This reporting was made possible by a grant from the Fourth Estate Fund.
The best way to see the scale of industrial animal farming in North Carolina is from the air.
Pilot Rolf Wallin revs up his single-engine Cessna Skylane on the runway at Duplin County Airport, about 80 miles southeast of Raleigh.
Wallin volunteers with the nonprofit Southwings to fly people over sites of environmental concern. With us is Kemp Burdette, the Cape Fear Riverkeeper, who keeps an eye on pollution threats along the river and its tributaries, including CAFOs.
"So the route is just kind of a tour of Duplin and Sampson, the two most heavily concentrated counties in North Carolina for both swine and poultry CAFOs," Burdette says. "And the Cape Fear basin, in general, is the most heavily concentrated watershed in the world for swine CAFOs. And poultry is expanding rapidly, frequently right next door to swine."
Rows of long, metal-roofed barns are visible on all sides of the plane.
"Everywhere you look, you see either a swine or a poultry CAFO. This one's discharging into the lagoon right now. You can see it coming out of that blue pipe," Burdette says, pointing out the window.
Duplin and Sampson counties not only lead North Carolina, but they also have more hog farms than any other counties in the nation. North Carolina is behind only Iowa and Minnesota, with 8.2 million pigs on nearly 2,500 farms that are grown and processed into meat here. The rest – around 800,000 more – are sent to other states for finishing and processing. It's big business, says Roy Lee Lindsey, CEO of the North Carolina Pork Council.
"Today we're third (nationally) in terms of producing market hogs," Lindsey says. "We're still the second largest in the country in terms of our sow herd, or our breeding herd. And the number of baby pigs that are born in any given state, we rank second only, behind Iowa, in that regard. And roughly 13% of all the pigs in the United States are born right here in North Carolina."
Today's big farms, with tens of thousands of hogs each, are a big change from a few decades ago, when most farms had fewer than a couple thousand animals.
In 2002, about one-quarter of hogs were on smaller farms, according to the United States Department of Agriculture's (USDA) Census of Agriculture for that year. Between 2002 and 2022, the proportion of hogs at smaller operations (with fewer than 2,000 hogs) declined from 25% to just 5%. At the same time, larger operations (5,000 hogs or more) increased from 53% to 75%. The proportion of mid-sized operations decreased slightly.
Like hogs, poultry farming also has exploded in the past couple of decades in North Carolina. On major highways, it's not unusual to see trucks carrying hundreds of turkeys or chickens in stacked cages - with feathers flying. The state ranks first in the U.S. for overall poultry production. The USDA estimates North Carolina has nearly a billion turkeys and chickens - more than 90 times the human population. We know a lot less about the poultry industry because North Carolina doesn't issue poultry permits or track poultry the way it does hogs.
"Poultry farms are North Carolina's number one agriculture business, yet there's so much secrecy around them," says investigative reporter Gavin Off. "They're not inspected, they're not permitted. Neighbors aren't told if they're coming to their town. Local governments have no say in them."
Off was an investigative reporter on the team that produced the award-winning 2022 series "Big Poultry" for the Raleigh News & Observer and Charlotte Observer. Off and his colleagues mapped the industry's growth, using satellite data to identify nearly 4,700 farms in 79 counties.
All those hogs and birds mean billions of dollars in revenues and thousands of jobs – at big food companies like Smithfield, Tyson and Perdue and at the local farms that contract to grow the animals for them. But they also mean massive amounts of waste. Hogs produce 3½ times the amount of solid waste as humans.
"We're raising too many animals in too small an area for the environment to really handle it," says Larry Baldwin, North Carolina coordinator for the "Pure Farms, Pure Waters" campaign of the international Waterkeeper Alliance.
He says the growth of hog and poultry CAFOs is like a massive migration of humans from the country to the city - but without building sewage systems.
"When we moved … from the countryside into cities, we went from an outhouse process of processing waste to doing a wastewater treatment plant type of thing. Well, we're not doing that same thing with the CAFOs," Baldwin says.
At large hog farms, waste is sent into special ponds, or lagoons, where solids settle to the bottom and decompose, and liquids rise to the top. Those liquids are sprayed onto nearby fields as fertilizer. Flying over Sampson County, you can see it doesn't always go where it's supposed to, says Cape Fear Riverkeeper Kemp Burdette.
"Down on the left side of the plane, there's a four-barn hog farm spraying right now. First thing I saw when we took off. And of course, it's pretty windy out, so quite a bit of drift on that spray," he says.
These practices haven't changed in decades, even though new lagoon-and-spray farms were banned in 1997 because of environmental concerns.
Meanwhile, poultry farms collect piles of bird poop and spread it on fields nearby, or truck it to farmers elsewhere.
"Down below us here, you can see poultry litter on the field there, down to your right. If you look kind of more down, you see those piles. That's poultry litter. Those piles should not be left out for more than 15 days, but that frequently happens up to 15 months, even," he says.
Environmental and community activists say poultry and hog manure are a public health risk. That waste is chock full of chemicals such as phosphorus, ammonia and nitrogen as well as harmful bacteria and viruses, like swine flu and avian flu.
Outbreaks in recent years have also hit North Carolina farms and led to the loss of millions of animals, as well as prompted fears of a jump to the human population.
Neighbors say these operations smell bad and can make them sick.
Science confirms that. Public health researchers have found that CAFOs can lead to respiratory illnesses, heart and kidney trouble, and other issues.
Environmentalists warn that some operations are too close to creeks and rivers, posing a risk to air and water quality as well as flooding during big storms. And CAFOs are an environmental justice issue, disproportionately affecting people of color and lower-income income.
Farmers argue that they have to follow strict rules - both in government regulations and as part of their contracts with big food companies that take their animals. Roy Lee Lindsey of the North Carolina Pork Council says farmers have been caring for the environment for centuries - and run their farms sustainably.
"They live there too," Lindsey says. "I mean, our folks overwhelmingly live on their farms. They're not going to create an environment where they don't want to live, so they raise their kids there."
Farmers I've talked to say the same. Later in this series, we'll meet a hog and poultry farmer and talk to her about how she protects the environment.
