This report profiles the amounts of animal waste generated by livestock operations. The report allows you to rank your community based on amounts of animal waste, details trends over time and provides you with opportunities to take action. See Scorecard's overview of animal waste problems.

Data Source: Scorecard combines livestock population data from the U.S. Department of Agriculture with waste factors developed by the agricultural community to estimate the amount of animal waste that livestock operations produce.

NOTE: Due to limitations in available data, Scorecard cannot describe the waste management methods of specific livestock operations or evaluate the level of health or ecological risk that animal waste may pose in an area.

Map(s) Locating the Farms
For North Carolina reports, Scorecard gives you links to maps that show you where the livestock operations are located. You can see on the map how close your home or workplace is to a hog operation. (Other animal operations in North Carolina are not mapped.) There are no national data locating livestock operations, so most state and county reports do not link to maps.

Rankings:
States and counties can be ranked according to a particular animal waste type or according to the amount of nitrogen or phosphorus contained in the waste, as well as nitrogen lost to the atmosphere. For these different categories of animal waste, Scorecard highlights the counties or states that rank in the top 20%, relative to all such areas in a state or the entire country. The rankings are based on county-level animal statistics compiled by the USDA. The number of animals of a particular type is multiplied by waste factors to estimate the yearly waste production, waste volume, total nitrogen, etc.

Animal Waste Summary
This summary provides a quick look at the various components of animal waste: the total number of animals, the volume and weight of waste being generated, and the levels of the nutrients nitrogen and phosphorus in the waste, as well as the amount of nitrogen that escapes into the atmosphere. See Scorecard's animal waste definitions for information on the health and ecological impacts of these categories.

Animal Waste Trends
Trend information simply describes whether the amount of animal waste has increased or decreased over a given period of time. These changes are expressed as a percentage of the amount of animal waste present at the beginning of the period of interest. Although there may be year-to-year increases and decreases within that period, this information gives a general picture of changes in the amounts of animal waste generated.

Take Action
If you are concerned about agricultural pollution in your area, Environmental Defense encourages you to take action. With the click of a button you can send an email to the top officials at the U.S. EPA and USDA who handle pollution for livestock operations. Scorecard presents you with a general message that you can tailor any way you want.

Discussion Forum is the place to air your views, ask questions, or give answers about local animal waste pollution and the livestock operations responsible for it. Find out what people are saying about agricultural pollution, or meet others working on environmental problems in your community.

Scorecard also gives you a list of environmental organizations in your area that you can contact to work with on local pollution problems.

Farm Information
If you want to contact a livestock operation directly about its animal waste, Scorecard gives you the contact names and phone number. Farm-level information is currently only available for hog operations in North Carolina.

Links
To make it easier to get more information on a geographic area, Scorecard points you to other web sites that provide accessible information about environmental quality in an area. If there is information available in online EPA databases, for example, it is rarely more than a click away.