North Carolina Hog Farming: Impacts of Hog Waste on Local Communities

Origin of a Crisis

Spanish explorer and conquistador Hernando de Soto is credited with introducing the New World to domesticated swine some 500 years ago. Little did he (or the pigs) know that their small-scale exploitation for foodstuffs would eventually grow into the institutionalization of commercial agribusiness, generating an almost unmanageable amount of waste, and along with it, great controversy.

Today, the United States is the top exporter of pork products in the world, accounting for approximately 16.2% of the market share. Within the United States, the top pork producing state is Iowa, with North Carolina a close second. In North Carolina specifically, the ongoing issue of waste management as it pertains to local communities is a burgeoning ecological and health disaster from one perspective and a corporate challenge from the other; Who is involved? What exactly is going on? Who is right? What is at stake? The theory of metabolic rift provides useful insights.

Smithfield Foods, Inc. 1.

Smithfield Foods is a meat-processing company based in Smithfield, Virginia, in the United States, and is the largest pork producer in the world. Though headquartered in Virginia, Smithfield Foods operates various ‘command posts’ throughout the country; in North Carolina alone Smithfield owns 11 or more subsidiary companies, each of which is a hog processing giant in their own right. So, what does Smithfield look like under the hood? In 2018, Smithfield boasted 54,533 employees, 10.7 billion pounds of pork packaged and sold, and a whopping $15.5 billion dollars in sales. Chief executive officer C. Larry Pope pocketed $16.67 million — more than double the median for other executives in the food, drink, and tobacco industry — this past year. In their quest to remain the world leader in pork production and continue to grow their positive cash flow, Smithfield Foods has announced many capital expenditures on expansions and new technologies: “’In the last several years, our growth has allowed us to invest in our facilities and create new opportunities for those living in the communities we call home,’ said Jeff Salyer, Grayson plant manager for Smithfield Foods, Inc.” Many of these facility expansions have occurred specifically in North Carolina: “Dennis Organ, senior vice president of supply chain and direct store delivery, issued a statement…noting that the company has invested $100 million to expand the plant in Tar Heel, and 250 positions will be added as a result of the expansion.” The company statements portray pride in its mission to feed families and create local jobs, while remaining a leader in the industry. As their company vision states, “With our culture of responsibility, operational excellence and innovation, we will be the most trusted food and protein company as we sustainably feed people around the world.” Even as a multinational company, the mission statement hearkens back to the hard work of the earliest farmers in our nation whose selflessness in the name of family and community responsibility drove our nation to success. One would think, based on these claims that a company like Smithfield would resist changes in their factory farming processes in the name of the free-market economy, and their pride.

Smithfield Foods, Inc. 2.

However, this is merely half of the story. Along with this massive industry comes massive waste output. Think of these factory farms as a very simple machine that takes in hogs on one end and spits out pork chops, feces, and carcasses on the other end. While consumers and Smithfield executives alike choose to focus on the pristine product these corporations generate, there is a darker side to the story about the massive waste output and its effects on the environment and local communities. In 2006, Smithfield Foods produced 6 billion pounds of packaged pork and killed 27 million hogs. One account described the living conditions for the animals: “Smithfield’s pigs live by the hundreds or thousands in warehouse-like barns, in rows of wall-to-wall pens…. Forty fully grown 250-pound male hogs often occupy a pen the size of a tiny apartment.” The quantity of waste these hogs generate is astronomical: “hogs in five eastern North Carolina counties produced more than 15.5m tons of feces” in one year, which was stored in “a stagnant pool containing their feces, urine, blood and other bodily fluids — often referred to as a ‘lagoon,’” the contents of which are liquefied and sprayed into surrounding fields that can be as close as 200 feet from a family home.

Metabolic Rift

If Smithfield’s North Carolina subsidiaries have a protocol for collecting and processing waste, shouldn’t surrounding nature (and those who inhabit it) be able to peacefully coexist? Are the two mutually exclusive? According to some, like environmental sociologist Bill Freudenburg, accountable government and strong regulations are needed to nurture a symbiotic relationship between corporation and nature. If we turn to the sociological theory of metabolic rift for answers however, it becomes clear that they are, in fact, mutually exclusive. Dr. Ryan Gunderson of the Michigan State Department of Sociology explores the concept of metabolic rift as it relates to the livestock agribusiness. In the most general sense, Dr. Gunderson posits that concentrated animal feeding operations, waste lagoons, and other “efficiency measures” employed by large facilities to cut costs and maximize profits cannot occur simultaneously with environmental protection in the same localized area. As Gunderson writes,

“livestock production operates much differently in practice than it does in theory. Many of the costs of intensive livestock production are ‘externalized’ on the communities where they operate. The nourishment necessary for livestock in scale economies still depends on the land that the animals have been removed from. As pastureland is dwindling, feed demand increases the need for intensive cropland production, thus, increasing land and soil degradation. The concentration of livestock also concentrates livestock waste with enormous costs to the environment and public and animal health. The cramped conditions created by CAFOs [concentrated animal feeding operations] are breeding grounds for disease. Antibiotics and hormones are used excessively to keep livestock ‘healthy’ in unclean conditions and misused to promote rapid tissue growth. Excessive antibiotic and hormone use create additional public health problems… the ecological contradictions are quite formidable and are directly related to the spatial–relational estrangements of (a) animals from the land and (b) society from both animals and the land.”

Simply put, capitalism has irreversibly transformed the social interchange of commercial agribusiness with nature, directing it toward the constant pursuit of profit. A brief look at the evolution of hog farming throughout the United States specifically offers irrefutable evidence of this principle. Though contested at the time, “findings of an 1893 study revealed that…it was more economical to raise sheltered pigs;” at the turn of the 20th century, though hogs were still primarily seen as foraging creatures that consumed human food waste and required little upkeep. However, the prospects of economic gain from modifying hog management reached a tipping point, and by the early 1900’s rudimentary houses and pens were implemented by farmers. Following this, in the 1930’s through 1950’s, “the hog house [became] no longer just any old left-over building, but a more specialized structure” that adhered to certain dimensions and was outfitted with self-feeders to reduce hired human labor. With this transition towards standardizing operations, the hog farming industry saw a tremendous increase in homogenization of production with the birth of companies like Smithfield Foods, Inc. The factory farming pièce de résistance, however, did not debut until the 1960’s, and to this day is considered the single greatest factor in permitting the CAFO used today: “total confinement of hogs became a possibility with the invention of the slatted, or slotted, floor…through which urine and dung dropped or was trampled through to a manure pit.” As a result of this, “one of the most significant savings was labor, as hand scraping of manure was no longer necessary.” Among the other changes in this transformative decade were “the reduction of square feet needed per head, elimination of bedding, and elimination of supplemental heat by keeping hogs closer together.” Thus emerged the crux of modern-day agribusiness: the cost-effective concentration of pigs and waste. As time and greed distorted the spatial arrangement of hog management, higher risks (for the environment) and higher rewards (for farm owners) could suddenly be realized for better or for worse, producing an inevitable rift; a machine-like system that concentrated waste as fast as profit was achieved. And as the cost of land and labor have only increased over time, farmers have doubled down on their investment in these cost-cutting, risk-generating systems.

When Hurricane Florence in North Carolina in 2018 one of the most glaring sources of costly damage both economically and health-wise — aside from the obvious damages incurred by a hurricane (due to strong winds, flooding, etc) — came from mismanaged hog farms. A study led by Srikanto Paul of the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at the University of Texas at San Antonio assessed the damages. Paul and cauligues write that “the state Department of Environmental Quality indicated that 32 lagoons at 27 different facilities have discharged some amount of waste as flooding overtopped their berms…[and] likely cross-contaminated the waterways and water treatment operations. The observed extent of the flooding, environmental contamination, and impact to public health caused by Florence will add to the long-term disaster related mortality and morbidity rates.” Paul et al. noted that these waste floods also contaminated estuaries, killing fish and causing algae blooms. It’s important to note that this was not a novel occurrence; similar patterns were observed from hurricanes Floyd (1999) and Mathew (2016), and little changes were made to waste operations. Metabolic rift was on full display, and it seemed that government accountability could not be relied upon; had it not been for a primary interest in profit margins, damages incurred by natural events likely would not have been so severe.

There are tangible medical consequences stemming from commercial agribusiness as well. A study examining the impacts of hog farm waste on surrounding communities in North Carolina focused primarily on individuals with lung cancer. It was concluded in this study that waste runoff from hog farms, which is inadvertently consumed by locals, may play a role in tumor inflammation. As researcher Nitika Sharma states, “The hog and poultry operations heighten the harmful effect on waterways and can adversely affect the inflammatory signature, hence the tumor biology.” Steven Wing, professor of epidemiology at the University of North Carolina’s Gillings School of Global Public Health, additionally has made clear through extensive research that there is a correlation between hog farm air pollution and nausea, higher blood pressure, asthma, and lower quality of life. Even in light of the fact that hog farms have waste management protocols in place, it is abundantly clear that harmful contamination of the environment is inevitable when profits are of primary concern. In other words, as Gunderson might argue, these are symptoms not of poorly constructed waste lagoon barriers but of the existence of waste lagoons themselves; the system as a whole is flawed.

Taking a Stand

Bladen County, North Carolina, is the location of a subsidiary of the Smithfield Food company named Murphy Brown. As one source points out many of the farms are near the homes of African American families.”6 In an effort to defend their personal health and quality of life, “more than 500 North Carolinians, most of them African American, blitzed Murphy Brown with more than two dozen federal lawsuits….They argued that Smithfield, which dominates the state’s swine industry and owns the animals raised under the company’s contracts, has the resources to phase out the prevailing waste management system…they said the company can dispose of waste in less noxious ways but refuses to do so.” In other words, these underprivileged communities with proportionally more black individuals, with no choice but to build their lives around the waste and stench of industrial factory farming of Smithfield, argued that Smithfield’s effort to protect their interests and save capital was infringing on their own right to a healthy life. These local communities believed that Smithfield was a privileged account — an entity with sufficient capital, attention, and respect to control the narrative in a given situation — playing victim, and using their resources to divert attention from their wrongdoings. “Smithfield called the complaints exaggerated and the alternatives too costly. It described the lawsuits as ‘a money grab by a big litigation machine.’” With little to lose, achieving victory over seemingly indomitable corporations like Smithfield and feeling empowered as citizens and members of a community were the forces guiding these exploited and suffering people. Though the odds did not seem to be in her favor, a 14-year-old girl by the name of Alexandria McKoy took Smithfield to court and won a settlement somewhere in the millions.

This grassroots effort lobbying for hog farm waste management reform in North Carolina in an effort to protect health, safety, and sanity, is an ongoing battle today. North Carolina General Assembly was presented with House Bill 405, proposed as a measure of protection for hog farming companies. Essentially what it proposes is that any person who intentionally gains access to nonpublic areas of an organization and publicizes what they find are liable for any damage they may cause to that business. This in effect would protect hog farms from independent journalists exposing their wrongdoings. However, this bill has been met with a challenge: “The Animal Legal Defense Fund filed a federal lawsuit challenging the constitutionality of [HB405] designed to deter whistleblowers and undercover investigators from publicizing information about corporate misconduct.” The status of this bill is on appeal, and its constitutionality has yet to be determined.

Conclusions

While this article looks solely at the environmental concerns in North Carolina, this case study serves as a microcosm for a much larger controversy in the United States. Should hog farms be held liable for the damages incurred on the environment and communities around them, or are these unfortunate outcomes of a multinational conglomerate operating within its legal boundaries? Your answer might depend on your politics, the theory of justice you subscribe to, or your socio-economic status, among many other things. In short, what is right is not always what is found to be correct in cases brought to courts of law. A Smithfield executive might align with the utilitarian view that the suffering of these relatively few amount of people is a small price to pay for the greater good; if cutting waste management costs correlates to more produce for cheaper prices, it could be argued that they are helping more people than not. However, a citizen of Bladen County, North Carolina might argue (more logically, in my opinion) that if a single human being’s rights to a healthy life are breached by a corporation, a change is required without question.

But what exactly is the change necessary to eradicate the flaws inherent to the hog farming industry? Is it the return to small farms? That’s not practical. Is it tighter laws regarding waste management? Maybe. As Elizabeth A. Stoddard and colleagues point out in their 2018 paper, the vulnerable system of North Carolina factory farms have been able to perpetuate via neoliberal governance structures that include “tax exemptions, redefining farms to include CAFOs to enable zoning near schools and hospitals, weakened environmental penalties for discharging pig waste into local streams, shifting from required to voluntary inspections of pig waste lagoons,” among other actions. On this point, Freudenburg’s research has posited that such comprehensive governmental measures would in fact have a profound impact on reducing disproportionality caused by corporations. But, these changes would only be temporarily treating symptoms of a more profound disease; commercial hog farming corporations will inevitably find a new way to cheat the system or flee to a third-world country to make more money at the expense of others. Thus, the linchpin lies even deeper. It lies in the system of capitalism as we know it. Perhaps the only change that can inextricably integrate commercial agribusiness and the environment is a complete and total disintegration of the pursuit of profit and corporate competition, the two pillars of global economics. Therefore, as the theory of metabolic rift ultimately suggests, we may have manufactured a disease for which there is no cure.