Iowa Not Snorting at Pork Bill

Despite the ridicule of Republicans including Senator John McCain and unintentional-comedian Rush Limbaugh, a $1.7 million earmark for pig odor research in Iowa is no scoffing-matter for residents of the #1 pig-producing state. In Iowa, where the pig population outnumbers the human population approximately 7 to 1, the stench of hog waste seriously affects the quality of life.

“You hold your breath and when it’s really bad you get the taste in your mouth,” said Carroll Harless, a 70-year-old retired corn-and-soybean farmer from Iowa Falls who blames the smell—a mixture of hydrogen sulfide and ammonia—for headaches that led him to spend two weeks at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minn.

“Once, we couldn’t go outside for a week,” adds Karen Forbes, who lives near a hog feedlot outside Lorimor and vividly recalls a citywide garage sale a couple years back which no one attended because of the stench that day. “It burned your eyes. You couldn’t breathe. You had to take a deep breath and run for your garage. It was horrid.”

Several lawsuits have been filed in Iowa in recent years by neighbors of hog lots who blame the odors for health problems and declining property values. In one case a jury awarded $76,400 to four families over falling property values.

The proposal currently making its way through Congress, authored by Iowa Senator Tom Harkin, actually marks the latest grant in a combined state and federal effort to control stinky pig-farms smells which has been going on for years at the Agricultural Research Service at the U.S. Department of Agriculture labs in Ames, Iowa. Hog odors have been a perennial issue at the state Legislature, where lawmakers argue over the need to protect quality of life without compromising Iowa’s $12-billion-a-year pork industry. “While we will likely hear about it on Jay Leno or the Letterman show, where they will be yukking it up, it’s a profoundly serious challenge,” says Harkin, who believes the idea is to help the pork industry go about its business “in an environmentally friendly way and be good neighbors.”

To those who make light of the smell, the senator extends an open invitation: Come to Iowa and take a whiff. “We could probably quadruple the money going into research if we got some of these people to tour areas where these large hog confinements are going up.”