Abstract
In the USA, historical data on the period over which industrial swine farms have operated are usually only available at the county scale and released every 5 years via the USDA Census of Agriculture, leaving the history of the swine industry and its potential legacy effects on the environment poorly understood. We developed a changepoint-based workflow that recreates the construction timelines of swine farms, specifically by identifying the construction years of swine manure lagoons from historical Landsat 5 imagery for the period of 1984 to 2012. The study focused on the Coastal Plain of North Carolina, a major pork-producing state in the USA. The algorithm successfully predicted the year of swine waste lagoon construction (+ /− 1 year) with an accuracy of approximately 94% when applied to the study area. By estimating the year of construction of 3405 swine waste lagoons in NC, we increased the resolution of available information on the expansion of swine production from the county scale to spatially-explicit locations. We further analyzed how the locations of swine waste lagoons changed in proximity to water resources over time, and found a significant increase in swine waste lagoon distances to the nearest water feature across the period of record.
Highlights
In the USA, historical data on the period over which industrial swine farms have operated are usually only available at the county scale and released every 5 years via the U.S Department of Agriculture (USDA) Census of Agriculture, leaving the history of the swine industry and its potential legacy effects on the environment poorly understood
The two algorithms did not detect the same year of construction for 19 waste lagoons; of these 19, the Binary Segmentation (BinSeg)-NormalMean detected the correct year for 84% of them, while the BinSeg-Normal-mean and variance (MeanVar) detected the correct year for only 16%
We developed an algorithm to reconstruct the spatiotemporal expansion of the swine concentrated animal feeding operations (CAFOs) industry, by focusing on the construction of swine waste lagoons in North Carolina built between 1986 to 2010, from Landsat 5 satellite images
Summary
In the USA, historical data on the period over which industrial swine farms have operated are usually only available at the county scale and released every 5 years via the USDA Census of Agriculture, leaving the history of the swine industry and its potential legacy effects on the environment poorly understood. By estimating the year of construction of 3405 swine waste lagoons in NC, we increased the resolution of available information on the expansion of swine production from the county scale to spatially-explicit locations. The growth of the animal production sector is often dictated by distances to processing plants, feed mills and transportation routes to minimize transportation cost This has led to the emergence of densely clustered CAFOs over relatively small geographic areas, resulting in massive amounts of waste being generated, stored, and land applied in “hotspots”’ across the landscape[2]. In the USA, the most spatially comprehensive documentation of animal production is through the U.S Department of Agriculture’s (USDA) Census of Agriculture, which reports the number of animals housed and processed in most counties across the USA every five years These data are only available at the county-scale, leaving gaps in our understanding of exact CAFO locations. Without knowledge on the locations of CAFOs, their collective effects on the surrounding environment are challenging to estimate given that administrative boundaries (i.e., county boundaries) do not always align with physiographic or environmentally-relevant areas
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