By Brad Penner
STATEWIDE Correspondent

[Jana McGuire, Statewide Host] If you've paid any attention to your local newspaper, this summer you've probably seen a story or two about large hog operations. This has been a summer of discontent for some Nebraskans who are doing everything they can to stop or at least slow down new hog facilities. Brad Penner looked into the dispute over the future of Nebraska pork production. Brad?

[Brad Penner, Statewide Correspondent] Jana, we're talking about large or "mega" hog operations, places with anywhere from 1,000 to 5,000 hogs on a single site. These kinds of developments aren't new to Nebraska. Some have been around for 20 years or more, but there seems to be a rush to build more. The Department of Environmental Quality is getting 20 to 30 applications a month for new hog confinement facilities. They used to get 5 or 10 applications a month. The growth could strain D.E.Q. resources. They only have four inspectors to handle livestock operations. It's also put a strain on rural residents who've seen stories of environmental disasters in other states and don't want to see it happen here. Some want to stop new development for two years. That would allow counties and the state to strengthen regulations. But those in the business say a moratorium could cripple Nebraska's pork industry. We went to one of Nebraska's largest pork producers and one of the leading opponents to learn more about the pig deal.

[Annette Dubas, Mid-America Pride] 7,400 cattle feedlots and 12,500 swine operations in the state.

The dining room table at the Dubas' house became a library this summer. It's also a mailroom and a public relations office.

[Dubas] Never in my wildest dreams would I have imagined we'd be where we're at today.

Annette Dubas and her husband, Ron, got politically active this summer, all because someone wanted to raise hogs down the road.

[Annette Dubas] One evening we got a phone call saying we could come into a meeting in town to hear about this hog confinement. It was just kind of a real spur of the moment type meeting.

Bell Family Farms from North Dakota planned to build some confinement buildings.

[Dubas] Then we had a chance to ask questions. One of the first questions that was asked was well, how many hogs are you looking at, and he said 500,000. And we just all about -- oooh, it's a wonder any of us were still in our chairs.

Within a week, there were 140 friends and neighbors at another meeting.

[Dubas] And that's when we decided to organize. And I guess our initial intent for organizing was we wanted to stop this. We didn't feel it was something we wanted in our community.

By this time it was the middle of June. The group adopted the name Mid-Nebraska Pride. It picked up support in other ppers of the state. By August, the group helped fill the house at the Columbus High School auditorium. Senator Bob Kerrey held a hearing to learn more about the hog industry debate.

[Dubas] Evidence is showing that these hog factories are leaving a trail of warning flags wherever they have been. Lagoon spills, air pollution, surface and groundwater contamination are just a few of the problems that other states are dealing with right now because of these factories.

[Ron Schooley, Mid-America Pride] The devastating detrimental affect these factories have on our groundwater, our service water, the air we breathe, our quality of life, our economy, our health is undeniable.

Not exactly undeniable. Jim Pillen is willing to give it a try.

[Jim Pillen, Pork Producer] If people can somehow try to maintain an open mind, I think that they'll see a lot of positive sides of the issue and that people's neighbor's quality of life is not being obstructed. Pig waste, if handled incorrectly, can hurt air quality from as few as 200 animals or less. The fact is when it's handled correctly in today's contemporary facilities, odor is not offensive to neighbors a short distance away. (crowd booing)... If a producer in your neighborhood...

Pillen was booed by half the crowd at the Columbus meeting, but later he was cheered by the other half. It shows how this issue has divided Nebraskans.

[Pillen] In terms of neighbors or people who are opposed, I have not had anybody call and say, hey, Jim, I'm willing to come out and take a look and learn the facts behind your industry. Haven't had anybody interested in learning the facts of what the pork industry has.

We decided to accept Pillen's invitation and visited his hog facility near St. Edward.

[Pillen] In this building right here, there is 1,140 crates, and then we have enough penning on the end where we can handle or house about 60 animals. So roughly 1,200 animals can live in one of these buildings.

Altogether, the 5,000 sows on this site produce more than 100,000 pigs per year.

[Pillen] These are control boxes that are computerized and set up to maintain the temperature.

Pillen calls it a high tech food business.

[Pillen] Anybody who's still talking about pig farms is using totally outdated and outmoded technology, and they are probably not in the pig industry anymore, because if people are in the pig industry today with the pig farm mentality, they're not going to be in it for much longer. This is a baby pig. He was born on pigtail day 457 and what are we today?

[Unidentified Confinement Facility Worker] 473.

[Pillen] 473. So this little guy is 16 days of age.

Pillen is now a partner in six facilities in six different Nebraska counties, and he's building more. But he says he doesn't want his success to be at the expense of neighbors.

[Pillen] If it's going to have a chance of violating any neighbors' quality of life, we won't even consider it. We've turned down great locations to do facilities that would have been really super opportunities because there was somebody that was too close.

When you put 5,000 hogs on one site, you produce a lot of pork and a lot of waste. Opponents say that's the primary problem.

[Pillen] Believe me, you can leave here today, not shower out, put your street clothes on, and no one will detect that you've been around pigs.

The hogs live on top of open grates. Below them is a pit with 8 to 10 inches of water.

[Pillen] Urine and feces then drops into that pit of water and that falls down into the bottom of it and it's sealed by the water.

Every two to three weeks, the waste is flushed out. This is where it winds up. On the day we visited, there was a faint odor next to the lagoon. It was similar to the experience we had when we visited the Gerdes farm near Johnson in southeast Nebraska.

[Dan Gerdes, Pork Producer] Jerry told me once we could have a picnic here and it would not be a problem. We dumped here yesterday. We dumped the G barn so this is -- we got fresh manure in here so there really ought to be odor, really.

[Jerry Bodman, UNL Engineer] That's right. I was down close near the lagoon. There's a nice pink color, nice rosy color. It's coming along really well.

University of Nebraska Engineer Jerry Bodman designed the lagoon.

[Bodman] ...and not be offended by the odor even though the wind is blowing right toward us.

The hog waste doesn't just sit in the lagoon. Solids settle to the bottom where bacteria break them down. More bacteria attacks odor-causing byproducts near the surface. Periodically, the water and waste byproducts will be sprayed on nearby fields as fertilizer. Bodman says the key to controlling odor is the amount of water used to dilute the waste. This lagoon uses four times more water than state standards require. He says if a waste lagoon stinks, there's a problem.

[Bodman] It is an indication of either inadequacy of the design or inadequacy of the management, one of the two. But they do not need to be odorous. That's why I'm convinced that livestock operations and rural residents can co-exist peacefully.

[Dubas] They keep telling us over and over and over again that it doesn't smell, it's not going to be offensive, but yet I've been finding just in the last week articles in the paper and in magazines where they're spending millions of dollars on research on how to eliminate or disguise the odor from these hog confinements. Well, if there is no odor, then why are we spending millions of dollars to try to research how to handle these odors.

The Gerdes family staked their own well-being on Bodman's design. Their lagoon sits just a couple of hundred yards from their home. They won't smell the lagoon from there, but for now they can still smell hogs. They still raise some pigs the old-fashioned way in an open lot. It smells worse near that lot than it does around their confinement building or their lagoon.

[Gerdes] We're starting to tear some of this down, but we're just not there yet. We got the roofs off of some of the sheds.

[Bodman] It's more of a concern. The open lots, the majority of them, we don't have much in the way of runoff control facilities. And hence, a lot of our smaller operators around the state contribute more to water quality problems than the large operations because they still have the open lots with lack of runoff control facilities.

But odor isn't the only concern. Opponents are worried that waste from lagoons could seep into the groundwater.

[Dubas] That's probably our number one resource as far as I'm concerned in Nebraska is our quality of water, and why would we want to even begin to do anything that could possibly jeopardize something that precious to our state.

Bodman says proper design and construction can handle that problem, too. He says that as long as the soil contains clay, it can be packed down to limit seepage.

[Bodman] We know, for example, on a driveway where the ground is very well pack, water doesn't percolate through. It tends to run off. What we do here is the same thing. You pack it purposely so the water cannot go down through it.

Bodman says a lagoon that's built right and taken care of will also minimize the risk of a lagoon spill or collapse.

[Bodman] No different than the septic tank on a rural residence. What's the risk of that one malfunctioning and putting raw sewage right into the groundwater? There's a risk there. With good design and good construction, we keep that risk minimal. It's not zero. Life doesn't have zero risk.

The State Department of Environmental Quality has to approve plans for waste lagoons at large hog operations, and they do have inspection requirements once lagoons are in operation. But Bodman says the State isn't involved while the lagoons are being built.

[Bodman] Our operations here in the state are very much on good faith basis. There is no organization, no agency that does monitoring of construction.

[Dubas] We think there needs to be a much more stringent inspection process before these lagoons are even allowed to be used.

[John Hansen, Nebraska Farmers Union] Do we have adequate environmental standards in place through the permitting process in the Department of Environmental Quality? In our opinion, absolutely not. The department standards themselves are inadequate. Inspection is inadequate. And the over all track record is mediocre at best.

D.E.Q. Director Randy Wood defends his department's record. So far there haven't been any environmental disasters like they've seen in other states. Meanwhile, at the federal level, the issue of livestock production is getting a whole new look.

[U. Gale Hutton, Environmental Protection Agency] It's only been through the past several years where we've had such a significant change in the pork producers' operation that the issue has really been forced as to whether or not we should be reviewing these regulations and guidelines. Indeed E.P.A. is taking on that review.

Hutton says the long term environmental impact of small livestock operations can be just as devastating as large facilities.

[Hutton] I think you can say that it basically boils down to proper construction and proper operation and maintenance of facilities. Now that's regardless of size. It has nothing to do with size.

New regulations won't stop large hog operations, but they may give opponents peace of mind.

[Dubas] To be realistic, you know, these operations are going to be in our state. We just want to be able to maybe level the playing field out a little bit and we want to know what's going on. And if there are regulations and if there is zoning, those are avenues that we have to find out what's going on.

Jim Pillen says he doesn't mind new regulations, as long as they take new technology into account. All he wants is an opportunity to do business, a business he believes will only help rural Nebraska.

[Pillen] People in the pork business need to be more active and do a lot better job of explaining our business to our neighbors and to the communities so there's not the hysteria and the fear that we're going to change everybody's -- we're going to adversely affect everybody's quality of life and contaminate all the groundwater because that's just not the fact.

[Dubas] There's very obviously a strong difference of opinion between operators like Pillen and operators like us as to, you know, what we think will save rural America, you know. I believe he's real sincere in what he thinks he's doing, but we're real sincere, too. We just don't agree with that type of farmer.

Dubas and her organization have raised a lot of questions. Pillen and other pork producers say they have the answers. And government is trying to sort it all out. This is an issue that won't go away soon. Reporting for Statewide, I'm Brad Penner.

Captioning by Nebraska Captioning Center, Lincoln, Nebraska .