Water
going in and water going out central to Wholestone Farms plans for pork plant
in Sioux Falls
Processing hogs
requires a tremendous amount of water. Opponents of a new slaughterhouse in
the city limits say it will stress supply and raise concerns about the amount
and quality of the discharge. Wholestone maintains modern design anticipates
potential problems.
www.agweek.com
October 21, 2022 04:24 PM
SIOUX
FALLS, S.D. — It takes a lot of water to turn a live pig into pork chops, ham
and bacon.
A key element in Wholestone Farms’ decision to build a pork
plant in northeast Sioux Falls is access to a dependable water supply.
“Any plant is going to use a tremendous amount of water,” said
Terry Houser, the Smithfield Foods chair in meat science extension at Iowa
State University.
Water coming in and water going out.
Those challenges are
among the points that city voters will weigh when they go to the polls on
Nov. 8.
The city
currently has plenty of drinkable water coming in, which is required to
produce safe meat. The going out question is how you cleanse and
dispense of wastewater when you’re done.
The potential
for pollution is
one of the top points of contention for Wholestone’s detractors. The plan
includes building a $45 million treatment plant, which will remove the
solids, compounds and chemicals before discharging the clean water back into
the Big Sioux River.
Pollution is a top-of-mind issue, in
part, because wastewater has been a problem at the Smithfield pork plant near
Falls Park. Smithfield and previous owners have faced numerous fines over the
decades for violations of its discharge permit, including about $100,000
total for violations in 2018 and 2019.
Wholestone
leaders counter that reputation, saying a new plant won’t suffer from those
same problems. Proper planning, modern technology and redundancy can prevent
problems before they become environmental violations, they say.
Smart
Growth Sioux Falls is asking voters to change local ordinances to ban any
future slaughterhouses from building in city limits. While Wholestone’s name
does not appear on the ballot, the farmer-owned cooperative’s plan to build
the plant is what motivated the initiated measure.
The
potential odor is the centerpiece of Smart Growth’s “stop the stink”
campaign, but it’s water, labor and transportation that brought Wholestone to
Sioux Falls.
“Wholestone’s
slaughterhouse would draw an additional three million gallons per day from
our city’s water supply, making water scarcer for everyone else. The plant
would guzzle up more water each day than 32,000 typical South Dakota
residents,” Robert Peterson, Smart Growth’s treasurer and spokesperson, said
in a statement.
How much water?
Smart Growth says they aren’t against the plant or value-added
agriculture, just not in the city limits. But the quality and quantity of
water required is precisely why Wholestone wants to be inside that line.
It’s that balance between competing interests, between the
ideal landscape and the hard reality, that voters must balance.
How much water is involved?
On average, a pork processing plant in the United States uses
100 gallons of water for every pig slaughtered. That includes all the water
used for things like refrigeration, creating steam for sterilization and
scalding, carcass cleaning, hand washing and restrooms.
The Wholestone plant, because it’s a new facility, would use
around half that, said Rachel Kloos, the water and wastewater group leader
for ISG, the Sioux Falls engineering firm that is designing the plant.
That’s because they are conserving and reusing water at a
greater rate than an older plant, she said. The federal government and the
food industry at large, facing increasing challenges from climate change and
other factors, stress that finding ways to reduce water consumption is
paramount.
Kloos estimates the Wholestone plant will use about a million
gallons of water a day but they have requested 1.5 to 2 million gallons a day
from the City of Sioux Falls Public Works Department.
Representatives for the city did not respond to several
interview requests from Forum News Service on the topic.
Federal food safety regulations require that any animal
processing plant begins the process with “potable” water, which means it’s
safe for humans to drink. But it’s still not clean enough to ensure it
doesn’t introduce any contaminants, so additional treatment is required.
“We need our water to be as clean as possible,” said Kloos.
“The good quality water that is coming from the City of Sioux Falls allows us
to be more efficient in our process.”
Treating the wastewater
Then there’s the water going out.
The plant design includes a standalone water treatment
facility. While it’s similar in concept to how a city treats water from homes
and businesses, there are additional steps that are required to remove the
pig parts, hair and some other solids which have value, such as fats, oils
and grease.
Then the wastewater goes into covered lagoons where anaerobic
digestion, which means there is no oxygen present. This process uses
biological compounds to remove organic materials, which is common in
wastewater treatment
This
schematic shows the flow of wastewater in the proposed treatment facility for
Wholestone Farms pork processing plant in Sioux Falls. DAF is an acronym for
dissolved air flotation system, which removes suspended solids and recovers
fats, oils and grease, or FOG. MMBR stands for moving bed biofilm reactor,
which is part of the process that removes ammonia and phosphorus to reduce odorContributed /
Wholestone Farms |
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