Holyoke – At 2 a.m. on July 29, Mike Poe went out to check an irrigation sprinkler and was engulfed in the stench carried by a summer breeze from a nearby hog farm.
Two weeks ago, a winter wind brought even more odious pig smells, which after three hours left the 47-year-old farmer nauseated and weak.
“You feel like you’re coming down with the flu,” he said. “It drains your zest.”
The episodes are among 33 that Poe meticulously kept in a log during the past 13 months. Yet he no longer bothers notifying health officials responsible for enforcing odor violations.
“I quit calling in because they wouldn’t do anything,” he said.
Eight years ago, Colorado voters passed an initiative to improve air quality around the state’s largest hog farms through measures such as requiring covers on waste lagoons.
Today, Poe and other neighbors say enforcement of those rules stinks.
For example, the law requires covers on about 90 of the state’s lagoons, each of which can hold millions of gallons of pig waste.
Only nine have plastic or fabric covers.
Now the neighbors fear a state public-health agency plan – supported by the hog industry – to change the law by eliminating the cover requirement for those lagoons.
When Colorado citizens voted for lagoon covers, state Department of Public Health and Environment officials say, they weren’t really insisting on a visible cover.
Voters wanted odor control, and there are other techniques “that would meet the same odor-performance standards,” said Howard Roitman, director of the department’s environmental programs.
“We thought it would make sense to have the law clarified,” Roitman said.
In practice, the department is already approving alternatives to physical covers – and wants to broaden the choices.
About 10 percent of the lagoons affected by the law employ a thick plastic or fabric cover to trap the odors produced by a blend of hog urine, feces and wash water.
The others use alternative treatment methods that state regulators call covers.
“We regard them as covers” if they control odors effectively, Roitman said. “It would not be a visible cover for you to see. We would be measuring it through the odor readings.”
Colorado hog companies, which combined house more than 800,000 animals, say they just want more options to meet the standards.
That would “allow producers to focus on real odor control,” said Don Owens of Seaboard Foods, which grows nearly half of Colorado’s hogs, at a Colorado legislative committee this month. “Synthetic covers are not the best way.”
Seaboard uses “alternative” covers consisting of a layer of water, oxygen and bacteria, but it did install a fabric lagoon cover that sank, Roitman said.
Since 2002, the state health department has cited Seaboard – based in Shawnee Mission, Kan. – five times for odor problems and fined it about $31,000, Roitman said.
Statewide, the department has taken 36 enforcement actions in response to more than 200 hog-odor complaints and imposed fines totaling more than $120,000, Roitman said.
“I think the department has done a credible job,” he said.
Roitman says there are gaps in the enforcement program. The department devotes less than half of one full-time position to investigate hog-odor problems.
When complaints come in, the department relies on local health agencies, which respond only during weekday work hours.
The total fines remain small compared with the cost of covering lagoons.
A single lagoon cover can cost more than $100,000, according to Michael Veenhuizen, president of Livestock Engineering Solutions, an Indiana consultant to the hog industry.
Colorado is the only state that mandates covered hog lagoons, Veenhuizen said.
The state law says the most common type of hog lagoons “shall be covered” to minimize odors. The health department wants to add “or operated by technologies or practices.”
A Senate committee approved the change last week, along with amendments to bolster enforcement and odor standards. The full Senate tentatively approved the change Monday.
The move worries people such as Galen Travis, a farmer and co-sponsor of the 1998 initiative, who estimates he has called in nearly a hundred odor complaints in the past eight years and was visited just once by a local health official.
“Enforcement is practically nil,” he said. “It’s just their way of getting off the hook.”
The Colorado campaign to set air- and water-quality standards for hog farms followed an industry surge on the Eastern Plains and a North Carolina case in which a lagoon broke and fouled a river.
To the chagrin of hog producers, the citizen initiative drew financial support from Philip Anschutz, a billionaire whose horse farm was within sniffing distance of National Hog Farms, a Weld County producer that closed.
It passed with a 64 percent “yes” vote statewide, though several counties dependent on the hog industry opposed it.
Before the vote, Colorado hog production had quadrupled in a decade. While its pig population has leveled, Colorado still ranks 15th nationally and first among Rocky Mountain states in hog production.
The voter-approved law required “housed commercial swine feeding operations” with more than 800,000 pounds of pigs to meet the new air and water standards.
From the outset, the lagoon-cover requirement provoked industry protests. The lagoons can be 12 to 20 feet deep and span areas as large as several acres.
Hog growers claimed the cost of laying arena-sized covers over these lagoons would drive them out of business.
State health officials responded by letting a natural layer of water, oxygen and bacteria qualify as a cover if it blocked odors.
Farmers and ranchers living near the corporate hog barns scoff at this definition and contend the health department ignored a clearly worded law.
Nearly 200 miles east of Denver, farmers and ranchers worry that nobody in a distant state agency really cares about the air they breathe.
They say the stench of ammonia and hydrogen sulfide – the rotten-egg smell – rolls across their land less often since the initiative passed.
But when it comes, they run for shelter.
“I’ve had to get in the house and shut the doors. I’ve had to throw my coat over the head and run to the house,” said Sue Jarrett, a rancher who recalls vomiting once from the smell.
Up the road, Mike Poe raises cattle and corn on the same patch of northeastern Colorado land his great-grandparents claimed in 1892.
His parents, Don and Esther Poe, live in a modest farmhouse on top of the original, pioneer sod house. Mike Poe occupies a mobile home nearby.
In her diary, Esther Poe took to entering the “pig” smell days in red ink: “Pig in evening – had to shut my house. Bad pig at midnight.” “Pigs all morning – left about noon so I hung clothes out.”
Finally she bought a clothes dryer.
“There’s times it’s bad enough out there, the guys won’t even go out and work,” she said, “and I won’t hang clothes. You just have to wash ’em right over again.”
Mike Poe said he called in three odor complaints after the initiative passed, but twice nobody responded, and the third brought an inspector hours later, after the wind shifted.
The Poes and the Jarretts live near clusters of Seaboard Foods hog barns tucked among the rolling sandhills of Phillips and Yuma counties.
The lagoons are permitted to use intangible covers.
Staff writer David Olinger can be reached at 303-820-1498 or dolinger@denverpost.com.
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“Pig in evening – had to shut my house.
Bad pig at midnight. … Pigs all morning – left about noon so I hung clothes out.”
Esther Poe’s diary entries on the stench from a nearby hog farm
