Word: seaboards
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...ever present stench--the overpowering smell from Seaboard's 40,000 hogs closely confined in 44 metal buildings, where exhaust fans continuously pump out tons of pungent ammonia, mixed with tons of grain dust and fecal matter, scented with the noxious odor of hydrogen sulfide (a poisonous gas produced by decaying manure that smells like rotten eggs), all combined with another blend of aromas wafting from five cesspits each 25 ft. deep and the size of a football field. They are, in effect, open-air sewage ponds, and 75 ft. below lies the Ogallala aquifer, which provides drinking and irrigation...
...with pig manure. And then there are all the dead pigs lying about. By law, the carcasses are supposed to be deposited in Dumpsters with the lids tightly closed, and the contents disposed of daily. But with hundreds of thousands of hogs dying before their time each year, Seaboard often falls behind in disposing of them. Sometimes the overflow from Dumpsters is stacked nearby. Sometimes dead hogs are piled up beside barns, sometimes at the side of the road. And sometimes they lie about so long that the flesh rots away...
After issuing repeated warnings to Seaboard, the Oklahoma agriculture department fined the firm $157,500 in December 1997 for improper disposal. After an appeal, the company paid the state $88,200 for the infractions. In all, the Seaboard death toll reached 48 hogs an hour in 1997--420,000 for the year. And the carcasses are picked up only once a day--assuming the dead-pig truck is on schedule. Sometimes it isn't. Which is why at any given moment during the day there are hundreds of dead hogs lying about the fields of Texas County...
...thought we were at the point that we could retire. And, of course, the rhetoric from Seaboard is, 'Well, my goodness, your land, your home, it's worth more than you ever dreamed because of us coming in next to you...' Our kids couldn't sell this if they needed the money to bury us with. It's just devaluated to nothing as far as the market's concerned...
...story is much the same for Vancy Elliott and her husband Delmer, who live about three miles from Guymon and whose land abuts a Seaboard hog farm. "We have to put flytraps out in the summer," says Elliott. "But we even have flies occasionally in the winter now, and we've never had that before. Rats and mice are a real problem because they have so many pigs that are dying...