Installing A Few Wind Turbines Isn’t Enough: Smithfield, Clean Up Your Environmental Act
Bacon and eggs. A heaping BLT. Pasta carbonara. Clam casino or spinach salad, each sprinkled with bacon bits. Yum! Who doesn’t love the smoky crunch of bacon in just about any meal?
Yes, we often love to indulge in things that please us. Then again, it’s important to remember the words from 20th century business person, W. Clement Stone: “Be careful the environment you choose, for it will shape you; be careful the friends you choose, for you will become like them.”
United Wind/ Smithfield Foods Partnership
United Wind, the nation’s leading distributed wind energy developer, announced in March, 2019 that it had signed an agreement with Smithfield Foods, Inc., and we in the renewable energy community should’ve been excited. After all, the global food company and the world’s largest hog producer and pork processor has agreed to power dozens of its hog farms in Colorado with on-site wind energy. The glowing press release is effusive about how the partnership will provide Smithfield with long-term, low-cost renewable energy for its agricultural operations. Wind will contribute to Smithfield’s “industry-leading goal” to reduce greenhouse gas emissions 25% by 2025 – “the first commitment of its kind from a protein company.”
“At Smithfield, we are committed to seeking out innovative ways to reduce our environmental impact, all while creating value for our company and stakeholders,” said Stewart Leeth, vice president of regulatory affairs and chief sustainability officer for Smithfield Foods. “This partnership with United Wind is part of our efforts to produce the food needed to feed a growing world population, while minimizing our use of natural resources.”
In 1999, Smithfield purchased the nation’s second largest hog production company, Carroll’s Foods, Inc., for its Colorado holdings with 180,000 sows. The purchase was for approximately $500 million, consisting of 3.3 million shares of Smithfield Foods common stock, $178 million in cash. They also added Western Pork Production Corp., a 12,000-sow unit, in Colorado the same year.
Smithfield Cleanup Is Little More than a PR Ploy
But, wait. Isn’t this the same company that had more than 130 waste lagoons compromised during Hurricane Florence, flooding North Carolina farming communities many miles inland? This kind of flooding takes a largely airborne issue which contains numerous disease pathogens and bacteria and sends them variously into neighboring lands, waterways — and drinking water.
According to the New Yorker, when a Chinese conglomerate called WH Group purchased Smithfield in 2013, Senator Chuck Grassley (R-IO) described it as “a bit concerning” and asked, “How might this deal impact our national security?” Through a subsidiary called Murphy-Brown, Smithfield contracts approximately 1200 hundred of North Carolina’s 2200 hog farms to raise its pigs.
Smithfield claims that, for more than a dozen years, it has “worked hard to make sustainability and transparency more than just buzzwords.” Its website outlines that they “employ over 54,000 people who all work together to provide families worldwide with Good food. Responsibly.®”
You decide if the Smithfield policies are responsible.
Bacon, Bacon! Factory Farms & Giant Lagoons
Bacon is cured meat cut from the sides of hogs. Owning hogs in today’s industrial agriculture system is part of a cycle of environmental degradation, as most hogs are raised on factory farms that produce tremendous amounts of air and water pollution. That’s because hog farms cram hundreds of thousands of animals in extremely tight conditions, then store all of the millions of tons of their excrement in open air lagoons. Animals raised for food produce about 130 times more excrement than the entire human population.
These lagoons off-gas toxic compounds like ammonia, hydrogen sulfite, endotoxins, methane, carbon dioxide, and bacteria. Many of these chemicals are known to cause severe respiratory irritation, dizziness confusion, high blood pressure, and, in some cases, brain damage.
To remove this waste, corporate agriculture drains the lagoons and spraying it on neighboring fields. One Green Planet reports that community members liken the spray to “rain,” and they have to close their windows and doors to keep it from getting inside their homes. The smell pervades nonetheless.
The waste can’t be used for fertilizer due to the toxins, antibiotics, and strains of antibiotic resistant bacteria within it. Yet, when sludge and wastewater is sprayed onto neighboring fields, it’s absorbed into the ground. It can contaminate groundwater, spread carcinogens, and disperse harmful compounds into waterways.
The federal government does not recognize the toxins sprayed in the process of emptying cesspools as illegal pollution.