Berkshire Hathaway Acquires Dominion Energy's Pipeline Assets
“Pigs are extremely efficient,” says Kraig Westerbeek, who oversees renewable energy production for Smithfield Foods, the world’s biggest pork producer. For what farmers put into them, they get a lot out. “They eat 2.4 pounds of feed per pound of gain,” he says. “And they produce more gas per pound of live weight.”
Westerbeek is talking about greenhouse gases emitted by the millions of pigs his industrial farms produce each year. Inside his giant barns, manure and urine ooze through holes in a concrete floor before getting piped to open-air ponds called lagoons—some the size of four football fields. In these lakes of livestock waste naturally occurring bacteria—called methanogens—continue to feed and fart out more gas. All this methane ends up in the atmosphere, and that is bad news for the planet. Pound for pound, methane packs 25 times the greenhouse effect as the standard environmental villain, carbon dioxide. To make matters worse, it’s long been standard practice for farmers to spray the odoriferous lagoon waste on croplands as rich fertilizer—subjecting Smithfield and its former hog-producing subsidiary, Murphy-Brown, to environmental litigation and scathing publicity as local communities cope with the stench and health risks.
By Forbes