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Air pollution from farms leads to 17,900 U.S. deaths per year, study finds Source: By Sarah Kaplan, Washington Post • Posted: Monday, May 10, 2021
The first-of-its-kind report pinpoints meat production as the leading source of deadly pollution
A hog farm in Vanceboro, N.C., is surrounded by floodwater in the aftermath of 2018’s Hurricane Florence. (Alex Wroblewski/Bloomberg News)
The smell of hog feces was overwhelming, Elsie Herring said. The breezes that wafted from the hog farm next to her mother’s Duplin County, N.C., home carried hazardous gases: methane, ammonia, hydrogen sulfide.
“The odor is so offensive that we start gagging, we start coughing,” she told a congressional committee in November 2019. Herring, who died last week, said she and other residents developed headaches, breathing problems and heart conditions from the fumes.
Air pollution from farms leads to 17,900 US deaths per year, study finds Published May 10
Dust drifts over a cornfield in Alden, Iowa, on Aug. 28, 2017. Corn dominates the landscape and is primarily used for producing ethanol and feeding hogs. Iowa is the leading U.S. producer of corn and pork. (Bonnie Jo Mount / Washington Post)
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Print article The smell of hog feces was overwhelming, Elsie Herring said. The breezes that wafted from the hog farm next to her mother’s Duplin County, N.C., home carried hazardous gases: methane, ammonia, hydrogen sulfide. “The odor is so offensive that we start gagging, we start coughing,” she told a congressional committee in November 2019. Herring said she and other residents developed headaches, breathing problems and heart conditions from the fumes.
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May 11, 2021
Larissa Zimberoff
BLOOMBERG – The pandemic turbocharged many trends that were already underway when the coronavirus struck the United States (US) early last year. One of them was consumer demand for food labelled “organic”, as shuttered restaurants and lockdowns forced many to see the contents of their refrigerator in a new light.
Indeed, 2020 sales of organic produce grew by 14.2 per cent. In the first quarter of this year, organic food sales rose by 9.3 per cent over the same period in 2020, topping USD2.2 billion as shoppers sought to avoid the taint of artificial additives, fertilisers and pesticides.
“Some of the surge we’ve seen in organic sales in the pandemic has been because of the perception of safety,” said Global Food Analyst Melanie Bartelme at Mintel, a market research firm.