"While backers hail their benefits, the state struggles to regulate operations that put thousands of animals under the same roof."
"Soon after graduating from Purdue University, Aaron Chalfant decided the best way for him to keep the Randolph County farm his family had tended for decades was to start raising hogs.
Lots of hogs. Four thousand of them, in fact.
'Livestock was kind of my ticket back to the farm,' said Chalfant, 29. 'It's really been a good chance for me to put food on the table for my family.'
But two summers ago, dead fish surfaced along miles of the Mississinewa River. A state environmental inspector followed the trail of carcasses to a field Chalfant had recently fertilized with hog manure piped in from his barn.
The inspector found liquefied hog feces pooled in a drainage ditch leading to Bear Creek, a tributary of the river. He photographed dead vegetation near a leaking manure hose. He smelled the unmistakable stench of hog manure wafting up from a drainage pipe."
Ryan Sabalow and Alex Campbell report for the Indianapolis Star October 13, 2012.
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