Determinants of environmental mitigation expenditures in hog and poultry production

While the intensification and concentration in swine and poultry production continue to provide significant economic benefits to livestock producers and meat consumers, the increasing negative environmental externalities pertaining in particular to disposal of waste and dead animals, however, are definitely emerging as an important societal cocern. This paper assesses the extent to which hog and broiler farms are mitigating the negative externalities arising from their production activities through the use of a working index of environmental mitigation expenditures. It also determines the factors affecting such environmental mitigation behavior of livestock producers using Tabit analysis and maximum likelihood estimation. A stratified and disaggregate broiler and hog dataset was drawn from the CEM-UPLBFI-IFPRI-FAD-LEAD Livestock Industrialization (LI) Project survey of 207 hog farms/households which was conducted from November 2002 to January 2 003. Negative externalities from broiler and hog production activities may arise from untreated and improper disposal of manure and dead animals. It was found that 9 out of 10 broiler producers are able to mitigate these externalities through the sale of chicken manure and application of manure on cropland. Dead animals are usually buried or burned within the farm premises. Except for smallholder independent growers, disposal of waste in broiler farms is not problematic. Disposal of work and dead stock with the use of more ecologically sound methods are quite a problem in hog farms. Only two-thirds of the sample are able to mitigate pollution from their farms, with impounding structures (biogas digester, lagoons and septic tanks) as the more common methods of disposal. The problem of environmental mitigation is more pronounced in small scale independent farms, particularly with those that are into the farrow-to-wear operations. For broiler farms, the most important determina nts of environmental mitigation expenditures are the ability to sell manure and the existence of cropland. For hog farms, the major determinants of mitigation expenditures are the presence of a regulatory agency, community pressure and some household head and farm characteristics such as education and connection to municipal piped-in-water supply.