Benefits of Adopting Environmentally Superior Swine Waste Management Technologies in North Carolina

Abstract

The July 2000 agreement between the North Carolina Attorney General’s office and Smithfield Foods and its North Carolina subsidiaries (the Agreement) allocates funds to be used for the development of environmentally superior alternatives to the anaerobic lagoon and sprayfield system for treating swine waste.  The Agreement calls for the Designee to evaluate the economic feasibility of candidate technologies in determining whether the technologies are acceptable for implementation pursuant to the Agreement.  The Designee has deemed that the economic feasibility assessment must evaluate both the costs to the industry and consumers of its products and the benefits to society of the environmental improvements associated with adoption.  The cost and industry analyses are being led by a group of researchers from North Carolina State University’s Agricultural and Resource Economics (NCSU-ARE) department and will be reported in a separate study to be released in mid-2004.  This report focuses on the benefits of adopting alternative technologies, as assessed by an interdisciplinary research team from RTI International.4