rc farms, Las Vegas. Food recycling

Rc farms is a pig farm that was featured on an episode of "dirty jobs", where they talked about the operation, and "americas heartland" does an indepth exploration in this youtube clip

The farm is surrounded on all sides by completely built subdivisions. RC farms is on the right side of this street, and landscaped subdivisions are on the other side.

The houses that are built around it are very nice. They'd qualify as a nice neighborhood in any other part of the country... but here, across the street from this hog farm, the quality of life apparently suffers a bit. Here's a quote:

"by Michelle 02/05/2010


This farm is disgusting! It makes the whole city smell for miles. I don't mean a little pig smell either, it smells like rotten garbage and is so over powering that you can not stand outside without gagging! The area also contains lots of garbage, old rusty run down cars and mobile homes. It looks like a garbage lot and smells even worse! Who knows what else is out there and why the city allows all the garbage in his area when they are so strict on the neighborhoods. Nothing like spending over $200,000 for a home I have to stay inside of because it stinks so bad outside...." quote from this site.

In fact, the pig farm has impact on the only undeveloped tract that borders it.

Just to be clear; when I drove around this farm the smell was so strong that I gagged downwind. North Las Vegas seems to be ok with being close to the farm. In fact, they've built this beautiful new school RIGHT NEXT TO IT

I like Bobs' emphasis on recycling, and I have to admit I admire him taking a problem and making an innovative solution. This farm has been there for quite a while; at least 40 years, and all of these houses and school were built in the full knowledge of what was there and what the conditions were like.

Here, a neat and tidy subdivision on the left, and pig manure in piles on the right. I'm not saying composting because I didn't see any turning or handling of this; these piles are just scraped out of the pig paddocks and piled by the gate. The piles are composed of rotten, uneaten food, pig waste (solid and liquid) and bits of inedible stuff like plastic containers and other stuff that comes in through the waste stream they're feeding the pigs. If I were to use that material as fertilizer I'd probably want to make sure that it was composted well to a safe temperature and then screened to remove the plastic. This is where I was gagging as I took these photos.

Inside the farm the paddocks are divided into smaller areas, and there are numerous shade structures (well, they'd work for rain as well, but it being nevada, I think that shade is more valued by these pigs. Because of the way they cook and feed the pigs, they end up being frosted like doughnuts with a crust of uneaten food that dries hard on them. In a perfect world I'd like to see the pigs have a mud area where they could cool down, but all of these animals seemed to be fine, wandering around or dozing. They have a lot of space, so in that sense they're "pastured".

the bare dirt is mostly pig manure and dried pig urine and smells very bad. I'm guessing that is inevitable if you stock pigs at this density.

Next to the pig farm is a smaller operation that appears to be a cattle feedlot.

At this operation there's no shade for the cows, but there is protection for the hay.

The hay is tossed over the fence to the cows. Seems like a sideline; only about 100 heads. Big feedlots get tens of thousands of head of cattle.