You’re looking at a map of North Carolina
showing where the state’s over 2,000 large-scale hog farms are located.
They’re clustered primarily in this rural region in the eastern part of the state.
North Carolina is the 3rd biggest hog-producing state in the US.
But this level of concentration makes the state uniquely qualified
to show how industrial hog farming impacts the surrounding communities.
Specifically when it comes to one thing: pig waste.
That’s what this video is about, so for this story, we went there.
And when I spoke to locals in the area
they told me that the best way to understand this story is from the air.
We flew in a small Cessna propellor plane from New Bern, North Carolina
to our first stop, over Duplin County,
which has the highest concentration of hog farms.
BALDWIN: They have more hogs than they do people.
Larry Baldwin works for the Waterkeeper Alliance, a non-profit environmental watchdog group
and he regularly goes on flights like these as a surveying tool.
BALWIN: A lot of these places you cannot see from the ground
so you don't even know they're there.
So doing these flights, it's one of the more important resources that we have.
Hog facilities are easy to spot because of this tell-tale feature.
The hog farm will always have what they call a lagoon.
I refer to it as a cesspool and it's holding nothing but hog feces and urine.
Historically, and on small farms today, pigs graze on pasture.
But in industrialized hog farming, farmers confine thousands of pigs in buildings.
This makes pigs’ lives more brutal, without access to sun or fresh air
and it also creates a waste management problem.
Enter: the lagoon system
Inside the buildings, pigs drop their waste onto slatted floors.
And it gets flushed into the lagoons through pipes like these.
Bacteria in the lagoons break down the waste.
When they get too full, hog farmers syphon the waste
to a massive sprinkler and spray nearby crop fields with it.
We saw this from the air.
Manure is a good fertilizer, but most people told me
this is more of a waste disposal strategy than a fertilizing one.
Spraying and lagoons have air quality risks.
When bacteria breaks the waste down, it releases hundreds of compounds
like methane, carbon dioxide, ammonia, hydrogen sulfide and dusts into the air.
These can cause asthma, respiratory diseases, headaches, and nausea
among other conditions.
A recent study on US agriculture found that “reduced air quality”
contributes to nearly 18,000 premature deaths nationwide
mostly from ammonia emissions from “livestock waste and fertilizer application.”
That’s not even to mention the smell
which we picked up even from the air near the Duplin County Airport.
This lagoon and sprayfield system also impacts surface and groundwaters.
When waste gets into water it brings pollutants like nitrates, phosphorous, and fecal bacteria.
Which can cause algae blooms, fish kills, and potentially
life-threatening illness in humans.
This can happen when lagoons flood after hurricanes
exacerbated by the fact that this region sits in a coastal floodplain.
And some studies — including one of this watershed
in eastern North Carolina —
show high levels of waste pollutants even without rainfall or a breach
meaning lagoons pose a threat all the time.
There’s evidence of pig waste underground, too.
Which matters because people who live in this rural area
primarily use wells as a water source and don’t have access to county water.
All of these negative impacts disproportionately affect some of the most vulnerable people
in the state.
Residents here are more likely to be a person of color than the rest of the state.
And poverty rates are higher than average, too.
Making this pollution more than an environmental issue.
It’s an environmental justice issue.
In 2018, North Carolina settled a federal civil rights complaint
filed by Larry Baldwin's organization and others
alleging racial discrimination by the state
due to the demographics of communities where it issued hog facility permits.
The complaint cited health issues, odors, nuisances, increased expenses,
social and psychological harm, and declining property values.
BALDWIN: It's not the way to treat people just so we can raise cheap meat.
It's wrong on a number of different levels.
During the flight, we flew over a community surrounded by hog facilities:
the congregation of this church, in the town of Magnolia.
In Google maps, I counted at least 12 hog lagoons
within 2 and a half miles of the church.
I'm the Reverend Jimmy Melvin.
I’m the pastor here at Mount Zion AME Zion Church.
I'm Danielle Koonce and I've been attending my father's church here at Mount Zion.
MELVIN: So many of our people, in a rural setting, are used to farms.
MELVIN: This is nature to them.
MELVIN: This steeple used to be white.
MELVING: We are now in the need of getting our steeple pressure washed.
Drone footage we shot shows why.
Nearby hog farms would spray their fields with manure
and mist would reach the steeple.
And recently this health department notice was put on the church’s door.
KOONCE: It was really clear warning.
High nitrate levels don't use this water to make infant formula for babies.
The issue with hog farm waste is that it creates high nitrate levels
in the ground, in the streams, and the tributaries around that farm.
It was just a no brainer that that is why there's
high nitrate levels in the groundwater.
So, this is the new, deeper well?
Yeah, this is the new, deeper well right here.
The church’s well was only 20 feet deep at the time of the notice,
so the church paid nearly $4,000 to dig the well deeper
to 250 feet, to bypass any groundwater contamination.
After a Sunday service in the fall of 2021
Reverend Melvin led a community meeting about what parishioners were experiencing at home.
Like if this is happening where a church is getting notices for high nitrate levels
then what is happening in the communities, in the houses,
in the neighborhoods that live around that church?
They have sat these hog farms in black communities.
And then we can't have cookouts or family gatherings.
Fighting flies and fighting the smell.
As far as these hog houses are concerned.
There's one behind my house
and when they spray the stuff it turns into like mist.
Well you breathe this stuff.
I grew up having bronchial asthma as a child.
I went away.
I was in a different environment.
I moved back down here and I have two doctors, specialists
I have to go to every two or three months so I can keep my lungs cleared out.
One of the specialists, he said a lot of people that have the same thing that I have.
It comes from being in an area where we have the hogs and all that.
Even our children graduate from high school they go away to college.
Some don't come back to the area.
These children will not and I can understand that.
I didn't encourage neither one of my daughters to live here.
Clean water is not a black and white issue, is humanity issue.
Stories like the ones from Magnolia
have been told since the spray field and lagoon system started in the 1980s.
Including a 1995 Pulitzer-Prize winning
Raleigh News & Observer series on the hog industry.
Which inspired one of North Carolina’s only significant interventions.
A moratorium in 1997 on new or expanded hog farms, made permanent a few years later.
And then this document almost transformed the industry.
It’s a 2000 agreement between North Carolina’s Attorney General
and pork companies in the state.
Including Smithfield Foods, the largest hog producing company in North Carolina
and one of the largest in the world.
In this agreement, Smithfield paid millions of dollars
to North Carolina State University to research an “environmentally superior technology"
so that the industry could do away with lagoons and sprayfields for good.
This new technology had to meet 3 criteria:
be permittable by the state,
substantially eliminate water and air pollution,
and be economically feasible.
"Treatment technologies are needed..."
Researchers pitched several new ideas throughout the years.
The most recent would have looked like this:
waste would get flushed into a storage tank.
The solids would get separated and sold as fertilizer,
and the liquids would go through a process of removing nitrogen and phosphorus.
The resulting less-harmful liquid would irrigate crops
or get reflushed through the system.
This technology was able to get a state permit for a pilot program
which showed that the new system substantially eliminated water and air pollution.
But it didn’t meet the economic feasibility criterium.
It would’ve cost more than twice as much for farmers
than the lagoon and spray field system.
So nothing changed.
The answer from the industry said:
“We can't afford to do it, it's not economically feasible.”
Smithfield has decided to invest a half billion dollars in another technology.
A “manure to energy project” mentioned in this promotional video:
“We’re partnering with local contract farmers and leaders
in the bio energy field, for a groundbreaking project
underway in North Carolina.”
Which means they will be capturing the methane emitted from
at least 19 participating hog farms in eastern North Carolina.
According to a map on the energy company’s web site
this pipeline will carry the methane to a processing facility
to be converted into natural gas
which will eventually end up in the state’s existing natural gas pipeline.
A version of this process is already happening at this farm
in Lillington, North Carolina.
Which was the last stop on our flight.
My name is Tom Butler.
I'm a contract hog farmer in Harney County, North Carolina.
A contract farmer raises hogs for big, sometimes multinational companies
that process the meat and sell it.
BUTLER: They furnish all the pigs, they furnish all the medication.
BUTLER: They furnish the feed and then the owner and operator of the farm
they raise the hogs, take care of them for the 20 week period that we have them.
Contract farmers build their facilities to these corporation’s specifications
which is why industrialized hog farms look practically identical.
And that includes waste management.
BUTLER: We market about 20,000 adult hogs here on the farm each year.
And we produce about 10,000 gallons of waste per day.
And that's a lot of waste.
Doing anything with waste above and beyond what the contract pays for
is unaffordable for most farmers: otherwise they can’t make a living.
Which helps explain why farmers alone are unable to change this systemic problem.
You cannot do it on your own.
And the thing that we found out that the waste management was not included in the contract.
We didn't sit down when we signed the contract and nobody laid out the paperwork
and says, "Look, now, you know, in 25 years
you're going to have 3 or 4 million gallons of sludge."
And you will have to clean it out, take it off the farm.
And it's very, very expensive.
The good thing it does for the environment is...
In 2008, Tom received a grant
to put these green covers on his lagoons after receiving complaints from his neighbors.
We really didn't realize the impact we would have on our community.
We have one neighbor, he called me one night
and he said that inside of his new living room
smelled like hog poop.
This helped mitigate some of the lagoon odor.
Then, in 2012, through more loans and grants, he took on a separate project
to install this digester which captures methane gas.
That gas gets turned into energy for his farm with this generator.
It’s a small-scale version of what Smithfield is proposing
for the state’s electrical grid.
Which makes Tom uniquely qualified to say what this technology won’t do.
The pipeline thing it doesn't improve the environmental impact.
You still haven't solved any of your problems, except
you have sequestered some greenhouse gases
which is a good thing, but it's not enough to justify
leaving the waste at the farm.
Livestock and poultry manure contribute about 9% of US emissions of methane
a powerful greenhouse gas.
Biogas operations have the potential to reduce hog waste emissions by up to 85%.
The natural gas it creates has the added climate benefit
of reducing our dependence on fossil fuels.
And it will generate extra income for farmers and the corporations they contract for.
When we reached Smithfield for comment
they said that “This is indisputably a positive thing for the environment.”
But these operations not only accept the way large-scale hog facilities
currently operate: they monetize it.
Participating farms will still have to store all the waste on their property
And spray their fields with it, like Tom does.
We still have the phosphorus issues.
We still have nitrogen issues.
We have some of the odor problems with spray fields and the runoff.
That’s left communities to continue their fight against powerful companies.
Recent lawsuits against one of Smithfield’s subsidiaries
resulted in a nearly $100 million expected payout to 36 plaintiffs.
And in 2021, community organizations filed yet another
civil rights complaint against the state of North Carolina
alleging that the biogas pipeline would have a disproportionate impact
on communities of color, due to its location.
As planned, it would run very close to Reverend Melvin’s church.
I think this is a way for the industry to say that they're focusing on clean energy.
I'm really really nervous, what it's going to do
with communities that have already been impacted.
Communities and farmers will continue to pay the price
for the industrial hog industry’s waste problems,
until powerful corporations or state and federal governments
decide it’s worth the cost to fix.
Those plans are out there.
They're just too expensive.
There's not enough money for me to take care of my waste.
It's not about taking down the farming industry.
We have family members, friends who work in the farming industry
but it's a matter taking responsibility
for the problem that they created.
They've made billions of dollars off of these communities
and the resources have not been put back into these communities.
Thanks for watching this third episode of our series
with Vox's Future Perfect team.
This is the last of our stories on the human impact
of industrialized meat production in the US.
This was a really ambitious series for us in terms of reporting and filming.
We cover consolidation in the beef industry by way of
a cattle auction in South Dakota.
We covered worker safety issues in the poultry industry
through the work of a labor organizer in Arkansas.
And for this story we went to North Carolina
to witness the environmental impact of hog farming.
If you haven't already, check out episodes 1 and 2 in our channel.
And for more reporting on the meat industry by the Future Perfect team
I would highly recommend checking out their podcast on the topic
which I linked below.
And stay tuned because we're going to produce
another set of stories with Future Perfect on a totally different topic.