Anything but Green: How Hog Waste and Biogas Is Threatening North Carolina Communities

~ In Partnership with SELC ~

In North Carolina, large-scale pork producers champion the biogas from hog-waste lagoons as green energy, but the air and water pollution impacting the physical and mental health of surrounding communities is anything but positive. Alice Driver takes a firsthand look at the Southern Environmental Law Center's advocacy for residents living with the legacy of this environmental racism.

Story by Alice Driver | Photos by Jacky Muniello

The Rev. Jimmy Melvin’s church in Magnolia, North Carolina, is surrounded by industrial hog operations and spray fields on all sides. In 2016, the county tested the water at the church and declared it contaminated. The notice read, “Mt. Zion AME Zion Church water has high levels of nitrate. Do not give the water to infants under 6 months old or use it to make formula.” The county gave the church and its parishioners 90 days to come up with $4,000 to dig a new well. While the new 225-foot well was being dug, the reverend performed baptisms with bottled water.

But Danielle Melvin Koonce, the reverend’s daughter, said water contamination from Smithfield Foods, the largest hog producer in the country and a major employer in the area, has been a part of daily life for decades. A doctoral student at the University of Maryland studying sociology and social movements, Koonce is writing her dissertation on how rural Black communities engage in environmental justice. She returned to North Carolina to conduct dissertation research, and when she arrived, the first letter in her mailbox was a request to check the water quality. 

“It really hurts — what they are doing with the water,” Koonce said, explaining that locals had been collecting signatures and documenting the quality of the area’s water for more than 20 years. “Most people will cook with [tap water] but don’t drink it,” Koonce said. “Even my parents, we don’t drink our tap water.”

Jimmy Melvin is the reverend at Mt. Zion AME Zion Church in Clinton, North Carolina. His church, surrounded by industrial hog operations and spray fields on all sides, received notices from the county that the water at their church contained “high levels of nitrate” and gave them 90 days to dig a new well.

Water pollution is just one of the many ways in which large-scale hog-waste facilities have impacted the quality of life for residents in Duplin and Sampson counties. Located in the Coastal Plain region on the eastern edge of the state, the counties are home to the overwhelming majority of North Carolina’s 2,100 hog operations. 

The hogs in these industrial hog operations, also known as concentrated feeding operations (CAFOs), produce billions of gallons of hog feces and urine that are flushed from the barns into open-air lagoons, where ammonia, hydrogen sulfide, methane, and other harmful gases are released into the air. Additionally, because CAFOs rely heavily on feed additives and medications that can be harmful to humans, the hog waste includes nitrate and heavy metals such as arsenic and lead. This solid waste collects on the bottom of the lagoons, while the liquid waste is gathered to use as fertilizer for nearby fields in a spray-field system. However, the spray is often overapplied and drifts onto neighboring properties, allowing the hog waste — laden with excess nitrogen, phosphorus, and other pollutants — to seep into groundwater, an important drinking water source for rural residents, and run off into nearby rivers and streams.

In 2007, North Carolina became the first state to adopt a renewable energy portfolio standard that included a swine and poultry waste-to-energy requirement. While Virginia and California have similar biogas legislation, North Carolina is the only state in the country that requires utilities to source energy made from swine waste (0.2 percent of the state’s energy by 2023). 

To make biogas, industrialized hog operations cover lagoons and collect methane produced by the waste, converting it into natural gas for electricity, which stands to entrench the decades-old cesspit and spray-field system. This has allowed hog operations to refer to lagoons as a source of green energy and profit from it — even though local communities, largely Black, Latino, and Native American, have to live with air and water pollution and the associated health effects. A 2018 study published by the North Carolina Medical Journal found that North Carolina residents living near CAFOs had higher rates of anemia, kidney disease, septicemia, tuberculosis, infant mortality, and low birth weight. Though the study did not find that industrial hog operations are the cause of those increased health risks, it does state that hog operations “warrant attention and action.” 

Smithfield Foods is the fifth-largest meatpacking company in the world and owns and contracts with hundreds of CAFOs. In an email, Ray Atkinson, a representative from Smithfield, pointed to a report from the North Carolina Pork Council that countered some of the claims made in the North Carolina Medical Journal study. The North Carolina Pork Council operates under a mandatory checkoff funding system, which promotes and provides information through funding by pork producers, and at least seven members on the council’s board of directors have direct ties to Smithfield, according to the council’s site. 

But rather than investing money to address the environmental and health threats posed by hog-waste lagoons in North Carolina, Align RNG, the joint venture of Smithfield Foods and Dominion Energy, proposed a $500 million project to produce and sell biogas in 2018.

Blakely Hildebrand, a senior attorney at the Southern Environmental Law Center (SELC) in Chapel Hill, is in constant motion and all energy, action, and optimism. As the largest nonprofit environmental advocacy organization in the South, SELC has a long history of engaging in work to clean up pollution from industrial hog operations, and its employees work closely with community members and conservation organizations to spur legislative action to address environmental pollution.

In January 2021, SELC filed a clean air lawsuit on behalf of CleanAIRE NC against a permit that the state issued to Align. The suit resulted in a settlement under which Align had to improve monitoring at an Align biogas plant in Sampson County and conduct additional inspections for and repair methane leaks at hog operations, thus limiting pollution.

Robert Osborne Moore grew up in and returned to Duplin County, where he currently serves as the president of the NAACP Duplin County Branch in North Carolina. Outspoken about the harm industrial hog operations have caused his community, he mentioned a 2021 study published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America that showed people living in places with high air pollution suffer from more mental health issues. He relates the study back to the people he knows at home. “The pollution makes them feel depressed, you know.” 

Over the past two years, SELC has also represented the Environmental Justice Community Action Network (EJCAN) and Cape Fear River Watch,as well as filed a civil rights administrative complaint on behalf of the Duplin County NAACP and the NC Poor People’s Campaign, alleging the discriminatory impact of the Align project, the first large-scale biogas project in the state, on Black, Latino, and Native American communities.

Sherri White-Williamson, a co-founder of EJCAN, wears horn-rimmed glasses and is efficient and powerful in her movements. When I met White-Williamson at the EJCAN office in Sampson County, she explained that when Black workers began to organize to protect their rights and their community, CAFOs hired more Hispanic workers and fewer Black workers. “It’s been a huge transformation, because Smithfield needs to keep doing what Smithfield does without a lot of resistance,” she said. In the face of questions about its environmental responsibility, including numerous legal cases, Smithfield has threatened to move the company elsewhere. 

Hildebrand drove me to see CAFOs in the area and introduced me to community-based organizations that work on industrial hog operation-related issues. Though there were walls of trees that blocked any view of the hog operations, Hildebrand pointed out Smithfield signs noting what lay at the end of the long gravel paths, many of which were marked by tiny letters like PED (animal diarrhea) and others. She said nearby residents feared that illness could be spread from hogs to humans when the waste from the lagoons is sprayed on crops. To avoid attracting attention from local law enforcement or industry representatives, Hildebrand advised that I not get out of the car near any industrial hog operation property. In the two years that I’ve spent reporting The Life and Death of the American Worker about labor conditions at Tyson Foods, the largest meatpacking company in the U.S., I’ve become familiar with stories of journalists, activists, and labor organizers being intimidated by such corporations. 

It was my first time in Duplin and Sampson counties, and to explain the magnitude of the hog waste problem in North Carolina to me, Hildebrand told me hogs can produce up to 10 times as much waste as a person. It’s challenging for lawyers, journalists, activists, and community members to document the hog industry’s labor and environmental practices when “ag-gag” laws like those in North Carolina protect the industry, imposing heavy fines on those who attempt to enter company facilities.

If one could enter a CAFO — if visiting these hog factories to document the conditions in which hogs are raised wasn’t prohibited by law and penalized by a $5,000 fine — it would look like something out of a science fiction novel. The largest swine operations house as many as 24,000 animals that live in cramped warehouse conditions, usually in crates, where they’re more likely to develop lesions and illnesses, and frequently die. Female swine are forcibly impregnated and give birth inside metal gestation crates that are only slightly bigger than their bodies. The animals never leave the warehouse at any point during their short lives, a 10-month span that the hog industry refers to as a production period. If one could walk CAFO property, they would see that a lagoon isn’t a place for a summer swim; in reality, the bubble-gum-pink pits hold enough waste to cover 15 football fields.

Though access to industrial hog operations is highly restricted and walls of trees block any view of them from roads, Smithfield signs with letters marking conditions such as animal diarrhea (PED) are posted.

At the state level, the North Carolina General Assembly, the Environmental Management Commission, and the North Carolina Department of Environmental Quality (NCDEQ) are the main policy-making and enforcement bodies. “It is hard to overstate the influence that the hog industry has over state policy for hog operations,” Hildebrand continued. “Time and time again, the legislature has prioritized the hog industry over communities, predominantly Black, Latino, and Native American communities.” 

Hildebrand provided examples of legislation that severely limits the ability of residents to sue hog operations for creating noxious odors, or attracting flies and buzzards; of the legislature refusing to fund NCDEQ inspection and enforcement activities; and of the legislature demanding that NCDEQ develop a one-size-fits-all, fast-tracked permit for hog operations that want to make biogas while significantly limiting the ability of those who live near hog operations to weigh in on permit decisions. 

As she drove, Hildebrand explained that in 2000, residents of Duplin and Sampson counties felt hopeful after Smithfield committed to spending $15 million to develop cleaner technologies to process hog waste. Leading engineers and researchers in North Carolina worked to develop clean technology options to process hog waste in a manner that was better for the environment and produced fewer odors. But the committee in charge of evaluating the economics of the technologies, which included hog industry representatives, determined that investing in such technologies at existing hog operations was not “economically feasible.” Instead, Smithfield continues to rely on lagoons and spray fields, which, according to Wastelands author Corban Addison, pump 200 gallons of waste per minute into the air. The hog operations spray billions of gallons of waste onto neighboring fields, and biogas facilities will only concentrate the environmental pollutants in the lagoons. In a sign of progress, Hildebrand pointed to a state statute that prohibits new or expanded hog operations unless they can meet stringent performance standards.

“There’s been a lot of disappointment at the community level, a lot of exhaustion around that,” Hildebrand said.

North Carolina is the second-largest producer of pork in the country, as Cameron Oglesby noted in a 2022 article on biogas. Roughly 40 percent of the state’s hog farms are in Sampson, Duplin, and Bladen counties, and about 25 percent of Duplin and Sampson counties’ populations is Black.

“Those hog farms with those lagoons, I know they overflowed. The water runs downhill into the ditches and goes throughout the community,” the NAACP’s Moore, who grew up and currently lives in Duplin County, said, describing the aftermath of 2018’s Hurricane Florence. After hurricanes, he said, the bloated bodies of dead pigs sometimes float by in a river of their own feces, the overflow from hog waste lagoons. “Pigs aren’t very good swimmers,” said Moore, when I met him in July 2022.

“[Industial hog operations] are located in the midst of African American communities because it’s the lowest cost of land. And that’s what we can afford for historically making less money than our counterparts,” Moore said.

Born in 1958, Moore came of age under “separate but equal” and said he was the first African American child to play Little League baseball in the town. He then went on to work in radio at stations in Jonesboro, Durham, Raleigh, Warsaw, and Wilmington. Trying to remember the dates of his radio stints, he said, “The years are fuzzy with COVID; it seems like the world stopped.” He paused before adding that he worked at stations from 1978 to 1987 and 2014 to 2021. Moore has been involved with the NAACP since 2008, when he was on the executive board and then became communications chair. In 2017, he became president of the local NAACP. 

“There used to be this thing called Black farmers,” Moore said. “I had three uncles and my father — they all farmed together. When they killed a hog, they actually invited the community to come and partake and work together. And then we split up the sausage and the pork chops and bacon and everything among the community. None of that occurs anymore.” Meatpacking companies like Smithfield often advertise their operations as if they were family farms, conjuring up quaint images of rural life, when that is far from the reality. 

As we sat outdoors and breathed in the smell of rotten eggs mixed with burning chemicals, Moore said, “That is the smell of money.” Before we parted ways, he warned me not to follow the “dead truck” — as locals refer to the trucks that transport dead hogs that are raised under the industrial system that has replaced the way Moore’s family once raised hogs.

Robert Osborne Moore grew up in Duplin County and is outspoken about the harm hog operations have caused his community. His father and uncles all farmed together, and he says, “When they killed a hog, they actually invited the community to come and partake and work together. … None of that occurs anymore.”

Later that day, I drove through Sampson County down a country road toward a white cross atop Mt. Zion AME Zion Church. The corn was so high that I could see only the cross atop the church from the road. I had arranged to meet with the Rev. Melvin, his wife, Janet, and their daughter Danielle.  “We did get approached by Smithfield, contacted by them, you know, ‘We’d like to sit down and talk.’ And they sent representatives out and said, ‘We don’t think we contributed to it,’” the Rev. Melvin said of the well water contamination. He refused to meet with Smithfield because his community has been dealing with the same water contamination issues for decades. However, Atkinson, the Smithfield representative, said that no one from the company visited the Rev. Melvin at the church. He said the company instead sent a letter to the church in June 2021, offering to pay for a forensic study of the groundwater and to reimburse the church for the cost of a new well because “we were so confident the farm was not the source of the contamination.” Atkinson also said representatives from Smithfield continue to be willing to meet with the Rev. Melvin. 

“I thought it would be hypocrisy,” the Rev. Melvin said of rejecting the proposed meeting. Instead, he provided the church’s space to host community meetings about how to address water and air contamination issues. “When they had the opportunity to share their experiences, it seemed like it empowered them, that it was going to make a difference.” But he also noted the power of Smithfield to silence people: “We found in our meetings that people came and really didn’t want to be vocal because they had signed nondisclosure agreements.”

Janet Melvin shared a story about how one parishioner’s dentist told her to stop smoking. But when she told the dentist that she didn’t smoke, he said that the black film on her teeth could be due to the contaminated water.

While people talked at church and among themselves about the CAFOs, they often feared speaking publicly. If they spoke to the media, they often requested to be anonymous or, if it was a radio interview, they asked to have their voice changed so as not to be recognized. “People fear for neighbors, friends, family members losing jobs or funding, being pulled from important community projects because someone speaks out against the industry,” Hildebrand said. 

Koonce said that her parents later presented testimony about Smithfield’s polluting local groundwater before the North Carolina Senate Agriculture, Energy, and Environment Committee. Afterward, she explained, “Even at some of the public meetings and hearings, I saw them taking pictures of my dad. [Smithfield] really has people planted everywhere. I mean, I tip my hat to them. They’re doing what these industrialized agricultural complexes do.”

As I stood in the parking lot looking at the new church well, Koonce said that she had been inspired to return to North Carolina by the environmental justice work of White-Williamson, who grew up in Sampson County and had a career at the Office of Environmental Justice at the EPA before returning home to found EJCAN.

Sherri White-Williamson, a co-founder of the Environmental Justice Community Action Network (EJCAN), grew up in Sampson County and started working on the biogas issue in 2019.

I met White-Williamson in Sampson County at the EJCAN office, which is decorated with maps — a sea of red and blue dots that mark the location of poultry and swine CAFOS in the area. 

When White-Williamson first started working on the biogas issue in 2019, county officials claimed they were not aware that a biogas facility was being built on Highway 24 in Sampson County. “Sometimes I’m not sure if it is a lack of knowledge or if a lot of things are being done and not everybody’s being brought into the decision-making process,” White-Williamson said. “I quite frankly don’t care right now, because I’m retired. They can’t do anything with my salary. But there are a lot of people who are still working at these places and are, you know, less likely to be able to stand up and challenge things. I would hope that over time, by providing folks with information, that the knowledge would make them more comfortable with trying to stand up.”

By design, the only way to witness the vastness of industrial hog operations is from the sky, with the lagoons looking like a constellation of open wounds. Doug Oakley, a volunteer pilot from Southwings, which promotes conservation through aviation, dedicated a morning to giving me an aerial tour of hog and poultry operations. Kemp Burdette, the Cape Fear Riverkeeper at Cape Fear River Watch, accompanied us and described the impact of CAFOs on the surrounding rivers, lakes, and communities as we flew over.

At 9,000 square miles, the Cape Fear River Basin is North Carolina’s largest watershed. As we flew over the Goshen Swamp, a stream in the Cape Fear River Basin, Burdette talked about the spray fields that line the big, braided network of creeks on both sides of the wetland and how everything drains into the swamp. As I peered out of the tiny four-seater plane, I could see hog-waste pits stretching to the horizon, and Burdette pointed out the proximity of lagoons to schools and churches. 

“The Cape Fear watershed has the most densely concentrated swine CAFOs in the world. With climate change and the increased frequency of hurricanes and floods in the area, the lagoons are prone to overflowing,” Burdette said. When lagoons overflow, the waste — including pathogens, heavy metals, and antibiotic-resistant bacteria — flows into the basin.

NCDEQ reported in 2018 that 110 lagoons overflowed or were at imminent risk of doing so — a quantity of waste hard to imagine. “We're very quickly becoming the most dense watershed for poultry in the world,” Burdette said, adding, “This watershed also has the largest swine slaughterhouse in the world.” 

The Smithfield slaughterhouse that Burdette referred to is in Tar Heel, North Carolina, and it has the capacity to slaughter 36,000 hogs a day.

Locals like Moore have dealt with CAFO-related water and air pollution for decades, and they want Smithfield to invest in technology to treat hog waste rather than turn it into biogas. 

In January 2021, the NCDEQ held a public meeting about four Smithfield-owned hog farm permit modification applications involving biogas digesters, siphoning off methane and other gases, storing waste in open pits, and spraying this waste on fields. Later that year, the North Carolina General Assembly passed the Farm Act, which directed the DEQ to develop and issue a one-size-fits-all permit for any hog operation wanting to install a biogas digester. SELC and its community partners objected to the legislation for not taking into account environmental justice and pollution concerns. As Burdette explained to me while we flew over hog waste lagoons, air emissions from lagoons include hydrogen sulfide and ammonia — neither of which are monitored or regulated. When ammonia settles on the ground, it can lead to nitrogen-rich waters and algal blooms, which can be toxic, or “they can just be normal algal blooms that eventually die and then create huge fish kills.”  

When the Digester General Permit went into effect on July 1, 2022, SELC challenged the permit in court on behalf of Cape Fear River Watch and EJCAN. The case is ongoing, but Hildebrand said in a statement, “This general permit continues a long legacy of injustice by a powerful industry, entrenching pollution and harms onto people with less political power despite the availability of cleaner, better solutions. The state has a responsibility under the law to protect people from pollution.” 

While biogas sounds benign and even useful, its production is anything but green for the communities where it is produced. 

“There's this argument and this presumption by the [hog] industry that the only way to address the climate change impacts of these facilities is to cover lagoons and to capture methane and then to send that methane into pipelines that go through all these communities,” Burdette said, “when in fact the only reason the methane is a problem is because we’re piping millions of gallons of hog waste into these giant lagoons.”

While the technology exists to address the environmental impact of hog waste, CAFOs “can make money if they convince people that the only way to do anything is to keep this terrible system that hurts everybody,” Burdette said.

The Rev. Melvin, his family, and his parishioners live in a community where they can’t drink tap water or hang out clothes. When the hurricanes roll in, they prepare — as best these communities can — for their rivers, their wells, and their land to overflow with untreated hog waste. SELC will continue to support residents to ensure that biogas facilities, green in name only, won’t further pollute these areas. Moore said the community wouldn’t stand a chance against Smithfield without Hildebrand and SELC because “we could never afford the lawyers to take on these cases. [They’re full of] fight and tenacity.”

White-Williamson worries that the biogas digesters will create an increase in ammonia, nitrates, and hydrogen sulfide levels in the air. By pursuing biogas, Smithfield and other industrial hog operations in North Carolina are doubling down on the lagoon system, which, White-Williamson noted, is “the cheapest and most harmful way of managing hog waste.” 

She summarized the situation, “For 20 years, Smithfield has refused to put in place cleaner technology to protect the environment, water quality, all of that. And they’ve refused to do it because they keep saying it’s too expensive. And now they’re investing half a billion dollars in biogas, locking in the harmful system and creating yet another revenue stream for themselves on the backs of the people who live here.”

~ In Partnership with SELC ~