycle going. , if we could just move away from the idea that like, we all need to consume just enormous amounts of meat all the time, every day, that would probably be a help too what I don’t want to do is.

introduce the idea that like 

Individuals are responsible for fixing the CAFO problem by changing their diets. That’s absolutely not the case

Thomas Hynes: I agree with that. Yeah

Kemp Burdette: This is gonna take big Policy level changes to fix the situation and individuals can take some actions to improve things But it’s not an individual issue.

It’s an industry issue and a policy issue 

Thomas Hynes: Yeah, I mean, you saw that with like plastic straws a couple years ago, and it’s yeah, like it would help if we didn’t use plastic [00:57:00] straws. But like, that’s really kind of shifting the onus on the individual and giving a little corporate giving corporations a pass a little bit.

 Kemp, thank you so much for being here. It’s been great to see you again. It’s been great to hear about this problem from you and The visuals you said will haunt my dreams, but I think you did a great job of explaining the problem and in ways that really make me want to not eat lunch later today.

 It was what we said on the first episode of this series. It’s like liking bacon is not a personality. It’s like, we’ve gone too far on this. Like, and, and it is, you know, I don’t want to, I don’t want to take the focus off of corporations , and the failures of government to regulate this

But there is you’re right. And I appreciate you touching on that, that there is like this notion, right, no meat, no meal. And like, that’s just, a not really healthy. I think we’ve all come to learn and be like, not really necessary. And finally C, you can positively impact your environment by changing your market behavior a little bit.

And I, I know that’s like lower on the totem pole, but I think it’s, we need a little bit of an all [00:58:00] of the above strategy to, to fix this problem. 

Kemper debt. Thank you so much for being here today. We really appreciate this, and it was great. It’s great to see you and great to hear from you. 

Kemp Burdette: Yeah, well, I’m super excited to be here. 

Thomas Hynes: Thanks.

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