This is one of the highest
elevations in Smith County.
Bit beautiful, it's gorgeous.
On their 600 acre ranch just
northeast of Tyler and Winona and
we made Larry and Sandra James.
Created Paradise hey
big baby. Apico it's beautiful.
A lot of rolling hills and green grass and.
Up until about
two or three years ago, great smell.
Out of nowhere, this beautiful
paradise just suddenly became
enveloped in clouds of of stench.
Everything changed for us.
That was unlike anything
we'd ever smell before.
They'd soon realize that
smell was coming from this.
A chicken farm with hundreds
of thousands of birds less
than a mile from their ranch. They put
these chicken houses in the middle
of a residential community.
People that have worked hard all their lives.
It's not right what they're doing.
I can smell it now.
Neighbors Tom and Loretta
Collins live near the farm too.
It's sometimes just unbearable to burn
your eyes, burn your nose, you taste it.
When I open the door I was like, OK,
this is what they're talking about.
Can you imagine having one of our
grandchildren's birthday party
at our house since they passed
the cake and smell this, no?
The chickens belong to Sanderson Farms,
the nation's third largest poultry producer.
The 16 chicken barns and land
itself belonged to farmers that
Sanderson contracts with to grow its
chickens when they're big enough.
The chickens are taken 9 miles West to
Lindale to this processing plant before
eventually landing in your grocery store.
Gifts of the Earth combined
with gifts of the spirit.
This is what you see in
Sanderson Farms commercials.
Industry and corporate America wants to paint
good old fashioned red
blooded American farming.
That's not what this is at all.
This is corporate farming.
What is that chicken manure?
These images
are graphic.
They were taken by a former
employee and are part of
a lawsuit he filed,
alleging bad working conditions.
These farms are what's known
as concentrated animal feeding
operations and the Winona Farm is
one of hundreds operating in Texas.
Neighbors have filed several
lawsuits against Sanderson Farms,
including one in Henderson County.
In that suit,
Sanderson Farms officials and their
contractors testified about the operation.
Each of the barns contains
about 27,800 chickens.
That's more than 400,000
chickens total for all 16 barns.
You have diarrhea coming out of a bird,
27,000 of them every day, all day.
Those chemicals build up inside that house,
and they have to be exhausted
to protect the birds.
So when you're talking about
hundreds of thousands of birds.
The neighbors then get to deal with
the hydrogen sulfide, methane,
ammonia, any number of chemicals that
you don't want to be breathing in.
The second problem when you
have this many animals,
some of them die
over a 60 day growing cycle as
many as 5% of the chickens die,
or more than 20,000 dead chickens.
I've seen birds left for
dead for days on end.
They're stuck. Without food, water.
Either leaving them there,
right? Or buried alive.
Texas law allows a grower
to compost those birds.
Trying to rot the birds down.
There's a chemical reaction
inside that compost,
so all that rotting dead
compost smell also gets
disseminated to the neighbors.
Come here block. Come here
after the Winona Farm moved in the
James is complained to the Texas
Commission on Environmental Quality.
They met with Sanderson Farms officials. We
wanted to believe.
That we could all work this out
before we have to go get lawyers.
What we did not know at the time is
that we have one year to file action
against any chicken farm that goes in
the Texas right to farm Act gives
neighbors like them one year from the
time of farm begins operations to file
a nuisance lawsuit. If they don't,
they are barred from suing later.
Neighbors often don't know when a chicken
farm started operation and no law mandates.
Neighbors be notified
that time they waste
hoping they can work out.
The problem is then used against them.
If they don't file that suit,
the James did make the filing deadline
within that one year.
We and all of these neighbors
file suit against Anderson Farms.
I said, OK, we'll join in the
take a little part of Texas Tom
and Loretta Collins live on 17
acres right next door to the farm,
just beyond a patch of trees.
Our property borders.
And sometimes it gets so bad it
will permeate into the house.
It's just kind of depressing.
We asked Sanderson Farms about
the complaints from neighbors
as well as the images and videos
recorded by the former employee.
They told us it is our company
policy that we do not comment
on pending litigation.
In court filings,
Sanderson Farms denied the
allegations made by residents.
I was the CEO of a publicly held
company and if my company had
done this, I would damn sure
have done something about it.
Either shut it down or
do something to stop this pain that
they're delivering to hard working people.
And Winona, I'm Tanya iser.