Charlie Pierce in Esquire: West Virginia Is Open For Business

[CrispyQ]

11. The link to the pig shit story in Iowa was an incredible read, too.

Although most people don't want to hear that their meat based diet casues huge environmental issues as well.

http://www.motherjones.com/tom-philpott/2013/03/chinas-dead-hog-scandal-gross%E2%80%94-so-are-our-factories-farms

But as China reshapes its meat production in our image, we have no standing to feel superior when scandals like the current one in Shanghai's hinterland erupt. That's because we don't do a very good job of protecting our waterways from the hog industry, either. Consider Iowa, which houses around 18 million hogs, making it our most hog-intensive state. All of those hogs concentrated into a relatively small space generate unthinkable amounts of toxic manure. How much? Food & Water Watch weighs in:

• The nearly 733,000 hogs on factory farms in Plymouth County, Iowa, produce twice as much untreated manure as the sewage from the Dallas-Fort Worth metro area.

• The more than 857,000 hogs on factory farms in Hardin County, Iowa, produce three times as much untreated manure as the sewage from the greater Atlanta metro area.

• The more than 1 million hogs on factory farms in Sioux County, Iowa, produce as much untreated manure as the sewage from the Los Angeles and Atlanta metro areas combined.

And it's not just hogs that are crammed into the state's factory farms. According to FWW, Iowa's vast confinement facilities also house 1.2 million beef cattle, 52.4 million egg-laying hens, 1 million broiler chickens, and 64,500 dairy cows. Altogether, this teeming horde annually churns out "as much untreated manure as the sewage from 471 million people—more than the entire US population."

As you might imagine, keeping such titanic amounts of shit out of water is a near futile task. There are occasional spectacular incidents—FWW points to the time in 2008 when spring floods "destroyed at least 3 hog factory farms near Oakville, drowned up to 1,500 hogs and flooded manure from storage pits downstream into waterways throughout eastern Iowa." And according to the Iowa Citizens for Community Improvement, a group that fights factory farming in Iowa, there have been more than 800 documented in Iowa since 1995.

And some dare think humans are the pinnacle of creation?