Despite a moratorium on new hog farms in North Carolina, enough farms have been added, expanded or reactivated under exemptions to add 500,000 swine in the state in the past 10 years.

Under those exemptions to the 1997 law that established the moratorium, 73 new hog farms have been built, 25 have been expanded and four were reactivated, state water regulators told The News & Observer of Raleigh. The majority of these exceptions use waste pits and spray fields to dispose of hog manure, both of which the state wants to eliminate because of concerns that they pollute water.

“I’m very surprised,” said Molly Diggins, director of the Sierra Club in North Carolina. “People assumed that the total number of hogs has been kept steady and that there are not new lagoons and spray fields being built. People knew those exemptions would allow some slippage, but not at that level. The moratorium isn’t working, and it should be replaced with a permanent ban on new lagoons and sprayfields.”

A spokeswoman for the state Division of Water Quality, which issues hog farm permits, said the farms comply with the way legislators wrote the moratorium, which expires in September without further legislation.

“The industry hasn’t been growing in spite of the moratorium,” spokeswoman Susan Massengale said. “It’s been growing in concert with what was said in that moratorium.”

The new farms could mean more business for Smithfield Foods, which is asking the state for permission to process 1 million more pigs annually at its slaughterhouse in Tar Heel in Bladen County. Smithfield’s application includes a request to buy hogs from new farms that don’t use the more innovative waste disposal methods.

The company’s permit now prohibits it from buying hogs from farms built after 2002 unless the farms use such methods, a ban that state regulators continue to support.

North Carolina produces about 9.5 million hogs a year, second only to Iowa, on 2,300 farms that are located mainly in the eastern part of the state.

Tommy Stevens, director of environmental services for the N.C. Pork Council, an advocacy group for the hog industry, said he thinks most of the new and expanded farms were built in the first few years of the moratorium.

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The law allowed the farms to be built under certain conditions: if foundation had been laid, the farmer had received a loan to build or expand or he had obtained a permit for construction. And in the months before the moratorium took effect, state regulators approved applications that equaled nearly 568,000 more hogs.