Pantai Acheh is situated in the west coast of Penang Island (Fig. 9.1). The piggeries are scattered on the right side of the road coming from the airport. There are three bigger piggeries with a maximum production capacity of 600 each. At present, about 300 fattening pigs and younger pork are kept in the observed piggery. There are about 20 small piggeries keeping 20–30 pigs each.
The closely inspected piggery has about 50 sty compartments occupied by 8–10 fattening pigs or younger pork. All compartments are slanting toward the opposite side of the feeding alley where a flat (15 cm deep, 30–40 cm wide) concrete canal collects the faeces and urine, hosed off from the compartments and the constantly dripping drinking water.
Although there is a simple two chambered 1.5 m × 1.5 m + 1.5 m × 1 m cement sedimentation tank, it has no function in separating solid and liquid waste, as it is completely filled with solid material, obviously ever since. Thus, one part of the diluted waste flows through the settling tank, and other larger part flows directly to a small creek which is already polluted heavily by the wastes of other piggeries. The creek crosses the back topped road and flows into the sea. The pollution effect of the creek in the sea was not investigated by this first visit.
There is enough area belonging to the state where fishponds can be constructed. On the lot of the pig inspected farm, there are nine smaller ponds under construction. In these ponds of 6 m × 25 m each, with a total surface of 1 350 m2, the farmer intends to raise aquarium fish and the food organisms for rearing of fry. It is planned to use the pig wastes in smaller quantities for the pond fertilization.
Gertak Sanggul is another small village in a rather remote but picturesque bay at the southwest of the island (Figs. 8.9 and 8.14). The farms cover crescent of the bay and are separated from the shore by a road. The available land for settlement is quite restricted as the area behind the pig farms rises steeply to 150–220 in high hills (Fig. 9.2). There is one big farm and ten (14)1 smaller pig farms with a standing pig population (SPP) of 4 350 (7 000)2 pigs.
The construction of the pig sties are of the same kind as those seen in Pantai Acheh. The waste hosed from the pig pens and conveyed to either the Gertak Sanggul rivulet at the east end of the village or to a concrete drainage system draining into the bay is approximately half way down the beach (Fig. 8.15). The concentrated wastes, however, have filled the natural bed of the rivulet between the piggeries and the sea. Rising gas could be observed in the river and foul odour was sensed around (Fig. 8.10).
Astonishingly, this rivulet does not seem to cause much pollution in the sea because most of the wastes decompose in the natural but clogged bed of the rivulet. During the dry season, the water flow in the rivulet is rather low so that the river is almost stagnant and acts as settlement tank.
1 According to Taiganides' report.
2 According to Taiganides' report.
The concrete drain causes very heavy pollution in the Gertak Sanggul Bay. The situation is even worse than it was described by P. Taiganides. Not only “several feet of the shore are turned into septic black, soupy seawater during high tides”, but the black bay water extends very far into the bay. Unfortunately, there was no opportunity to fly over this area for a possible visual distinction of water bodies as it was possible in Batu Maung (Fig. 8.3), nor to have an inspection trip into the bay with a boat, as investigation on how far the bay is affected has never been done yet. Apparently, there is not much dispersion in the bay's crescent. Exact hydrological data on current directions and velocities in the southwest of the island are not available. According to the Penang Port Authority, the major directions of the tidal currents are NNW-SSE west of Cape Gertak Sanggul, WNW-ESE south of Cape Gertak Sanggul and almost N-S in the southern end of the Strait of Penang (Fig. 9.1). (More information on currents is available for the Strait as this concerns the ship traffic from and to Georgetown and Butterworth). The whole bay is not deeper than 2 m as indicated in Fig. 9.11. Another nuisance is a thick layer of the undigested parts of the faeces on the shore continuously carried ashore (Fig. 8.15).
1 The positions of the 2 m and 5 m isobaths are copied from seachart “Approach to Pinang Harbours”.
Batu Maung is a village in the southeast of Penang Island at the vicinity of Bayan Lepas. The pig farm settlement is situated southeast of Bayan Lepas International Airport (Fig. 8.2). The total area is ca. 20 hectares, subdivided into lots of 80 m to 140 m length but only 17 m width, with the dwelling houses always towards the road front side. Thus, as one drives down the road, one sees nothing but houses. Behind each house is a feed store, sometimes a fruit and vegetable garden, followed by pit sties. These pig facilities are typical tropical climate open houses with only a roof for rain protection, feed alley in the middle square pens 3 m × 3 m size with a gutter to convey cleaning water and rainwater out to a drain. Feeding is done manually in troughs in front of the pens. Water is piped into pens and pigs actuate a nozzle at the end of the pipe in order to drink.
Pigs and pig houses are cleaned first and the waste is hosed down to well-constructed concrete drains. The hosed down pig excreta as well as some household sewages are quite rapidly conveyed through concrete drains into the canal system behind the dam along the mangrove fringe. The canal system is connected with the sea through the mangrove growth and its two branches are also collected with the main drains mentioned before.
The canals are about 40 m wide, one side branch being only 30 m wide. A 5 m to 6 m wide trench excavated in the canal system is now mostly filled up with anaerobic rotting pig manure and also dumped household garbage and litter (Fig. 8.7). The waste materials from the pig sties are quite rapidly flushed through the concrete drains but the water current slows down in the canals and so solid parts of the waste settles in the trench and canal bed. So there is hardly any detectable water flow.
The State of Penang is a net exporter of pigs, shipping live porkers to all the states of Peninsular Malaysia. About half of the animal pig population of 400 000 pigs comes from the Island of Penang.
The production is done all over the island with approximate standing pig population of 100 000, but there are only three major production centres: Batu Maung, Gertak Sanggul and Pantai Acheh. In Batu Maung, the SPP was 11 000 in 1978 and early 1979. In Gertak Sanggul the SPP was ca. 4 350 in 1978 and 7 000 in 1979 according to information given by Taiganides. For Pantai Acheh we could only obtain last year's figure which shows an SPP of 1 300.
Table 1 details the figure into numbers of pens, sties and farms. Though the total SPP at Batu Maung is 2.5 times bigger than that of Gertak Sanggul, the average number of pig pen farm here is ca. 400 to 460 versus 150 to 200 in Batu Maung.
The increase of the total SPP is certainly depending on normal economic development. It is difficult to assess as the major part of the SPP is distributed over small farms in the island. The SPP in the three production centres could well increase quite rapidly. For Gertak Sanggul, Taiganides estimates an increase from 7 000 to 12 000 until 1980. Pantai Acheh seems to have a still better capacity, as there is much more land available to build new farm houses. The only hindering factor might be the supply of freshwater through the presently limited capacity of water pipeline.
