Florence Flooding Hits North Carolina Hog Farm Hard

choi

Kris Maher and Ben Kesling, Florence Flooding Hits North Carolina Hog Farm Hard. Wall Street Journal, Sept 20, 2018
("Andy Curliss, chief executive of the North Carolina Pork Council pa trade group] * * * said farmers moved 20,000 hogs to higher ground, which prevented a higher death toll. 'From pour point of view, there's a lot of heroics,' he said * * * Hurricane Florence killed 5,500 of the state's 8.9 million pigs, the state said. That is more than the 2,900 hogs that died during Harriacane Matthew in 2016, but far less than the 21,000 hogs that died during Hurricane Floyd in 1999, according to pork council numbers.  The North Carolina Department of Environmental Quality said it had received reports of breaches, or structural failures, at at least two hog-waste lagoons. One breach in Duplin County was considered a total loss and more than 2.2 million gallons had spilled out, said Megan Thorpe, a department spokeswoman.  The agency said heavy rains had caused manure to spill over at 21 additional lagoons [these were spillovers, not a total loss]. It didn't have an estimate for the total amount of spilled at farms")

My comment:
(a) There is no need to read the rest.
(b) Among the states that raise hogs, Iowa is head and shoulders above the rest, three times as big as the runners-up: North Carolina and Minnesota are neck and neck.