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Trends and Developments in Hog Manure Management: 1998-2009

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By Nigel Key, William D. McBride, Marc Ribaudo, and Stacy Sneeringer

Economic Information Bulletin No. (EIB-81) 39 pp, September 2011

In the past decade, hog production has increasingly become consolidated, with larger operations producing a greater volume of hog manure on smaller areas. With less cropland for spreading the manure, hog farmers may be compensating through more effective manure management. The authors use data from 1998 to 2009 collected in three national surveys of hog farmers. Over this period, structural changes in the hog sector altered how manure is stored and handled. Changes to the Clean Water Act, State regulations, and local conflicts over air quality also affected manure management decisions. The findings further suggest that environmental policy has influenced conservation-compatible manure management practices. The authors examine how the use of nutrient management plans and of practices such as controlled manure application rates vary with scale of production and how these practices changed over the study period. This report is an update of an earlier report, Changes in Manure Management in the Hog Sector: 1998-2004.

Keywords: Hog production, manure management, structural change, environmental regulation, ERS, USDA

In this report ...

Chapters are in Adobe Acrobat PDF format.

Charts and graphs (in .png format) from this report are available in the .zip file listed below. The .zip file also contains a document (readme.txt) that lists the name and title of each chart or graph file.

Updated date: September 14, 2011

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