Content warning for animal abuse.
I’ve read many stories about how, in its drive for greater profits, corporate America has abused powerless American citizens. Slogging through account after account of injustice can be extremely aggravating. Even in the rare case where David slays Goliath, the details can be mundane and excruciating. In “Wastelands: The True Story of Farm Country on Trial,” author Corban Addison achieves the rare success of turning a story of corporate greed into an exciting page-turner.
Addison’s book covers industrial hog operations in North Carolina. In four North Carolina counties alone, “there are five million hogs and only two hundred thousand people.” With the 1980s came the transition of tobacco farms into family hog farms and then family hog farms into industrial hog operations. Two local farmers made it big by creating concentrated animal feeding operations (CAFO), which located “thousands of hogs in a single barn.” The first of these was Wendell Murphy, “the godfather of industrial swine.” The second was Joseph Luter III, who hailed from Smithfield, Virgina, and turned Smithfield Foods into an industrial powerhouse.
Murphy and Luter expanded their operations up and down the production chain and contracted local farmers to raise hogs for them. “The day the first Duplin County farmer became a Wendell Murphy grower was the day the modern hog industry was born.” Industrial hog farms are in rural areas, hidden away from all, except for their neighbors. “Most of the neighbors were poor and Black, the children of sharecroppers with limited education.” Black families had owned their properties for generations, but suddenly these new industrial hog farms were despoiling their land.
What exactly was happening? “All those hogs generate an unfathomable amount of waste, equivalent to a city twice the size of New York. Yet the method of waste disposal that Smithfield uses at all of its company-owned and contract hog farms — close to two thousand across the state — is as antiquated as an outhouse.”
Hog waste is placed untreated into multi-million-gallon “waste lagoons.” When the lagoons are full, the hog farmers dissipate the waste using “giant guns that shoot liquified hog waste into the air, leaving it to drift like a cloud on the breeze.” This “shit-tinted spray” travels whichever way the wind is blowing and by no means stays on the hog farms. Also, the farms include large “dead boxes” that are overstuffed with the carcasses of hogs that have died from mistreatment. These boxes often sit directly on property lines and, as one can imagine, attract an inordinate number of buzzards and flies.
As the industrial hog industry raked in profits in the billions, they befouled the air and land in dozens of communities and had never been held to account. “‘Don’t bother about that smell,’ said Wendell Murphy. ‘It’s the smell of money.’”
Neighbors tried every method available to them to get the industry to change, without success. The hog industry literally treated them like the shit that was being sprayed onto their homes. “Wastelands” is about a five-year lawsuit brought by these neighbors, who had been waiting 25 years “for the chance to speak of the befouled air, the poisoned water and the degraded soil that is their heritage and to demand a measure of justice from the company whose factory farms have transformed the once-idyllic rural geography around their homes into a farrago of forested wastelands.”
The type of lawsuit they brought is known as a “nuisance” lawsuit, which contends that “the right of a person to enjoy his home without unreasonable interference from his neighbors” must be upheld. The smell from the hog farms caused headaches, brain fog and burning eyes and noses. Neighbors had trouble breathing; the odor triggered asthma and heart issues. Nearly 600 of them banded together against 59 hog farms, “alleging that Smithfield’s hog operations are a menace to their way of life.” At its core, the lawsuit was about racism inherent in North Carolina. The neighbors are Black; the hog farmers white.
But the lawsuit was against Smithfield, not the contract hog farmers, who were pretty much struggling to survive. Addison writes how “the growers, in effect, are modern-day sharecroppers.” Smithfield and the other CAFO companies enforce strict rules on the growers, while making them take all the risk. Of course, in the lawsuit, Smithfield portrays itself as promoting the “family farmer,” but through industrialization, the corporation “put 15,000 actual family farmers out of business.”
Addison also describes the horrid conditions suffered by the hogs in Smithfield’s operations. They are “cooped up by the thousand in cages of misery and debasement. It’s enough to make an animal lover shed tears.” Industrial hog farms result in “shit-caked hogs, intelligent animals crammed into cages and left to wallow in their own excrement.” It’s disgusting to think about. “The dark stains that spread across their hides look like mud. But there is no mud in a CAFO. Only shit.” Addison’s descriptions of industrialized hog farming may well make the reader reconsider eating pork.
Addison does a great job in recreating the suspense of the trial and enables the reader to feel like they actually know the individuals on both sides. He also explains the science used in the trial, such as the ability to test for the DNA markers of hog fecal bacteria, which was found throughout neighbors’ houses. Addison covers the relatively simple measures to clean up hog farms, such as installing lagoon covers, converting methane into electricity and treating “the waste in real time while recovering the water and the nutrients.” But Smithfield refused to implement any measure unless doing so came at zero cost.
An aggravating plot twist in the story is the political backlash in the North Carolina Legislature. Many Republican legislators worked to make lawsuits like this one illegal. They claimed that the lawsuit was “an attack on our way of life!” They even tried to make the legislation retroactive, to kill the lawsuit before a jury could determine its verdict. At the same time, the hog industry spent millions of dollars on a public relations campaign, claiming that “family farmers are under siege by hog-hating environmentalists and greedy out-of-state lawyers.” All this resulted in many death threats against the plaintiffs and their lawyers.
How does the trial turn out? I won’t give that away. But to me, this lawsuit seems remarkably straightforward. As Addison writes, “common sense tells you that seven million gallons of feces and urine stored in an open-air pit a thousand feet from someone’s house is going to stink.” No shit.
Dave Gamrath is a longtime community activist who founded InspireSeattle.org and serves on multiple regional boards and committees.
Read more of the March 13–19, 2024 issue.