The company is not only the world’s largest producer of pork but also the owner of the world’s largest slaughterhouse. In a David-versus-Goliath tale like this one, you could hardly hope for a more ruthless and intimidating giant than Smithfield. After years of complaints to local and state authorities went unheeded, more than 500 neighbors of North Carolina CAFOs, almost all of them Black, filed lawsuits against the meatpacking company that seemed the worst offender: Smithfield Foods. It was a textbook case of environmental racism. And the waste sprayed on fields often fell on the roofs of nearby houses, Addison writes, with “the soft pitter-patter of rain.” DNA tests revealed traces of hog excrement inside kitchens, on the surfaces of refrigerators, on top of stoves. The vast pools of waste emitted a terrible, overpowering smell. The high mortality rate in the sheds and the dead hogs left outdoors awaiting removal attracted flocks of vultures. Tractor-trailers carrying hogs drove past day and night. The quality of life in those homes deteriorated greatly. The new hog factories were built without restrictions from local zoning laws, sometimes right next to homes inhabited for generations - mainly by families who were poor and Black. In one county, the hogs soon outnumbered the humans by a factor of 35 to one. The North Carolina hog boom occurred mainly in the coastal plain east of Interstate 95, Addison notes, “a rural region of the state invisible to outsiders and forgotten by most North Carolinians.” From the 1980s through the early 2000s, former tobacco farmers were encouraged to raise hogs under contract to the meatpackers. Addison describes how giant spray guns shoot 200 gallons of waste per minute into the air, noxious stuff with “a strange muddy-pink color to it” that tends to “drift like a cloud on the breeze.” And when lagoons are full, the untreated waste is sprayed onto nearby fields. It is pumped into large pools, euphemistically called “lagoons.” Just one of those pools can hold enough waste to cover 15 football fields with crap a foot deep. But that hog waste isn’t sent to high-tech treatment plants. The state’s nine million hogs annually produce from three to 10 times as much waste as New York City does. Today, it has only 2,000 hog operations, with herds as large as 60,000 hogs. In the early 1970s, North Carolina had about 18,000 hog farms, with an average herd of about 75 hogs. Addison, an attorney and best-selling novelist, is the ideal writer to tell this story - and North Carolina is in many ways the perfect setting from which to explore the real-life impact of concentrated animal feeding operations, abbreviated CAFOs, an official term for modern-day livestock factories. They sued the company in federal court, launching cases that took years to resolve, with surprising twists and serious implications not only for the future of American agriculture but also for the health of our democracy. “Wastelands,” by Corban Addison, tells the extraordinary story of how some neighbors of hog operations in North Carolina battled a meatpacking company polluting their neighborhoods. And where it winds up has proved remarkably destructive to America’s rural landscape and the people who live in it. And like other factories, they produce a good deal of waste - in this case, about a gallon and a half of urine and excrement per hog every day. They’re essentially livestock factories, dedicated to uniformity and efficiency, that house thousands of hogs crammed together in windowless sheds.

The places where hogs are now raised are “farms” in name only. During the 1980s, cheap, federally subsidized grain, an absence of antitrust enforcement, the rise of huge meatpacking companies, and new production techniques devised by those companies turned hogs into industrial commodities - and drove 80 to 90 percent of American hog farmers out of the business. The typical herd ranged in size from the dozens to the low hundreds. In the United States, until recently, hogs were raised on small farms, fed leftover grain, allowed to run freely in pens and barns and sold at live auctions with competitive bidding. But the methods used to breed, raise, process and market them have been profoundly transformed during the last few decades. Human beings have been raising pigs for about 10,000 years.

WASTELANDS: The True Story of Farm Country on Trial, by Corban Addison

Long forgotten fields review