Major Russian pig company accused of pollution

The FSB reported that the director of Kudryashovskoe, Vladimir Gavrilenko (37) gave instructions to discharge sewage and liquid animal waste into the Amba river in order not to spend money on waste disposal. In addition, waste was thrown into the surrounding area and forest fund lands.

Kudryashovskoe is the largest pig farm in the Novosibirsk region and one of the largest in Siberia. The farm is a part of the Sibagro Group, which accounts for 7% of Russian pork production. In 2021, the farm generated 8.7 billion roubles ($ 120 million) of net revenue and 1.7 billion ($ 25 million) of net profit.

The end of a long battle

The Russian environmental watchdog reported that Kudryashovskoe was fined by 2.9 billion rubles ($ 45 million). This is the biggest fine a Russian pig company was charged with over ecological damage in the past several years. It is believed to finally put an end to a long battle of the Novosibirsk population against the bad smell in the city.

In December 2021, a group of researchers from the Institute of Organic Chemistry discovered that Kudryashovskoe was to blame for the bad smell the city suffered from at that time. The farm management, however, denied all accusations of polluting the environment through improper waste disposal.

A gap in the law

In April 2022, Alexander Shcherbatov, head of the regional department of the Russian sanitary watchdog Rospotrebnadzor, in response to a complaint of local residents on the Kudryashovskoe, pointed to a flaw in the existing veterinary regulations, under which the regulators have no authority “to assess the impact of smell on the human olfactory organs”.

Shcherbatov said that Rospotrebnadzor expects changes to the Russian veterinary law, under which odours would be regulated like pollutants. This would help sort out such cases more swiftly, he said.

Not a single case

This is not the first case when a Russian pig farm has been fined for polluting the environment. For instance, in March of 2022, TopAgro was fined by the regional veterinary authorities for polluting the environment after an inspection revealed a rise of nitrate ion by a factor of 446 times, phosphate ion by 1.7 times, and zinc by 2.4 times in soil samples taken near the farm.

Over the past few years, nearly a dozen pig farms in Russia were found guilty of polluting the environment. In several cases, the trials were initiated after repeated complaints from residents who also wooed about a lack of veterinary control in this field by Russian regulators.