The standards do not call for any monitoring to ensure that the lagoons are not leaking, despite the potential for soil differences which could result in excessive leakage in lagoon bottoms or sides, for lagoon bottoms falling below the water table, or for lagoon bottoms or sides cracking or sloughing during the years of operation.
New research indicates the severity of the public health impacts of pork operations.
Using the current lagoon-sprayfield approach, hog waste being applied to land contains 100 to 10,000 times the number of pathogens in human waste that is treated and applied to land through municipal treatment systems. The Division of Water Quality, Groundwater Section, of the North Carolina Department of Environment and Natural Resources conducted a study to determine if the NRCS lagoon construction standards established in 1993 were adequate for the protection of groundwater quality. While this does not seem like a lot, it adds up to more than 350,000 gallons an acre every year or more than 1 million gallons a year for a 3-acre lagoon. Ammonium is quickly converted to nitrate in the presence of oxygen. However, since the soil directly beneath lagoons usually has a low level of oxygen, the ammonium does not convert to nitrate but accumulates in the soil.