Chapter One
You can read the full text of Righteous Porkchop’s first chapter below, or, to see it as it appears in the book you can download it in Adobe Acrobat format.
Chapter One (PDF: 572 KB / 33 pages)
My Crash Course in Modern Meat
A New Assignment
There I was, driving through sheets of relentless rain, straining to get a good view of the road in front of me. The year was 2000 and I was heading east on I-80 toward my new job in New York City, anxiously anticipating what lay ahead. As I made the trip from Michigan, I thought about all I’d given up. I’d just quit my job, sold my house, given away most of my possessions, and crammed the rest—my least expendable belongings—into my aging Volkswagen Golf. I had the overwhelming sense that this new beginning would be a turning point in my life. A few days later I would start as the senior attorney for the environmental group, Waterkeeper, headed by Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.
After some long hours on the road, I finally reached New York and collapsed on a friend’s sofa. Two days later, my first day on the new job, I settled into a small, austere office at the Pace University Law School, where Waterkeeper was housed, and awaited direction. These initial weeks on the job turned out to be atypical in both the tasks I was given and the hours I worked. Bobby (as everyone calls him) threw a hodgepodge of requests at me, relating to everything from employment issues, to air pollution, to the organization’s tax status. These were tests, I suspected, yet none of the work seemed particularly pressing. Diligently but dispassionately, I plodded along as a legal factotum in a regular rhythm of nine to five.
That all changed one Saturday afternoon when I got a call from Bobby (for whom a mere wisp of a line separates on- and off-duty). “Nicolette, I want you to take charge of our hog campaign,” he barked in a way that sounded half command, half request. “You’ll have a lot of autonomy and responsibility,” he continued, “but it’s also going to be a lot of hard work.” At that moment, there was really no “hog campaign” to speak of. It was little more than Bobby’s notion that he wanted to sue hog farming operations for contaminating rivers with their manure and that he wanted it to be part of a larger national crusade against industrialized animal operations that caused pollution.
The responsibility and autonomy were certainly appealing, but I knew almost nothing about hog farming and it struck me as, well, an immersion in poop. It was not exactly the glamorous job I’d envisioned when abandoning everything for New York. “Uh—I’m not sure I want to work full-time on manure,” I ventured.
There was another reason for my reticence. I’d sought this job with the idea of dedicating myself to environmental causes dear to my heart, yet livestock farming didn’t hold much interest for me. Just after my freshman year of college, a tangle of vaguely informed concerns about the environment, health, and animals had inspired me to quit meat. However, since I wasn’t much of a proselytizing vegetarian, I’d largely ignored the dark details lately emerging about the meat industry. Frankly, I found those stories so depressing I intentionally avoided them. (Anyway, why did I need to read that stuff—wasn’t I doing my part by abstaining from meat?)
Hearing my hesitation, Bobby responded that before giving my answer, I should see for myself what this was really about. “Just go to Missouri and meet the people who’ve been asking for our help. Then you can decide.”
A Steamrolled Community
As Bobby is not a person easily gainsaid, a few days later I found myself stepping off a plane in Kansas City. My ultimate destination was a Missouri town three hours to the northeast that had become densely populated by the hog operations of the large agribusiness corporation, Premium Standard Farms (PSF). Two farmers, a lawyer, and an environmental advocate would be my guides. They met me at the airport terminal exit in a white rental van.
From our phone conversations, I already knew that Scott Dye, a Sierra Club employee in the group, was a straight-talking, saltytongued fountain of knowledge. With his grizzled beard, booming voice, red plaid shirt, and baseball cap, he struck me as more lumberjack than tree hugger. Scott gave my hand a firm shake then introduced me to the others.
From the introductions I learned that all but one in the group came from farming families. That fact stood out to me because I had already encountered claims from agribusiness that complaints about industrial animal operations are made only by misguided “displaced city-dwellers” who simply don’t understand agriculture. It seemed to be a classic agribusiness response to any criticism.
As we drove north, I heard facts and stories about the people who’d been raising crops and animals in the area for generations, long before big agribusiness moved in. Seated next to me was one of them: Terry Spence, a second-generation farmer with a Red Angus cattle herd. He seemed a modest, soft spoken man. But I soon detected a will of iron underneath as he described the company’s inauspicious arrival in their town a decade earlier.
At the time, Terry was serving on the local township board. When he and his fellow board members heard that PSF planned to move to their community after being blacklisted in neighboring Iowa, they leapt into action. The board drafted land use ordinances that would prohibit animal operations from causing pollution and odor, laws by which traditional farmers could easily abide.
The company responded by making a beeline to the state capitol to flex its political muscle. The day after the township adopted its anti-pollution ordinance, the state approved PSF’s permits, effectively overriding the local laws. The legislature even passed a law that explicitly exempted Terry’s county from the protection of a decades-old state statute that makes farming by out-of-state corporations illegal. Everything coming out of the capitol appeared hand-tailored for the company to seamlessly set up its facilities in Terry’s township.
PSF announced plans to erect ninety-six buildings that would hold more than one-hundred thousand hogs within a one-mile radius of more than twenty family homes. The rise of visible, vocal community opposition did little to slow the commencement of construction.
For good measure, PSF sued the township and its board, apparently hoping to intimidate them into repealing their ordinances. But the tiny community stood fast. “The company underestimated how much pride we had in our way of life, and how determined we were to protect it,” Terry wistfully recounted. When PSF won the case, the township appealed the decision all they way to the Missouri Supreme Court. Still, it got no relief. The state’s highest court ruled that the board was powerless to regulate local agricultural buildings and manure storage systems. The battle to protect Terry’s hometown, begun almost ten years before I met him and still raging, clearly required remarkable resilience and tenacity.
Terry’s tale was jarring to me both as a lawyer and a former city council member. Local governments in the United States have always held firm control over local land use, under a principle called “home rule.” The Missouri courts and legislature were essentially abandoning a centuries-old system of self-governance.
Sitting in the van chatting with Terry, Scott, and the others, I was drawn into their saga and feeling entirely comfortable. Then we stopped for lunch. I knew that with their rural farming backgrounds, several of my companions would have been exposed to years of meat industry propaganda that equated vegetarians with bomb-throwing radicals plotting to overthrow the American way of life. I discretely ordered an egg salad sandwich. When it seemed to pass unnoticed, I breathed a small sigh of relief.
Across the lunch table from me was the lawyer in the group, Charlie Speer, an amiable, scholarly looking man with silver rimmed glasses and receding gray hair. Charlie explained that he’d been representing Terry and several neighbors against PSF in a lawsuit over water pollution and odor. They’d had a tough row to hoe because as part of its unstinting generosity toward PSF, the state legislature had adopted a law making it almost impossible to sue hog facilities for nuisance.
I was stunned. In law school I’d been taught that hundreds of years of American and English case law hold that no person can use his property in a way that causes a nuisance for his neighbors. This age-old precedent was apparently being entirely ignored. “They call the nuisance exception the ‘Right to Farm’ law, but it’s got nothing to do with real farmers,” said Charlie, shaking his head. “Let’s just call that what it is—a bunch of horseshit,” interjected Scott in hearty agreement. “I mean, my clients are all farmers,” Charlie continued, “and they’re the ones hurt by the law. It’s really to protect a few big companies, like PSF. The legislature is just giving them a free pass.” The genuine anger coloring Charlie’s cheeks and voice, I suspected, was what kept him motivated in spite of what seemed very unpromising odds.
Factories, not Farms
When we reached Putnam County, Scott drove straight to an enclave of large windowless metal warehouses. “There are seventytwo of ‘em at this point,” Scott narrated unhappily. I could picture furniture or salt mounds stored in the barren structures, but not living creatures. More than a thousand pigs were crowded into each building, where they’d spend every day in pens with concrete floors, my guides explained.
The floors were slatted so the pig manure and urine would collect in containments below the buildings. By standing and lying in their own excrement, pigs push it through the slats with their hooves and bodies. As with toilets, water is added to the waste for ease of transport. This liquefied manure then flows out to large, open-air storage ponds. When the ponds reach capacity, the waste is pumped into giant wagons that spread it onto surrounding farm land. This elaborate mechanized waste handling system, my guides pointed out, makes it possible to keep huge numbers of animals in buildings, with very few people looking after them.
Perusing the landscape, I spotted numerous giant ponds beyond the buildings, roughly the size and shape of football fields. “They call those ‘lagoons,’ ” Scott said with a skeptical snort. It did seem an odd word for a murky brown manure hole bordered with weeds and scum. Until that moment, I’d always pictured a “lagoon” as a crystal clear azure tropical pool surrounded by sandy white beaches.
My brow furrowed as I studied the metal sheds and absorbed the description of the grim drama unfolding inside, shielded from our view. Aside from a couple of petting zoos, the only pigs I’d ever seen in the flesh were wild boars rooting and roaming the forests of Germany. It was hard to imagine their descendants surviving in lifeless buildings like these. “You mean the animals never go outside?” I questioned tentatively. “Never,” Scott called over his shoulder from the driver’s seat. “They’re born in confinement and they’re there until they take ‘em to slaughter.” “So, I guess it’s sort of like living in a barn,” I reasoned. “No, it’s not like a barn,” Scott patiently explained to the naïve city dweller. “You see, Premium Standard Farms never even gives them any straw to lie on. That would be like throwing a handful of straw in your toilet—it would gum up their fancy sewer system.” Just talking about it seemed to exasperate Scott. “Listen—these aren’t farms. They’re factories.”
The insides of confinement buildings were organized as two rows of crowded pens, explained Scott. A pig’s opportunity for movement was minimal; exercise was nonexistent. Eating was the sole activity. Night and day, the animals languished with nothing to do but stand and lie in their dirty pens. The sows, females used for breeding, had it the worst. They were continually contained in individual metal cages so narrow they could not even turn around. This was all starting to sound like a pig prison, and it was getting me depressed.
As our van rolled slowly past row after row of gray pig barracks, my eyes scanned the landscapes, which felt eerily devoid of life. I was being told that tens of thousands of pigs were just yards away, yet not a single animal or person was anywhere in sight. Everything about the place felt horribly wrong.
It began dawning on me then that perhaps divorcing animals from nature is exactly the point of the industrial approach. By taking animals off the land and placing them in totally artificial settings, the operations sever themselves from sunlight, seasons, weather, and even the need for skilled people with an understanding of animals. When I was growing up, farmers were the folks my father had always chatted with about local rainfall, heat, and wind. But none of that mattered here. Everything was being done inside buildings and by machines, much of it entirely automated. Operators could spend more time staring at their gauges and spreadsheets than with the animals in their charge. I suspected they did. This did not even remotely resemble my idea of “farming.”
After cruising the area for about twenty minutes, Scott pulled the van off to the shoulder. He’d been running the air conditioner on the re-circulate mode and now felt that I should experience what it was really like outside. “Let’s get out and take a whiff,” he suggested sardonically while shutting off the motor. Our group piled out at the roadside into a sticky mid-afternoon sun. Heat and odor instantly pressed in on me from all sides. A mildly nauseating smell of rotten eggs enveloped us. “Hmm. Hydrogen sulfide,” I speculated. “Yup. Hydrogen sulfide and ammonia, and plenty of it,” Scott confirmed with a nod.
Industrial animal operations, especially hog facilities, are notorious for foul odors. I’d been reading and hearing that the stench could be unbearably oppressive. But it wasn’t as strong as I’d anticipated, especially considering we were quite close to a few of the buildings. This was unpleasant, but not intolerable. Perhaps reading my thoughts, Charlie remarked, “The smell gets a lot worse than this. A lot worse, depending on the temperature, humidity . . . wind. Actually, the most frustrating part for neighbors is that they just never know when it’s going to get really bad.”
Standing by the roadside I could now hear the hog operations, too. The air was vibrating with a whirring sound, reminiscent of an airplane revving its engines for takeoff. Pointing to a huge fan at the end of one of the buildings, Scott informed me I was hearing the ventilation systems. “The fans have to run 24/7 because of the fumes inside.” If the ventilators stop working, even for a few minutes, he explained, tragedy strikes. “Every year we hear about incidents in the area where power goes out for a while and all the pigs suffocate. It doesn’t take but a few hours.” It occurred to me that such toxic air couldn’t be good for the people working there, either, even when the fans were working properly. I’d never imagined that a “farm” could be such a hazardous place for man and beast.
We all climbed back into the van and Scott pointed it toward the farm where he grew up, less than two miles from the spot where we’d been standing. On the way, Scott explained that since his father’s death a tenant farmer cultivated his family’s crop land. His mother was still living in the family home. We pulled up the long gravel driveway of a white 1930s clapboard farmhouse with an empty clothesline out back. A row of PSF’s metal buildings glimmered ominously in the distance.
A white-haired woman warmly greeted us at the door, inviting us all in and asking if we’d care for some cold lemonade. I gladly accepted the offer as we took seats in the living room. Mrs. Dye served us each our drinks then sat down. “Mom, tell Nicolette what’s it’s been like livin’ here since PSF came to town,” Scott gently prodded. His mother nodded and slowly began talking. “Well, it’s just made it hard to live here,” she began.
She told me how she now struggled to enjoy living in her home, where she’d raised her children and passed most of her life. Mrs. Dye suffered under the constant uncertainty of when PSF’s stench would next invade her yard and house. Some days it even affected her breathing. “I don’t care to hang my laundry outside anymore,” she told us with a sigh, “because when I bring it in a lot of times it smells like hog manure.” Because nighttime was when the fumes were strongest, even a good sleep was elusive.
As we said goodbye to Mrs. Dye, I watched Scott’s hulking body wrap his frail mother in a bear hug. Now I knew why Scott was so dedicated to fighting hog factories—he’s a good son.
As we drove away, the other farmer in our group piped up. For him and his family, too, he said, the nasty smell was the worst part. Rolf Christen, an organic crop, cattle, and free-range chicken farmer originally from Switzerland, had moved to Missouri with his wife almost two decades earlier to start a diversified family farm. About ten years after they bought their land, the PSF operations set up shop. Like Terry, he’d spent the years since tangling with the company. What was most upsetting, he said, was how it disrupted the lives of his family members. Sometimes he and his wife and children would wake up in the middle of the night as a putrid smell rolled into their house like a dense fog. “We rush around closing all the windows but it doesn’t really do much to keep out the odor,” he recounted with dismay.
Our final stop was along a stream that snaked through the PSF operations. Terry was part of the local citizens group, Missouri Stream Team 714, that monitored water quality. “For almost ten years, our team took water samples here every month,” Terry explained, “and the nitrate levels just kept going up and up.” I already knew that the nitrates contained in manure are the main water pollution problem from industrialized livestock operations. Every gardener is familiar with nitrogen’s value in making plants grow. But the same qualities that make it good fertilizer render it hazardous to aquatic plants and animals. When too much nitrogen gets into the water, algae bloom out of control, depleting all the oxygen and causing just about everything else to die (a condition called “hypoxia”).
Terry and fellow team members had dutifully made the government and PSF aware of their sampling results. They then spent years trying to get them to respond to the rising nitrate levels. The state did essentially nothing. The company, however, did take some action, although not to stop the pollution. “The most ridiculous thing is that the only thing PSF did in response was to put that up,” he bitterly complained as he pointed to a chain-link fence just below where we were standing. “Now I can’t take my samples.” The new fence cut off the path, making it impossible to step down to the stream.
This was all so disconcerting. How could our government refuse to act when a corporation was wreaking such havoc on a community of hardworking, salt of the earth citizens, and perhaps even breaking the law? It was becoming clear to me that fighting industrial animal facilities involved more than combating poop. Soon I would learn that Missouri’s refusal to enforce the environmental laws was repeated everywhere across the nation. Collectively, these failures had made pollution from industrial animal operations one of the United States’ most serious water pollution problems.
I already knew that manure wasn’t necessarily a negative. I remembered the small farms I’d known as a child in Michigan, where a pile of manure was treated as a treasure trove. Driving back to the airport, I remarked to Scott: “So, manure isn’t always bad, right?” “Hell, no!” Scott cried. “Farmers around here always fertilized their fields with manure. Environmentally, it’s actually the best fertilizer. And we didn’t have any serious problems with pollution. It’s just now, there’s too much concentration. Too many animals in one place. Way too many.”
I left Missouri with a lot to consider. I’d been deeply moved by what I’d seen, but didn’t want to make any promises. “Let’s talk very soon,” I suggested to Scott as he dropped me off at the airport. On the plane back to New York, the day replayed itself in my head. We were being asked, as an environmental organization, to target the air and water pollution generated by industrial hog facilities. Their polluting potential was becoming patently obvious. But what was already haunting me more was how these operations directly affected people and animals.
I’d now had my first up close glimpse of our modern, industrial food system, and I didn’t like what I was seeing. I was witnessing how corporations have been quietly but radically altering how our food is produced. It’s a shift away from farming as a true profession, passed down from generation to generation, and carried out by skilled people closely connected with their animals, lands, and communities. In its place agribusiness has been substituting factory- style industrial production, mechanized, automated, and carried out by hourly laborers who often have no training in animal husbandry and no connections to the surrounding community.
Orientation, Part Two
The next day, when I returned to the office, Bobby—an intensely action-oriented man—grilled me impatiently on when I’d be getting our lawsuits going. But I knew I wasn’t ready to start suing anyone just yet—first, I wanted to do more investigating. Industrial animal facilities were clearly reprehensible, but could we prove that they were actually breaking the law? That day I started trying to find out. I began calling and emailing questions to experts around the country—everyone from aquatic ecology professors to animal welfare advocates. And I hastily arranged a trip to North Carolina, birthplace of the corporate hog confinement system and lately the nation’s second largest pork producer.
Perhaps more than any other force, industrial hog and poultry production have molded North Carolina’s recent history. For most of the twentieth century, the state’s many farmers raised a variety of crops and a steady number of hogs—fewer than two million—on small family farms peppering the state. Almost every farmhouse had a few pigs out back. At the time, North Carolina was famous for its crystal clear flowing streams and abundant fisheries and craberies.
However, the state’s economy and physical environment began undergoing major alterations in the late-1980s. Catalyzed largely by a single entrepreneur, pig production in North Carolina exploded: quadrupling within fourteen years from 2.5 million hogs in 1989 to 10 million in 2003. During the same time period, the total number of North Carolina farms with pigs shrank from 12,500 to 2,800. Traditional farms, where pigs were raised in small, freely ranging outdoor herds, were being replaced by corporate controlled facilities with vast liquefied manure lagoons and thousands of animals living in continual confinement. Industrial chicken and turkey production were dramatically expanding as well.
Because North Carolina’s natural environment was reeling from the effects of this invasion of industrial animal production, Bobby chose it as the launching site for our legal campaign. By fortunate coincidence, I was already licensed to practice law in North Carolina. Fresh out of law school, I had lived two years in the state and worked as an assistant district attorney in Durham. On this trip down there, I would review documents, interview potential witnesses, and take a firsthand look at some of the state’s hog facilities. My other reason for heading to the South was to meet our point man on hog pollution.
Rick Dove, the person who’d first focused Bobby Kennedy’s attention on industrial animal operations, came to pick me up at the Raleigh airport. Waterkeeper is an international alliance of water protection activists called “riverkeepers.” Rick was the first riverkeeper in North Carolina. When I met him, he was a sixty-oneyear- old retired Marines Corps colonel, looking every bit the part with an erect posture, cropped haircut, starched shirt, and drab olive pants tucked in polished black combat boots. Bobby had told me that Rick had been a lawyer and judge in the Marines, and that he was a devout Catholic and a lifelong Republican who, for most of his life, would never have called himself an environmentalist. At first, much of this seemed a bit incongruous with the profile of an environmental activist. But I would soon come to understand how Rick’s experiences had radicalized him. I instantly liked this interesting man, who was both serious-minded and friendly.
From our emails and phone conversations, I knew quite a bit about Rick’s history. It was plain that after living two decades on its banks, Rick had a palpable intimacy with North Carolina’s Neuse River. Upon retiring from the Marines, he and his son briefly tried to make a living fishing. But they were too late. The decline of North Carolina’s fisheries was already in a free fall. They frequently came across fish with sores covering their bodies; shellfish and crabs were often officially declared too contaminated to eat. And when the river’s pollution started to make him physically ill, Rick knew it was time to give up the fishing venture.
That experience, Rick had told me, was probably what prompted him to answer a want-ad for a “Neuse Riverkeeper” without knowing what a riverkeeper was. He just liked the sound of “keeping” the Neuse. Rick Dove soon became North Carolina’s most visible environmental crusader as he redefined what it meant to be a riverkeeper. With military precision, he organized battalions of volunteers into platoons who patrolled the river to seek out and document river contamination. They put on waders and climbed into motor boats and canoes. They snapped photos, made video recordings, scribbled in notebooks, and carefully prepared and recorded hundreds of water samples. The information Rick and his forces gathered became evidence in dozens of legal cases and negotiations to halt pollution.
Their work quickly revealed that confinement hog and poultry operations were the Neuse River’s most potent enemy. When he repeatedly found himself stymied by “No Trespassing” signs near animal facilities, Rick doggedly searched out private pilots to fly him over the properties. Over time, he built a squadron of eighteen volunteer pilots.
After Rick picked me up at the Raleigh airport, we headed straight to a stash of files at the central Department of Natural Resources office (known locally as “the DNR”). By law, the state agency must monitor and record pollution at animal operations and elsewhere. The DNR files contain facility inspection reports, citizen complaints, and notices of violations cited by government agencies. The Freedom of Information Act requires that the files be made accessible to the public, including us.
Rick pulled out a yellow legal pad with a list of problem facilities he’d compiled from his own monitoring and his volunteers’ observations. He already had a pretty good idea of the major offenders, which was where we’d focus our time. Each operation was under the control of Smithfield Foods, Inc. by contract or ownership. The largest pork company in the country, Smithfield controlled more than three-quarters of the state’s hog raising operations and almost all of its hog slaughtering.
After a few hours of scouring the DNR papers, some of the operations floated to the top of our list. North Carolina’s industrial hog facilities function very much like Missouri’s, except that when liquefied manure is pumped from lagoons it’s usually sprayed directly onto land with giant water cannons. The DNR files described dozens of incidents where liquefied hog waste had gotten into waterways because facilities had sprayed hog waste in the rain, manure cannons had been directed at ditches or creeks, or lagoons had burst or spilled over after being filled too high. We photocopied the records. Then we packed up, climbed into Rick’s red Dodge pickup and started the two-hour drive southeast to his home in New Bern.
Over the next few days, Rick and I traveled to three regional DNR offices and pored over their files. We were covering a lot of eastern Carolina territory, and everywhere Rick pointed out dozens of hog and poultry operations along our route. No comrightpork munity seemed free of them. The dull gray metal sheds looked depressingly identical to each other and to the ones I’d been shown in Missouri. Some were bordered by ten-foot cyclone fences. Big signs with red lettering warned: “ABSOLUTELY NO TRESSPASSING!” Each operation had at least one large manure lagoon nearby. Several looked abandoned. It was creepy how here, too, we never saw any people or animals.
Rick loves to laugh and, as I would learn over time, he often plays small practical jokes on his friends and colleagues. As we drove between our destinations he would occasionally tease me by rolling down the truck windows as we neared confinement facilities. There was always a rotting egg odor, which seemed strongest when manure was being aerial sprayed. But one of those times, when the wind was blowing directly at us, it wasn’t all that funny. We were hit with a blast of putrid stench. A wave of nausea washed over me, and a salty liquid rushed into my mouth. I lurched toward the window and hurried to open it fearing I was about to be awfully ill. Luckily, the feeling passed without me emptying the contents of my stomach. At that moment I understood that industrial hog odors can be much more than an annoyance.
“God. The smell is sickening. It must be unbearable inside the buildings,” I thought aloud after regaining my composure. “I hear more complaints about odor than anything else,” Rick agreed. Bobby had talked about a riverkeeper in Ohio who’d once spent time as a laborer in a hog confinement operation. While employed there, his wife refused to let him bring his work clothes into their home. The garments, she said, stank up the house and she could not get rid of the odor. She claimed she could even smell hog manure on his breath.
To prepare for this visit to North Carolina, I had read a pile of environmental and health studies. A lot of the research related to the vapors inside hog confinement operations. It substantiated what people had been telling me—namely, that they’re full of dangerous toxins. Hydrogen sulfide tops the list. A Purdue University farm safety guide emphasized that manure lagoons are inherently danrightpork gerous, soberly advising: “When animal waste is being stored in large quantities, a number of hazards are present for both man and animal.” After first cautioning about the risk of drowning in a lagoon, the manual warns against being overcome by its gases, particularly hydrogen sulfide. The guide states: “Hydrogen sulfide (H2S) is a very poisonous gas . . . A concentration of only 50 parts per million . . . can cause dizziness, irritation of the respiratory tract, nausea, and headache. With concentrations exceeding 1,000 parts per million, death from respiratory paralysis can occur with little or no warning.” Adding, to illustrate: “Recently, a 16-year-old Wisconsin farm worker collapsed and died while cleaning a confinement calf barn located above a 100,000 gallon liquid manure [pit]. Hydrogen sulfide was reported as the cause of death.”
Eventually, I would uncover more than one hundred studies (mostly done in Europe, where researchers depend less on funding from agribusiness) linking the gases of industrial animal operations to various ailments, including lung diseases, nausea, nosebleeds, depression, and brain damage. Not surprisingly, the fumes are strongest inside the buildings, so workers are the most frequent human casualties of confinement fumes. The animals, who literally bathe in the vapors day and night, have it even worse. Chronic respiratory ailments are industrial hog operations’ single biggest animal health problem and, as Scott had pointed out in Missouri, asphyxiations in hog confinements are commonplace.
Rick spent most of his time over the years tracking down water pollution, but began turning his attention to what was going into the air. “The hog factory guys love dismissing the fumes as just ’smells.’ But that’s a bunch of bullcrap. It’s air pollution!” he railed one day as we drove to a DNR office. In fact, scientists have shown that as much as 80 percent of the nitrogen in manure lagoons ends up in the air, mostly in the form of ammonia.
In addition to lagoons, research has shown that lots of fumes are released by other parts of confined animal operations. Ammonia is continuously emitted from urine and feces in and under the hog buildings themselves, as well as anywhere liquefied manure is spread on the land. A North Carolina State University scientist and his colleagues documented that the ammonia from all aspects of hog and poultry operations was one of the state’s biggest air pollution problems. The researchers reported that North Carolina’s hog operations alone were putting between 55,000 and 72,000 tons of ammonia nitrogen into the air every year. Their research also showed the startling fact that 84 percent of the state’s recent increase in airborne ammonia resulted from a single cause: hog industry expansion.
Of course, what goes up must come down. Thus, contaminants that industrial animal operations put in the air also end up polluting land and water. Research shows that as much as 60 percent of the nitrogen entering North Carolina coastal waters, including the state’s fragile estuaries, comes from the atmosphere. The air to water pollution pathway has been connected to algae blooms lethal to fish and other aquatic creatures. It has also been linked to contamination of drinking water and poisoning of soils that kills trees and other plants. Some compounds released from liquefied manure storage are greenhouse gases, contributing to global warming.
In later research, I discovered that air pollution from industrial animal operations is a decidedly national concern. Documents from the federal Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) show that nationwide, 1.5 billion pounds of nitrogen from manure lagoons and another 880 million pounds of nitrogen from liquefied manure spread on land, ends up in surface waters after first evaporating into the air. Hog operations also emit 70,000 tons of hydrogen sulfide gas, 296,000 tons of methane, and 127,000 tons of carbon dioxide every year.
“Ya’ know what really drives me nuts about the air pollution from hog factories?” Rick continued on his diatribe, “It’s intentional!” “I don’t get what you mean.” Turns out, manure lagoons were actually designed with the purpose of getting rid of pollutants by releasing them into the air. Rick later showed me the industry’s own documents that proved it. Dumping waste into the atmosphere, it seems, has long been part of agribusiness’ plans. “And they’re still not being forced to stop?” I asked incredulously after Rick explained the scenario to me. “That’s right.” “Good Lord.”
In the days we drove around the state together, Rick provided me a running narrative about the many failures of liquefied manure systems that he’d witnessed in his years on patrol. “The state actually encouraged the lagoons, but that was just plain dumb,” he commented. “In our wet climate, and with these sandy soils, lagoons don’t work—they can’t work. They’re doomed to fail.” The problem is this: Pigs poop a lot every day, so operators must regularly empty out their lagoons (by spraying or spreading lagoon contents onto land). However, when it’s raining, it’s impossible to spray the liquid or spread the slurry without causing pollution. “When the soils around here are wet, they’re no better than a sieve,” Rick continued. “Manure goes straight through to the groundwater and ends up in the rivers.” This is why, even under North Carolina’s permissive regulatory scheme, it’s (theoretically, at least) illegal to spread manure when it rains.
The mound of studies I’d already compiled recorded risk after risk stemming from confinement animal operations and their waste. For one, as also shown by Rick’s crews in North Carolina and Terry Spence and his team in Missouri, the waste contains high levels of the nutrients nitrogen, phosphorous, and potassium. Nutrient is a word I’d been accustomed to viewing in a strictly positive light. But in both Missouri and North Carolina, I was seeing how industrial animal operations cause far too many nutrients to enter groundwater and surface waters, which in turn was triggering episodes of hypoxia that were killing fish and other water animals.
My collection of studies also talked about manure from industrial animal operations containing other contaminants. It can have high levels of heavy metals, especially copper, along with residues of various drugs and chemicals. The primitive waste handling method used by confinement operations ensures that anything fed to hogs (including pharmaceuticals) or used in the confinement buildings (such as disinfectants) will end up in our soils and has a good chance of ending up in public waterways, groundwater, and the air.
Manure lagoons have also been shown to be ideal hatcheries for virulent viruses and bacteria. As I would learn more about later, almost all confinement animal operations continuously administer antibiotics in feed or water. The practice is done both to speed growth and stave off diseases. Therefore, the urine-feces slurry is laced with both antibiotics residues as well as pathogens that have evolved to survive these drugs. These infamous antibiotic-resistant “super-bugs” can cause treacherous diseases for both people and animals. Illnesses that were once easily treated with antibiotics are becoming debilitating or even fatal.
My studies also taught me that turning pig poop into a liquid was at the core of many environmental and health hazards caused by lagoons. A report by the Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy noted: “The intentional mixing of water and animal wastes is proving to be one of the great mistakes of modern technology.” The report goes on to explain that liquefied manure lowers industrial operations’ costs but more readily transports nutrients and other contaminants to groundwater and surface water than manure in its solid form.
Pathogens are a particular concern. At traditional pig farms, the germs in pig manure are killed in composting or by sunlight when pigs are on pasture. This does not happen with lagoons, notes the report. “Unlike the composting or heating that takes place naturally in stored manure from animal housing when ample straw bedding is used, manure stored anaerobically in liquid form never reaches the temperatures necessary to kill pathogens [and] parasites.” Lagoons, then, are hazardous both in the quantity of manure stored and in the quality in which it’s stored.
Getting a Fish’s Perspective
After spending three days reviewing DNR documents with Rick, I was finally rewarded with some real adventure: accompanying the colonel on patrol. We would start on the water. Donning windbreakers and Waterkeeper caps, Rick and I climbed into his midsized fishing boat and he fired up the engine. We slowly pulled away from his dock and were soon skimming over miles of dark, choppy river water, first heading a ways south, then north. It was a sunny September day with a crisp breeze.
At several spots, Rick cut back the motor and glided into inlets where he pointed out algal blooms and other telltale signs of pollution. All the while, like the proud father of an errant child, Rick boasted of the river’s admirable traits while lamenting its problems, most of which have been caused by recent decades of various human activities, industrial farming in particular.
I could see that Rick relished his moments on the water. The Neuse is North Carolina’s third largest river, up to six miles wide and 250 miles long, and, even in its impaired state, hosts abundant wildlife. Having spent much of his time in his boat in recent years, Rick has seen it all: egrets, pelicans, herons, menhaden, shad, herring, catfish, bass, flounder, blue crabs, oysters, alligators, even dolphins and an occasional manatee. As we rode around in his boat, Rick rattled off a battery of statistics about the river. He especially emphasized one fact. “The Neuse feeds into estuaries that are the most important fish nurseries in the Eastern United States. Just about every major commercial Atlantic fish species has sizable spawning stocks here.” The significance of this was clear—a single river’s contamination was compromising the health of national fisheries.
We did not have to go far to see the effects of pollution. Rick could simply reach over the side and pull out clumpy green handfuls of algae that were choking the river inlets and entangling the boat’s propeller. “This is from excess nutrients,” he explained, adding, “but it wasn’t like this when I first came to North Carolina.” These days, a variety of sources put nitrogen and phosphorous into the Neuse River. The single largest—responsible for 56 percent of Neuse River nutrient contamination—is agriculture.
My river tour connected the dots between industrial animal facilities and our nations’ waters and gave me a good overview of the resulting environmental damage. After a while, in the soft afternoon light, Rick reluctantly pointed the boat toward home. When we returned to the little pier behind his house, Rick pulled out a fishing net. Standing on the dock, he cast it into the water. “There’s something else I want you to see,” Rick said. He pulled up the net dripping with water and a dozen or so silvery fish, each about the size of a banana skin. These were menhaden, an important part of the Atlantic food web. About half of the flopping fish had gaping sores on their sides or backs. Once we’d examined them, Rick quickly threw the fish back into the water. But their blue and crimson innards were severely exposed, dooming them to certain, imminent death. “That’s from Pfiesteria,” said Rick, a heaviness in his voice for the first time. “Another result of excess nutrients in the water.” For this one task, Rick had put on thick, black rubber gloves up to his elbows. It was Pfiesteria that had made him sick years earlier when he’d tried his hand at commercial fishing.
I had also read up on Pfiesteria piscicida before making the trip. The name roughly translates to “fish killer.” The tiny organism (technically, a toxic dinoflagellate), had been discovered and christened by Joann Burkholder, a North Carolina State University biology professor whom Rick had befriended. She and her team documented how the organism liquefies fish flesh while giving off dangerous vapors. For fish, Pfiesteria is fatal; for humans, exposure to the emitted toxins can cause nausea, dizziness, and even neurological damage.
Dr. Burkholder had also documented a 500 percent increase in ammonia in the Neuse River estuary over the preceding decade. Her research related the rising ammonia and Pfiesteria’s emergence to nutrient pollution from industrial animal operations. After she published her findings, the pork industry swiftly and sharply retaliated. Almost overnight Joann Burkholder’s character and work became the object of vitriolic attacks (later written about in a book called And the Waters Turned to Blood). But agribusiness’ attempts to vilify Dr. Burkholder could not change the facts on the ground: Massive numbers of fish were surfacing with sores and dying, and fishermen and lab workers exposed to Pfiesteria infested fish and waters were becoming terribly, perhaps irreversibly, ill.
After showing me the infected fish, Rick said he wanted to introduce me to some of the afflicted fishermen. The next morning, we drove to one of their homes, where Rick had arranged for them to gather. We sat down in the main room of a modest bungalow with three men in their mid- to late-thirties. Each had quarter- and nickel-sized sores on their arms and legs, some covered with Band- Aids. One by one the men told their stories about how they’d come down with the sores after consecutive days of fishing. Then they awkwardly pulled back their bandages, uncovering their dripping wounds. The sores looked startlingly similar to the ones I’d seen on the fish a day earlier. “They just don’t heal up,” one of the men mumbled with embarrassment.
The most unforgettable of the three was David Jones. His pale, frail limbs, splotched with dark sores, jutted out from his shirt and shorts. Even more worrisome was neurological damage. He said one evening, after several days of fishing in infected waters, he could not remember his way home. When I met David, months after that incident, he appeared to be far from recovered. As Rick and I spoke with him, his eyes wandered around the room and he seemed to have trouble focusing. Actually, he had become a totally different person, his wife told us in a low voice as she walked with us to the door. After thanking the fishermen and saying our goodbyes, Rick and I drove back to his house in silence.
Inside the Batcave
That evening, we watched the news and ate dinner with Rick’s wife, Joanne, a jovial, energetic woman who evidently supported Rick in countless ways. He and I then headed to his office, a separate building tucked behind their house. It felt like entering the Batcave. Everywhere were computers, monitors, video cameras, tripods, DVD players, telephones, and rows of storage cabinets and shelving filled with binders and videotapes. I half expected to see a red phone connecting directly to the police commissioner’s office.
Rick began pulling down stuffed binders and placing them in front of me. “You should take a look at these,” he urged. “It would take days to go through all of it. I’ve got hundreds of hours of video and tens of thousands of pictures.” The binders were brimming with photos Rick had taken over the preceding years. “We’re in a target-rich environment here,” he commented in his military lingo as I began flipping through the pages. “Truth is, our work is only scratching the surface of all the illegal pollution going on around here every day.”
I perused the pictures for almost two hours. Most had been taken from the vantage of boats and airplanes. Some showed huge cannons spewing a muddy liquid directly into creeks and streams. Others showed a massive brown plume of hog manure invading the Neuse River after a hurricane. The most disturbing were those showing scores of bloated pigs floating in filthy floodwaters.
“It’s ridiculous that hog factories can even be built in flood plains, but that’s exactly where they’re put because that’s where the land is cheap,” Rick observed. “It’s just asking for trouble. They’re guaranteed to get flooded. It’s just a matter of how often. And they always leak.”
Leaking lagoons turn out to be a major way that hog operations contaminate groundwater and rivers. Studies from several states (including North Carolina) have demonstrated that manure lagoons continually leach pollutants to groundwater, tainted water that in turn enters rivers. In many cases, such leakage ends up contaminating someone’s well, which may be their only source of drinking water. As I’d learned already, lagoons also pollute waters by releasing substances to the air that later end up in waters.
The third pathway to pollution is catastrophic spills. Whereas leaching and air emissions are the persistent daily drip, drip of lagoon pollution, spills are the periodic cataclysmic disasters. Every year, throughout the country, many lagoons burst or flood over. The consequences can be devastating.
North Carolina has surely seen its share of manure lagoon spills. In 1995, a lagoon broke open and spilled more than twenty-five million gallons of liquefied hog manure into the New River (more than twice the volume of oil spilled by the Exxon Valdez). According to university researchers who studied the spill, its noxious and foul-smelling plume traveled more than twenty-two miles and had noticeable effects for more than three months. The researchers also found that the spill killed millions of fish, triggered dangerous toxic algae blooms, and caused elevated fecal bacteria in the river waters and sediments. The infected waters put human health and aquatic ecosystems at risk while causing an estimated $4 million loss to the recreational fishing industry alone.
A couple of Rick’s photo albums were dedicated to Hurricane Floyd pictures. When the hurricane hit the Atlantic coast in September 1999, Rick had been on duty as Neuse Riverkeeper for several years. As soon as the storm subsided, Rick began flying over flooded areas, taking photos and video of hog operations. Some of his footage even ended up on national news broadcasts. Rick was shocked by the devastation he witnessed. One of the most troubling things he saw was more than fifty confinement hog operations inundated by floodwaters. Their manure lagoons and flush systems were contributing hundreds of millions of gallons of liquefied feces to the waters that covered large sections of the state. Newscasts were reporting that these filthy flood waters posed an unprecedented threat to human health.
What struck me most about Rick’s photo collection was the sheer volume of incriminating pictures. State and federal laws make dumping hog waste into waterways illegal, yet his pictures showed clearly that the laws were being widely flouted. And no one other than Rick Dove seemed to be doing anything about it. It appeared that Rick could go out on any day of his choosing and find operations flagrantly violating anti-pollution laws. I could see now that our legal cases would have a firm footing.
The hog industry, it should be noted, has steadfastly denied that its operations have any impact on water quality (or cause odor, or any other problem). In a typical move, in 2004, a group of North Carolina confinement hog operators funded a $30,000 study purporting to show that hog facilities were having “no effect” on the state’s rivers. Notably, the analysis was not done by aquatic biologists or by anyone who’d ever engaged in any firsthand research on North Carolina rivers.
In response, the state DNR pointed out that for the four watersheds considered, $500 million of public money had already been spent to combat water contamination. Pollution problems were so severe in those areas that instead of seeing the marked improvement one would expect from a half-billion dollar investment, water quality in those areas was the same or worse. In other words, the industry-funded analysis was on its face absurd.
Such protestations of blamelessness prompted Dr. Bill Showers, a leading North Carolina water biologist, to comment, “It is going to take several decades before we realize the full impact of the hog industry on the environment.” Dr. Shower’s research traces industrial animal pollution using a nitrogen isotope found only in animal waste. With this technique, he has documented that nitrate levels from hog waste are as much as ten times higher downstream from hog operations than upstream. “To say that [industrialized hog operations] are not exporting nitrogen is hydrologically impossible,” Showers has stated.
Dr. Mike Mallin, a professor at University of North Carolina’s Center for Marine Science, would certainly agree. For a decade, he regularly checked water quality at dozens of sampling stations on rivers in eastern North Carolina, many of which flow past scores of hog operations but little else. During that time period, Mallin and his team found a 265 percent increase in ammonia in the Black River and, in the nearby Northeast Cape Fear, an ammonia increase of 315 percent, river basins which have some 5 million confinement hogs.
A Bird’s-eye View
After almost a week working alongside Rick, my last full day in North Carolina had arrived. Finally, it was my chance to be part of his famous air force. It would be my first time in a small plane and I mentioned on the way to the airport that I hoped we had a good pilot. “Don’t worry,” Rick said, “Ron’s taking us up today. He served two tours as a pilot in Vietnam.” I wasn’t sure if that was comforting, but at least, I figured, the guy was unlikely to panic in a crisis.
Ron was a lively man with thick forearms and ruddy cheeks who wore a Hawaiian shirt and a backward baseball cap. He and Rick fell easily into conversation and mutual ribbing. Out on the tarmac, Ron busied himself with final checks of his aircraft like a cowboy tightening the cinch on his horse’s saddle. His confidence and obvious familiarity with the Cessna assured me we were in good hands. Ron’s enthusiasm about our mission, I sensed, came partly from allegiance to the colonel.
Loaded down like a burro with high tech cameras and telephoto lenses, Rick clambered into the backseat, as he instructed me to sit up front for the best view. I slid into the copilot’s seat, buckled up and pulled on a set of headphones with a tiny microphone at the mouth. As we checked the mics, it felt like we were about to try a high tech simulator. But this was entirely real, and soon we were in the air.
Prior to takeoff, Rick had instructed Ron where to fly. Several destinations were the operations Rick regularly monitored and photographed from the air; others, he had recently heard were illegally polluting. As we approached our first target, the sun glinted off the roofs of two big metal sheds and a large manure lagoon. A short distance away an enormous water cannon was lavishly spewing a thick brown fluid.
Rick strained toward the window exclaiming, “Aha! Just as I suspected.” He raised his camera and asked Ron to go in low. Ron complied by tipping the plane’s nose downward, and we plummeted toward the earth. Our pilot’s wartime experience seemed to be coming in handy. This was nothing like flying United, and I couldn’t help grabbing the sides of my seat as a surge of warmth rushed through me.
As we hurled toward the hog operation beneath us, a blue pickup suddenly came into view. The truck was racing toward the manure sprayer, kicking up a billowing trail of dust in its wake. We were now at what seemed about 500 feet and Rick’s camera was clicking away madly behind me. “Circle back!” he yelled, and Ron complied by banking the plane to the left in a wide arc. My heart was racing. On the second pass, we seemed to plunge down even lower. But by the time we made our second overflight, the sprayer had been shut down. A man standing near the spray gun was staring up at us with his hands on his hips. He had jumped out of the pickup and run over to turn it off. “He knows exactly who we are!” I blurted with pride. “You bet he does,” answered Rick. “This feels like warfare!” I exclaimed. To which Ron soberly replied, “It is.”
Forty minutes later, after reconnaissance on a few more operations, Ron glanced over at me and nonchalantly said, “Now it’s your turn.” I smiled, assuming he was joking. But a moment later he took his hands off the U-shaped steering control, leaned back into his seat, crossed his arms on his chest, and added, “You’re in charge now.” I gulped and took hold of the controls in front of me as I felt my palms getting clammy. Within seconds, we were rapidly losing altitude. “Steady her,” Ron advised calmly. “Keep your eyes on the horizon.” With those wise words, my competence in keeping the craft level quickly improved.
We flew over a few more hog facilities (with Ron back on the controls, of course) while Rick snapped photos. As we started toward home, Rick suggested we try to count the manure lagoons we could see from this bird’s-eye view. The land below us was littered with them. Each of us lost count around one hundred.
Back on the ground, I was walking on air. “I got some good shots,” Rick informed us matter-of-factly. “Those guys were spraying manure right into a stream.” For Ron and Rick, this was all in a day’s work, but I was thrilled that we had accomplished our mission and returned safely to base.
Itching for a Fight
On my trip back to New York, I realized there was nothing I’d rather do than pick a fight—a really big one—with the animal confinement industry. My initial suspicion that I’d be drowning in manure was partly right. Industrial operations warehouse throngs of animals that generate oceans of liquefied manure. A University of North Carolina professor has calculated that an adult hog produces as much as ten times the waste of an adult human and that the largest hog complexes can actually generate more animal waste every day than the human feces produced in New York City or Los Angeles. But cities collect and treat their sewage according to strict guidelines. Hog operations do not. They discharge their manure into the environment essentially untreated, a difference unwarranted by science. So, manure would play a leading role in my future.
But it was becoming clear to me that this was not a battle against animal waste. After all, manure is not inherently loathsome. It’s all a matter of how much of it is in one place and how it’s handled. I’d once heard a doctor say about aspirin, “Toxicity is all about dose.” The same can be said of manure.
And I now saw that avoiding meat didn’t make me unconnected to this national disaster. I had ties to the confinement food animal industry because I still ate eggs and dairy products. Even more importantly, I realized that these were issues close to my heart. Battling factory farms is a fight for people wanting to enjoy the sanctity of their family homes, for protection of lands, waters, and air, for citizens’ rights to govern themselves, and, perhaps most of all, for billions of farm animals who never know a moment of joy.
I was now eager to engage this industry, which seemed to be rampaging out of control and unchecked. As I drove to my apartment from La Guardia that evening, I called Bobby from my cell phone with my answer. “I’ll have those pleadings for you in a week.”