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COVER STORY - August
2006
Hog Heaven?
In early 2006, Kentucky Pork Producers Association Executive Director Mike Ovesen toured the operations of a hog farming contractor for Henry, Tenn.-based Tosh Farms. It didn’t smell like the imagination says a hog farm should. In fact, he said, it didn’t smell much at all. To control the legendary stink of hog waste, the barns relied on concrete waste pits built underneath the hogs’ feet, instead of the common practice of storing waste in open-air lagoons. Aside from when waste is periodically pumped from the pits into the soil as fertilizer, Ovesen said such barns minimize any smell. “I can drive you behind hog buildings all day and if I didn’t tell you that’s what it was, you wouldn’t know,” he said. Tosh Farms is expanding its operations in western Kentucky and is working with interested farmers to build 50 to 60 new hog barns in Fulton, Hickman and Carlisle counties over the next three years. Jenny Varden lives in Fulton, Ky., where Tosh Farms is proposing one hog barn 980 feet from the property line of her family farm. Another site is under consideration just south of her home. “It’s a wonderful place to live,” Varden said. She grows corn, soybeans and wheat, and is planning a switch to organic farming. She and her husband, Mike, are restoring an old farmhouse on the property, with another area of the land set aside for conservation programs. She thinks large hog contracting operations will bring groundwater pollution, odors, and the overall marring of the quality of life in the area. They don’t buy the assurances that new hog barns will not smell. They believe Tosh and some farmers are misleading the public about the economic benefits of large-scale hog operations, which could devalue surrounding land and deter other industries from locating nearby. A small swine comeback In Tennessee, Tosh Farms President Jimmy Tosh said he thought about giving up on the business as well, but decided to instead use a contracting approach to hog farming that had been successfully used in the poultry industry. “Most everybody who wants to grow for us is trying to put these barns up to try to keep their sons and daughters on the farm,” he said. His new strategy is bringing hogs back to some parts of western Kentucky in big ways, adding about 122,400 hogs a year to the 600,000 now being marketed annually statewide. Kentucky is attractive to Tosh because its westernmost counties are close to his home and the state’s Worker’s Compensation rates are cheaper. On top of that, Kentucky doesn’t impose sales taxes on barn building materials, which Tennessee does. Tosh’s contracting approach is no get-rich-quick scheme. Rising interest rates and building costs are eating into farmers’ profits this year, and building a barn can cost over $400,000. Still, Tosh said while farmers pay off their barns, they can expect $11,000 to $12,000 in annual net profit per barn. Each barn can house 2,400 pigs, though Tosh said they’re usually operating at 85 percent of capacity. A Tosh contractor for just over two years, Bardwell farmer Don Thornsbrough has 800 acres and four hog barns. So far, he said he’s netted $16,000 profit per barn annually. In seven and a half years, three of the barns will be paid for, and he expects profits to grow from there. “I’ve just been trying to find different angles,” he said of his hog farming philosophy. Contract hog farming is just another way of doing business, one that Thornsbrough expects to be a lasting industry trend. “Contracting is going to be the way of life in agriculture,” he said. “It’s not just hogs, chickens – it’s going to be everything.” In contracting, farmers build hog barns and pay utilities and waste disposal, while Tosh pays for the animals and their feed plus a fee for use of the barn space. Jim Moss is a Tosh contractor in Hickman, located in Fulton County, and a fourth-generation farmer. He and his 24-year-old son Matt each want to construct two barns with a total 10,000 hogs – and recently received state permits to do just that. The elder Moss says hog contracting has its benefits.
“It’s a guaranteed income where if you grow swine on your own – if that’s still possible – it’s like a crop, you don’t have a guaranteed price,” he said. With seven barns already operating in Carlisle County for the past two years, Tosh said he hears no complaints. He’s aware of detractors’ concerns, but said the statistics they cite to back up their claims originate from national groups opposed to the livestock industry itself or environmental groups. He said residents of other counties with new barns planned would soon realize that he runs an environmentally safe operation. Communities also stand to gain, he said, with nearly $21 million in new construction planned, not to mention interest paid on farmers’ loans, expenses on parts and repairs and various other expenses. “I think they’ll find that we’ll be good neighbors,” he said. Varden is not so keen on being neighbors with a hog farm she says will produce as much solid waste as the entire population of Fulton County, then pump it into the ground largely untreated. Tosh said each of his barns produces about 800,000 gallons of waste per year. Sharp said he isn’t anti-farming, but wants technology to be used to its fullest to minimize the impact on nearby residents. “I want their operations to prosper, and if they want that to be in the swine industry, I don’t have a problem with that,” he said. But he does suspect concrete manure holding pits will crack over time and leach waste into the ground, contaminating groundwater. That’s why he wants leak detection systems required on barns and wants biofilters installed in barn exhaust fans to reduce the smell. He thinks the state-recommended – not required – buffer of 1,500 feet between barns and homes is not far enough. A 2004 study by agricultural economists at the University of Kentucky and the University of Tennessee concluded that hog barns should be setback from homes at least 4,600 feet – three times the state’s suggested setback. Environmental groups, including the Sierra Club, have criticized both Kentucky’s weak environmental regulations on hog farms and the sales tax break. But Tosh said there’s no precedent anywhere in the country for stiffer requirements. A Fulton County ordinance Sharp and others supported that set more stringent limits on hog farming operations was declared invalid by a Circuit Court judge in late June after six Fulton County farmers challenged it in 2005. The state does mandate basic restrictions on groundwater and odor management for hog operations. But opponents like Sharp feel those limits are not strong enough. County governments can enact stricter requirements, which puts officials in the dicey position of weighing residents’ apprehensions about odor and noise against farmers’ eagerness to embrace new contracting opportunities. While hog barns can be built sales tax-free, they are taxed at fair cash value once built. And that means thousands of dollars in annual property taxes for county coffers. But Sharp feels hog farming operations will actually deter other types of industries from locating in Fulton. “The chance of other economic growth that does produce jobs is slim,” he said. “We’ve got the best ordinance that this county could possibly have because it goes further than the state’s rules, and the farmers have agreed to live by it,” he said. Carlisle County Judge-Executive John G. Roberts III in Bardwell said his county has historically been agricultural, raising hogs, chickens and row crops. He realizes farmers must diversify in today’s marketplace, and believes that can be done in peaceful coexistence with area residents, with proper regulation. He said he eyed the Fulton County ordinance’s court challenge with interest, awaiting a ruling before taking steps to create one for his county. He said he’s considering modeling one after Hickman County’s ordinance. Hog numbers peaked in Kentucky about 30 years ago at over 1 million, Ovesen said, and he doesn’t expect Tosh’s operations to push the numbers back above that high. He remains hopeful that today’s hog farming operations can exist relatively unnoticed in a community, unlike their malodorous predecessors. As a testament to that, Ovesen said he recently drove past a farm known to house 1,600 hogs. “I didn’t smell anything but the honeysuckle,” he said.
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Copyright 1996-2006, by Kentucky Business Online. All rights reserved. Editorial content
is copyright 2006, Lane Communications Group The Lane Report is a trademark of Lane Communications Group. All other trademarks are the property of their respective owners. |
But the prospect of a hog boomlet and promises of cleaner hog operations are little comfort for many western Kentucky residents. Tosh’s expansion into the region has sparked lawsuits, new ordinances and debate over the lasting costs of hog farming.
“It’s not so much a fear, it’s an understanding of the reality of what these large-scale hog facilities are really like,” she said. She and her husband have helped lead a years-long campaign against loosely regulated growth of hog farms.
Thornsbrough sells manure from his hogs and uses the rest to fertilize his farm. He’s considering installing a unit to capture methane gas and convert it to energy that he can both sell and use it to run his farm. In partnership with Tosh, he’s also building slats for barn floors for himself and other hog farms across the country.
Varden is treasurer of a group, Citizens for a Better Fulton County, that opposes hog farm expansion there. It was co-founded in 2005 by Fulton businessman Barry Sharp, who is building a house near a hog barn proposed for Fulton County. 
Tosh said the proposed regulations were cost prohibitive, putting the price of installing monitoring wells at between $15,000 and $30,000, plus monitoring fees. He added that he knows of no instances of groundwater contamination from leaking concrete manure pits.
Hickman County Judge-Executive Greg Pruitt said there are no hog barns there now, but some are planned. Pruitt, an attorney, said he and the county attorney felt the best move was for the county government to engage farmers interested in contracting with Tosh Farms early on and negotiate local rules governing future hog farms. A Hickman County ordinance passed in June 2005 includes a 1,750-foot residential setback line and immediate injection of waste into the soil to a depth of four inches to minimize odor.