Water Use

Reducing Water Intensity

The availability of quality fresh water is a growing global concern with potential implications for agriculture, such as increased costs or more stringent wastewater standards. Growing pigs need water for drinking, sanitation, and cooling (with misters, cool cells, and drippers). Our independent operating company (IOC) farms also use water to sustain animal health and keep equipment and facilities clean. Our processing facilities use water for cooling, cleaning, sanitizing, and making our products, totaling 9.6 billion gallons in fiscal 2011. In the United States, our IOCs obtain water from municipal water supplies from local surface and groundwater sources, private surface water impoundments, private wells, and spring water. In order to compete and succeed in an increasingly water-constrained world, we are working to develop more proactive water management systems.

Evaluating Water Risk

Because water is critical to our operations, we work hard to reduce pressure on local surface and groundwater supplies. We avoid operating in areas where there are insufficient water supplies to support our operations and the local community. To verify this, and in response to stakeholder requests, we recently began to use the World Business Council for Sustainable Development (WBCSD) Global Water Tool to identify facilities located in water-stressed regions. This analysis projects that 92 percent of our domestic sites will have adequate water supplies through 2025.

Going forward, we will continue to monitor and assess water supplies. We will focus particular attention on those facilities in areas with projected water scarcity and seek to contribute to solutions as we did near our Tar Heel, North Carolina, facility.

LEARN MORE Conserving North Carolina AquifersWe carefully monitor water use at each facility and make every effort to become more efficient. Since 2008, we have reduced water used per 100 pounds of product at our farms and our processing plants by 7 percent. Recent examples of water reductions include the following:

• Murphy-Brown’s feed mill in Laurinburg, North Carolina, uses spring water that used to flood its basement to feed its boiler, cutting water purchases by 90 percent (approximately 700,000 gallons per month).
• The Smithfield Packing plant in Kinston, North Carolina, salvaged a cooling tower from another plant to create a cooling loop, saving 1 million gallons of water.
• The North Side Foods plant in Cumming, Georgia, eliminated all processes that required a boiler. Without the boiler, the facility saves nearly 2 million gallons of water.
• The Armour-Eckrich facility in Mason City, Iowa, now saves 8.4 million gallons each year by placing restrictors on high-pressure hot water hoses that are used to clean plant work areas.
• The Smithfield plant in Landover, Maryland, installed tanks to hold pickle brine while staff members clean the sumps, allowing them to reuse 300,000 gallons of salt water annually.
• A Smithfield plant in Tar Heel, North Carolina, installed a 250,000-gallon tank to recover hot water produced by rendering operations, reducing hot water use by 49 million gallons per year.
• The Farmland Foods Monmouth, Illinois, facility replaced the hogs’ water troughs with 74 high-efficiency watering spouts, saving 19.2 million gallons of potable water per year.

These projects add up and have made a difference on our company’s water footprint—and the bottom line. By our estimates, the small sampling of water reduction projects above will save nearly $1 million in water bills and operating costs each year. The following chart illustrates the impacts of our efforts to produce our products using less water. We are on track for meeting our target for 2016; our challenge now is to push for further improvements.