Note: this project includes aerial imagery of large-scale enclosed animal facilities; the imagery does not show individual animals and primarily appears as warehouse-style structures viewed from above.
FAQ
How can I tell if I'm looking at a swine, poultry, or some other kind of CAFO?
Swine and poultry CAFOs often look different.
Poultry barns are long, narrow rectangular buildings stacked parallel to one another, usually from 2 barns to 8 in columns of 1 or more.
Hog/Swine barns are also rectangular, but are shorter and wider. They are stacked in a single column and near or often perpendicular to a lagoon.
If barn structures appear differently from these examples, there's a chance they could be normal greenhouses, such as in the image below.
Why do some swine lagoons look different?
Waste lagoons might appear differently colored in aerial imagery. Lagoons may range from a greenish-black to a pink or reddish-brown color. Variation in color is often due to factors like bacterial activity, age of lagoon, and whether it's covered or not. Lagoons that have faint white lines down the center are capped or covered lagoons, capturing toxic gasses that are fed to anaerobic digesters.
What part of the CAFO should I outline in the classify tab?
When asked to draw a polygon around the perimeter of each poultry or swine CAFO, set the perimeter to surround each group of barns, as shown in the screenshot below. If there's a swine lagoon present, draw around that as well.
If barns are rusty, or parts are cut off by the perimeter of the image, select the tool for "Cut off and can't identify CAFO type" to draw your polygon.
Is the use of aerial imagery in this project to identify industrial agriculture operations an invasion of privacy?
All of the data used in the project are publicly available through NC OneMap which hosts satellite imagery of all of North Carolina's counties.
Most concentrated animal feeding operations are regulated by environmental permits as required by the Environmental Protection Agency. In North Carolina, these permits have historically been approved by the NC Department of Environmental Quality, which is legally required to share its permit locations publicly. Advocates and researchers used these public locations to show that industrial swine CAFOs with their hog lagoons were harmful to human and environmental health.
However, poultry CAFOs without lagoons avoid publicly available permits by being permitted through the NC Department of Agriculture which is not required to share permit locations publicly. While there are no lagoons at poultry facilities, they still have the potential to cause human and environmental health harms through increased disease spread (e.g., avian flu), the disposal of deceased birds and waste, and bad odors for residents living nearby. Despite these potential harms, permits through the Department of Agriculture are the equivalent of a building permit and do not require environmental protections.
Interested in this topic further? Reach out to our team in the Ethics talk board, and we'd love to chat with you more.