This reporting was made possible by a grant from the Fourth Estate Fund.
Sampson County is in the middle of North Carolina's hog and poultry country. About 1.9 million hogs live in the county — most in the nation, just ahead of neighboring Duplin County. And local farms raise more than 100 million poultry every year, including 6.5 million turkeys — number one in the state. To see what this means for neighbors, I visited environmental and community activist Sherri White-Williamson at her office in Clinton.
White-Williamson is a Sampson County native and executive director of the Environmental Justice Community Action Network, or EJCAN (EJ-CAN). She co-founded the group after she retired from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency in 2015 and moved back home.
She says massive animal farms began concentrating here more than 30 years ago. The area is also home to a large pork processing plant downtown, a wood pellet factory, and the state's largest regional landfill. All these operations have a cumulative effect on public health, says Williamson.
"The industries generally are in low income communities or minority communities, or a combination of both. And we already know that health outcomes in many of these communities are not as good as in other communities.
A study out this spring from researchers at Johns Hopkins University found that people who live near industrial hog operations are at risk from hog waste bacteria that collect both outside and inside their homes. That's on top of past studies that show hog and poultry waste can pollute nearby waterways. This pollution can increase risks for asthma and other respiratory illnesses, heart conditions, high blood pressure, diabetes and even depression. To see more, we hopped into her car for a tour that included a visit to a neighborhood next to a hog and turkey farm and other sites.
Duplin and Sampson counties are home to about half the state's hogs — and half the waste. Massive barns hold a thousand or more animals. Waste typically flows into holding ponds, called lagoons. There, it separates into solids and liquids, which are periodically sprayed on nearby crop fields as fertilizer. North Carolina requires farmers to develop waste management plans that detail how often they can spray. Annual state inspections are required. But violation notices are few, despite calls by environmentalists for stricter enforcement.
And it's not just hogs. Increasingly, CAFOs in eastern North Carolina are diversified, with both hogs and poultry.
"If you find one, more than likely you're going to find … the other very close by," says White-Williamson.
Residents near these farms are concerned about the smell, air quality, and potential contamination of their wells. They say they can't hang laundry out, for fear that spraying will mess up their clothes.
Sixty-seven-year-old Rayford Bennett lives next door to a large hog-and-poultry operation. It's about eight miles from downtown Clinton, at the end of a dirt road that bears the family name. Bennetts have lived here for generations == since long before there were CAFOs. Bennett and his dog come out to meet us.
You can smell the animals next door, but it's not overwhelming today. There's no waste being sprayed on the field behind his house. I ask Bennett what it's like to live so close.
"Ain't nothing good, that's for sure," he says, laughing. "Everything's taken away from you. Like you in a box all the time."
"What's bad about it?" I ask.
"Everything. I mean, you can't come out or do nothing, (with) all the manure smells all the time … You just think you's somewhat in a prison," he says.
"You mean, you've got to stay inside some days?"
"Lots of days," he replies. "I mean, if they gonna spray, you gotta get inside. It stinks.
I ask if it affects his water.
"Honestly, yes. They spray on the field. So it affects it a whole lot, I guess," Bennett says.
State records show that the farm next to Bennett has about 10,000 hogs and has been inspected annually, as required. The most recent inspection was July 2024. No illegal waste discharges or other violations were found. The farm self-reported higher-than-allowed water levels in a lagoon three days before the inspection. A 2023 routine inspection also noted some structures in need of repair and said recordkeeping needs improvement. There are other separately-owned CAFOs within a few hundred yards, as well.
Meanwhile, there's no public information about the poultry operation.
While the state Department of Environmental Quality regulates hog CAFOs, it mostly takes a hands-off approach to poultry farms. Just a handful of a particular type of farm face inspections, while nearly 5,000 aren't regulated and don't require permits.
Egg-laying operations using liquid waste management systems do face inspections. That's maybe 10 farms, say state water quality officials. That's out of an estimated 4,700 poultry farms statewide, according to a Raleigh News & Observer/Charlotte Observer investigation a couple of years ago. The vast majority of poultry farms - birds raised for meat - use what's called a dry-litter system. By state law, they aren't regulated and aren't required to get individual permits. They typically store litter in piles and then truck it elsewhere for use as fertilizer.
Under state rules, poultry litter has to be covered, and must be removed within 15 days. But White-Williamson says she often sees piles in place for a lot longer, even after she has complained to DEQ.
"They won't just take the word of a local resident who's seen it there," White-Williamson says. "So that means a pile of poultry litter could theoretically be out in a field somewhere for 30 days or more."
State water quality officials didn't want to be interviewed on tape for this story. They told me they hear about poultry violations mainly through complaints. But again, the state rarely issues violations.
A decade ago, more than 500 North Carolina residents sued hog farmers seeking financial compensation and changes in waste practices. But even the highest-profile judgment was cut down to a fraction of the original award, and other suits led only to small settlements. In 2017, a state law significantly limited potential damages in future suits.
Rayford Bennett says he fears there's nothing he can do about the air and water issues he faces.
"You can say all you want to, but then they ain't gonna do too much about the hog farmers. I mean, they rule Sampson County," Bennett says. "And it ain't good in there one bit for your health. They're getting all the pay for it. I'm getting all the smells. I mean, that's not right."
By the way, Bennett worked 20 years at Smithfield's processing plant in Clinton, another nuisance for neighbors. That's where we're headed next.
At midday, the smell begins to build over downtown. White-Williamson stops the car briefly next to a chain-link fence on the back side of the Smithfield plant, which can process more than 10,000 hogs a day. (Smithfield's plant in Tarheel, in Bladen County, has an ever larger capacity of 32,000 hogs a day.) Steam rises from parts of the plant, which is in a mostly Black neighborhood of small houses.
"It used to be a lot more populated. There were little stores over here and that kind of thing for the convenience of the community. But all of that … has long been gone," she says.
She says that's partly because of the plant.
"The odor affects the property values, obviously, of these folks over here. They cannot sell the property, at least not for what they'd be able to get for the property if it was some in some other area, not close to a facility like this," White-Williamson says.
The smell is so bad that people keep their doors and windows closed — even on the hottest days.
"Some of them actually burn incense or candles all day just to try to keep the odor down. And obviously, depending on what you're burning, that could be an air quality issue in the home," she says.
Finally, we drive out of town, past closed textile, glass, and manufacturing plants. … We go past a company called Hog Slat, which makes the concrete grates that go under hogs in the barns. That's becoming big business for Sampson, says White-Williamson.
From there, we head east from Clinton to the Duplin County line, to see another new industry taking hold here - biogas generated from hog waste.
"We are headed out to Turkey. I'm going to show you the Align facility, which is the biogas facility here. And there is a second facility called Montauk, which is using hog waste to create some type of energy," White-Williamson explains.
Related: Big Companies Bet On Cleaner Power From Pig Poop Ponds (NPR)
Those companies — Montauk Renewables and Align RNG — call it renewable natural gas, or RNG. Align is a partnership between Virginia-based Dominion Energy and Smithfield Foods.
Here's how it works: The farmer installs a cover over a waste lagoon. Methane escaping from the decaying waste is captured and piped to a refining plant. From there, it's sent into the local natural gas pipeline and sold for energy.
This could be an answer to North Carolina's animal waste problem. But it's expensive and right now, covered lagoons are few and far between. And biogas may not be a silver bullet: Environmentalists say they're concerned about safety and air quality around the facilities.
Related: The Trump administration recently canceled funding for study of the health impacts of swine biogas in North Carolina. (Inside Climate News)
Roy Lee Lindsey of the North Carolina Pork Council says North Carolina has some of the most stringent rules in the nation for handling hog waste. Today's lagoon-and-spray systems are a far cry from decades ago when manure was unmanaged and often wound up in creeks. At least for now, we don't have anything better, says Lindsey.
"Well, if we could identify another system that worked as efficiently as does lagoon and spray fields, that appropriately handled waste, as does lagoon and spray fields, and was economically viable, we would adopt it. There's no question," Lindsey says.
In other words, other waste disposal methods are too expensive and would lead to fewer farms, less pork available at the grocery store, and higher prices.
"Are there things that we could do to change how we manage manure on the farm? Yes. Are there things we could do to change that that would allow us to remain in business? And today, the answer is no," Lindsey says.
"So if what you want is us out of business, then yes, we can make a change, and we can dramatically reduce the number of farms that are here in North Carolina. We can dramatically reduce the amount of hogs that are raised here. But you're not going to find pork in the grocery store the way you do today, and you're not going to be able to buy it at the price you are today," he says.
Sherri White-Williamson acknowledges that CAFOs and related businesses are important employers and taxpayers in town. She says the incomes people get from these jobs help them buy homes, put children through college, and retire.
Nobody wants to see the industry go away, she says.
"It's not about putting any of these businesses out of business, because they are a part of the economy. It's about figuring out how all of us can live together better and have a better quality of life," she says.
Adds Larry Baldwin, of the International Riverkeeper Alliance: "It's about putting them out of the pollution business, but not putting them out of business. We talked about … bringing the people into a city. Well, we have wastewater treatment plants. We can do the same thing (with CAFOs)."
For people who live near CAFOs and related operations, the question is when the promise of cleaner waste management practices might be realized.
NEXT: What about the farmers? We visit a hog and poultry farmer in Wayne County to see what she does to protect the environment and her own family's health.
