Drove past a hog farm once..
If there was a Hell, it's a Hog farm..
Oh, dang. Haven't driven past one yet.
In high school there were tons of farms around us and we've gotten accustomed to cow fertilizer. To this day whenever I smell it on flowerbeds it gets me nostalgic.
Tp4 grew up in a rural ghetto... That is to say, am familiar with animal Smells.
The Hog farms Tp4 drove past smells NOTHING like that..
I read that it's because their sewage is so concentrated that the soil simply can not digest it.
So it's pooled densely causing it to ferment.
Best description, it's significantly closer to Dead-Body, vs the regular farm smell.
Tp4, in his usual weird way, is correct.
There are "traditional" hog farms, and there are "hog confinement facilities." They are two very different things.
On a traditional hog farm, you raise the hogs in a building, let them out into a pen during the day. Keep them in pens when farrowing, but still let them out to feed, cool off, etc. If you're a responsible farmer, and clean out the building regularly, install fresh hay, etc - there is very little smell.
In a hog confinement facility, hogs are penned up and never let out, crammed in to maximize space and profit. Their excrement is pumped out of the building, usually into lagoons. These are the places that you will very much smell when you drive by.
Sadly, the "traditional" way is becoming more rare, and confinement method is becoming the norm.
As a side note, the farmer usually owns his own hogs in the traditional way but doesn't often with hog confinement facilities. In that case, he's usually a caretaker for hogs owned by a larger company or corporation - due to the high volume of hogs involved.
As someone who's lived on a farm that's been in my family for over a century, I've watch this trend play out over my entire life.
