Abstract
Conflicts have arisen between communities and operators of confined animal feeding as farms have become bigger in order to maintain their competitiveness. These conflicts have been difficult to resolve because measuring and allocating the benefits and costs of livestock production is difficult. This papers demonstrates a policy tool for promoting compromise whereby the community gets reduced negative impacts from livestock while at the same time continues to benefit from livestock jobs, taxes, and related economic activity. Public economic benefits and public economic costs of confined animal feeding operations are estimated for every farm and affected house in Craven County, North Carolina. The results show public economic benefits of $5.7 million and public economic costs of $2.2 million, but that the ratio of benefits to costs for individual farm-house pairs varies in important ways across the 26 hog farms in Craven County.
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Notes
Importantly, these suppliers may or may not reside in the community.
Grouping corresponds to the EPA ruling (December 2002) defining a CAFO.
There are 12 and 317 urban houses within 1 and 1.5 mile distance of the nearest farm, respectively.
Division of Water Resources website, “Important facts about lists of animal operations,” ftp://h2o.enr.state.nc.us/pub/Non-Discharge/Animal%20Operations%20Info/.
To save space all distance band results are not shown, but are available from the authors.
−$0.47/0.75 miles * 10,000 = $6,627 or 10% of value of the median house in Craven county.
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Kim, J., Goldsmith, P. & Thomas, M.H. Economic impact and public costs of confined animal feeding operations at the parcel level of Craven County, North Carolina. Agric Hum Values 27, 29–42 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10460-009-9193-x
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10460-009-9193-x