If a pig farm smells bad enough to affect the neighbors this much--it has too many pigs. Period

The real problem is not the odor--it is the CAFO. These vile operations are not just sources of smell. They are sources of water pollution, disease, and flat-out bad food. Let's stop squabbling over the side-effects

I personally would be thrilled to pay a lot more for pork if it meant every CAFO in America could be shut down or reconfigured into smaller operations.

Yes of course this is a major problem which certain politicians are blind to. Symptoms like this will continue to occur so long as we allow such huge factory slaughterhouses. Animals were not meant to be treated like machinery parts. Pigs were not meant to live put their lives confined to a 1x1 space, sepeeated from their mothers, their tails chopped off and neutered while wide awake and without anesthesea. There are so many wonderful alternatives to these factory farms with their atrocious conditions (read the omnivores dilemma by michael pollan or check out polyface farms website). It's corporate greed once again, and these health problems will continue until we change ourselves as consumers and demand a more sane approach.

That's all there is to it.

The serious problems to health, which are caused by too close proximity to hog-farms that have become gigantic cess-pools with the increase in pork production, was covered by The New York Times somewhere just before or just after the turn of the century. It has since been reproduced continually by interested parties and likely to show up almost anywhere on the web.

The health issues are very serious. Unlike the manure maintenance programs of dairy farmers where the cleaning of stalls into a manure yard that is then redistributed to fields on any of upwards of 12 days per month cyclically that is the custom of Amish farmers, who may or may not be familiar with the Roman poet Vergil's advice to farmers, is methodically astrologically noted on the: Der Neue Amerikanische Calender, but pig wastes just stand in ponds that increase in size. I have no idea what they do with them but it contaminates clean air for miles around just as surely as dumping diesel fuel on your property bit by bit, because you are a senile head-strong old farmer who went to work for an oil company because he didn't like farming when he inherited a farm in the fourth generation of Switzers to Lancaster county,then enters the water table on the land you rent out to your Mennonite neighbors.

The EPA didn't do anything about this during the Bush administration although they came and looked at where it was occuring. I had to possibly assume that maybe they made notes that went into records about potential problems that they had never thought of before. Occasionally some nice elderly Amish couple, whose gross dawdy haus is upon the crest of a hill,will have a neighbor who suddenly decides to raise pigs and builds a pig sty for them that uses the previous barnyard or farm-yard as their run adequately fenced to keep them out of the wife's flowers. The strong "ox-blood" odor exuded by pigs is carried uphill by the evening winds to the bedroom of the elderly couple whose bedroom as in most Amish homesteads has window-screens but no air-conditioning in hot summer weather as the pigs grow ready for autumn slaughtering.

They at least can go consult with their bishop about how to resolve the problem as good neighbors.

Why this now large scale industry in the South and the Midwest, where my grandfather once raised pigs (for family use and for sale) by the method used in the European manner of the country where he was born, can not be properly answerable to federal authority through the USDA or whatever is beyond me. How stupid do we have to prove ourselves to be as Americans; or, is it just our native greed like a hog?

Yea it stinks out there but this is what I find interesting.

http://oakcreekforum.blogspot.com/2009/03/mid-evil-times-and-pork-stimulus.html

Since bacteria, not the pigs themselves, are responsible for the foul odor let's just irradiate the pigs. Mandating irradiation was the answer in California to filthy conditions in almond processing plants that led to an outbreak of salmonella. Since irradiation equipment is expensive and the process is fraught with regulation this approach has the purely incidental benefit of helping the big guys run the little guys out of the market, those hippie freaks trying to practice more traditional sustainable farming and animal husbandry that would also, if left unchecked, provide us with more wholesome food.

I live in Iowa although I do not farm. Nevertheless, the odor from hog confinement operations is harmful to people and the environment; it poses a significant public health risk. An Iowan may live miles and miles away from a confinement operation but still be subjected to the effects of the odor, although it is clear that the health of people in my middle-America state is of little concern to many across the nation. Nevertheless, those many still seem to want agricultural states to supply them with food for their dinner plates.

In addition to human health issues,however, the conditions in which the confined animals are raised is deplorable. There are thousands and thousands of hogs raised each year in Iowa, as they are in other states like North Carolina, because Americans want cheap meat, which small to medium-sized farms can no longer produce with any profit. Most confinement operations are either owned by large entities or contracted out by large entities not located in the state of Iowa. The industry is controlled by national pork producers who have well-funded lobbies in state governments.

Smarmy comments, therefore, by individuals who have little knowledge of the problems associated with industrial farming are counterproductive and not appreciated by those of us trying to deal with a major public/environmental health and animal welfare issue.

that factory farming creates.

I'd love the administration to take a serious look at how the faring industry "works".