Monitoring to Protect Our Waters
State seeking comments on proposed monitoring rules
Dotting the eastern North Carolina landscape are more than 3000 waste lagoons, or storage pits, where hog and poultry operations store raw urine and feces until conditions present themselves for the operators to spray the waste onto fields. Most of these fields are transected with drainage ditches that directly connect to public trust waters. Even during the best of climatic conditions, animal waste high in nutrients and fecal bacteria can make their way into streams and rivers via surface or shallow subsurface runoff. Some sprayfields are underline by drain tiles, or artificial drainage systems, which discharge directly into ditc
hes and then to waterways.
At close to 10 million hogs, North Carolina is the number two producer of swine in the United States behind Iowa. The state now houses more hogs than people, with most of the negative environmental and health impacts occurring in the Cape Fear, Neuse, and Tar-Pamlico River basins. One can begin to comprehend the management challenges of hog waste from 10 million animals by realizing that on a per capita basis, swine produce about 10 times the fecal waste as an average human being, producing roughly 13 million pounds of waste per day for the North Carolina herd.
Now the North Carolina Environmental Management Commission has agreed with NC Waterkeepers that industrial animal operations should be required to monitor waterways running through their waste sprayfields. Such water quality monitoring will be a highly effective and reasonable way for the state and the industry to determine if current practices are protective of the state’s water resources. All other industries must monitor their waste discharge to insure that our waters are protected. It is past time for this industry to be held to similar standards.
Comments are Due Monday, August 16.
Submit comments to:
Keith Larick
NC Division of Water Quality
Aquifer Protection Section
1636 Mail Service Center
Raleigh, N.C. 27699-1636