Ten years after state leaders stopped the construction of more hog farms that use traditional waste lagoons, the state Senate gave final approval to a bill permanently banning waste ponds on new hog farms and set higher standards for alternative waste disposal systems.

The Senate approved the legislation 48-0 on Wednesday and sent it to Gov. Mike Easley, whose office helped negotiate the final version.

"The governor believes it appears to be a good compromise and looks forward to reviewing the bill," said Seth Effron, a spokesman for Easley.

Any new farms would have to install waste disposal systems that substantially eliminate odors, airborne emissions of ammonia, discharge of animal waste into rivers and groundwater, and disease-carrying pathogens. The legislation directs environmental regulators to write those standards into law.

Still, the bill is a significant departure from the milestone that environmentalists envisioned would phase out all open-air hog lagoons. Originally, state leaders and hog producers agreed to explore such a phase-out when they signed a pact to research alternative waste disposal methods.

But under the bill that goes before Easley, farmers with existing waste lagoons could continue to use them indefinitely. In certain circumstances, they could replace failing lagoons that pose an imminent hazard with new ones.

Environmentalists said that change weakened the bill. But hog industry officials contended that farmers could be put out of business otherwise. Although researchers identified environmentally superior methods of handling hog waste, none was deemed affordable.

"This moves us in the right direction," said Sen. Charlie Albertson, a Duplin County Democrat who introduced the original bill to try to make industrial hog farms better neighbors. "I don't think it's rational to set a date certain to phase out lagoons. We have to find a way to make some of the new systems more economically feasible."

North Carolina is the nation's second-largest hog producer, with an estimated 9.5 million swine on more than 2,300 farms, most of them in Eastern North Carolina.

Replacement exception

Ryke Longest, director of the environmental law and policy clinic at Duke University Law School, said the provision allowing replacement of failing lagoons is not a major loophole, especially because it requires that the defective lagoon present a hazard.

Longest said that state law defined an imminent hazard as something that poses an immediate threat to human life, serious adverse health effects or irreparable damage to the environment.

"That seems to me to be a high standard to meet," Longest said. "It says to me the replacement of lagoons is going to be a rare occurrence."

State leaders have been struggling with how to reduce the water and air pollution caused by factory farms, which produce huge volumes of manure and urine that sit in open-air waste ponds. While the solids are broken down by bacteria, the liquid waste is sprayed on fields as fertilizer. During rains or floods, the waste can wash into streams, degrading water quality and promoting conditions that can cause fish kills.

New methods costly

A six-year research effort led by N.C. State University identified several innovative methods of treating the waste that were superior environmentally to the existing waste lagoons. But researchers found the new methods cost two to five times as much as the current system of holding ponds and spraying fields.

The bill sets up a voluntary conversion program to pay most of the costs of replacing lagoons for farmers who volunteer. Supporters hope that will allow some of the new technologies to be refined on working farms and lead to cost reductions, making them more affordable for widespread use.

Environmental groups were divided over the bill.

"It's a modest step forward and perhaps the only one politically feasible this session," said Molly Diggins, director of the state chapter of the Sierra Club, which supported the original version of the bill.

The bill also creates a test program on as many as 50 farms to capture methane gas for production of electricity -- a provision supported by the hog industry.

"We're especially excited about the methane-capture program," said Deborah Johnson, chief executive officer of the N.C. Pork Council, which represents swine producers. "We have a lot of producers looking for opportunities that could lead to incremental environmental improvements."