Is pig heaven hell on groundwater? [November 2009 / CCT]

Recently Judy and Fred Tesson applied for a permit to keep 10 pigs on their half acre lot in Wellfleet. A neighbor, a part time resident, had complained in a letter to the board of health about the proposed pigs’ unpermitted predecessors , describing vividly “eight large pigs wallowing …in mud mixed with urine and feces which oozed through our fence” Eeuuu.

The Tessons also have chickens, geese and three horses on that half acre lot.

The Tessons’ reasons are practical and even “green”, that thing we are all supposed to try to be, even though, as the Tessons are finding out, it isn’t easy. By raising their own bacon to go with the eggs from those chickens they will save on their food bill in these tough economic times.

Their plan is totally consistent with the currently hot “ locavore” movement. Instead of relying on mega food corporations to feed us from sources far and wide, with known drawbacks such as preservatives and other additives, so locovore thinking goes, whenever possible buy from local farms. Best of all, grow your own.

Well, in Wellfleet we know where our seafood comes, but as for other parts of the diet, if we had to stick to local foods we’d starve. I have a neighbor about a half mile away who has chickens. I love the sound of them over the treetops, the reminder of an agrarian past I never knew. But we get our poultry and eggs from the big box in Orleans or P’town.

There are people in this town who, in order to get milk right from the cow rather than the processed stuff from the supermarket shelf, regularly drive all the way to an off-Cape dairy. I doubt the carbon footprint equation on that works out to green.

So the Tessons’ pigs are a step in the right direction. Right?

Maybe, maybe not. The health board is worried about groundwater. Won’t the pig ordure poison the delicate lens of fresh water beneath our feet from which we draw all our drinking water? And indeed, if we are fastidious about our own human waste p roducts, requiring a complicated and expensive Title Five septic treatment, it wouldn’t make sense to be more casual about animal waste.

The discussion about the Tesson application has turned up the fact that other people in town keep barnyard animals and that in fact the town issues permits for them. According to the health board chair Rich Willecke issuance of a permit requires a manure management plan; but are such plans required to be as complete (and expensive) as a farm animal equivalent of Title Five? And if the Tessons were required to come up with the $10,000 and more such a system costs these days, wouldn’t that more than cancel the savings on the food bill from those pigs?

The Tesson application raises an important issue. There was a time, before the likes of Stop & Shop took over the role of feeding us, when farming was a way of life in Wellfleet, along with the rest of the country. The farming era is part of our nostalgic image of old, self- sufficient Wellfleet. If the small amount of animal husbandry current in our town is a no longer consistent with healthy living, or animal waste management so expensive as to not make economic sense, is that view of a self-sustaining farming era a romantic delusion?

Is farming, at least in an area which doesn’t want to have to artificially purify its water (any more than its milk or other food), either bad for our health, or economically unfeasible?

At the board of health meeting of Oct 28 the Tessons withdrew their application pending results of more testing of their water, which has shown high nitrate readings, suggesting that waste management on that particular half acre has not been all that it should be.

But this goes beyond their particular case and beyond part time residents’ distaste for farmyard realities. The issues raised are important enough to warrant commissioning a special study of the feasiblity of farming in this town, so desirable in theory, including consideration of our agrarian past.

 

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