CHAPTER 18
THE MURPHY MEN
The highest reach of injustice is to be deemed just when you are not.
—Plato
There’s a certain pseudo-swagger that marks a company man, a gleam in the eye like a borrowed ray of sunshine, a swell to the chest that compensates for a subordinated ego, and a smirk at the ready to conceal the pucker of one who’s kissed the ring. The Murphy men are no exception, especially the satraps and prefects who now run the kingdom built by Wendell Murphy and Joe Luter. Men like Don Butler, John Sargent, and Kraig Westerbeek.
All of these men Mike Kaeske summons in the fall of 2016 to answer his questions about the world they have made, to swear a solemn oath and explain how they can justify a system that exploits everyone but themselves. It would be more gratifying, of course, if Kaeske could depose the old hog kings. But the law only allows the plaintiffs to look back three years from the date the lawsuit was filed, and both Murphy and Luter vacated the throne long before 2010. So Kaeske subjects their underbosses to his version of the Inquisition.
John Sargent, the vice president of hog operations at Murphy-Brown, has the distinction of being the first Smithfield man in the spotlight. With his close-cropped hair, receding widow’s peak, and knuckled nose that looks like it’s seen a few blows in its time, he has the unobtrusive, melt-into-the-background appearance of a high school athletics director.
In deposing Sargent, Kaeske is really only interested in soliciting one thing: a portrait of serfdom in the kingdom, the scripted life of a Smithfield contract grower. As commissions go, it should be a breeze. The feudal relationship is spelled out in black and white in the company’s grower contracts. Still, Sargent struggles to admit the obvious. When Kaeske presses him about the touchy concept of “control,” Sargent does a cockatoo dance around it.
“We do not control the growers,” he says. “They have specific guidelines in the contract that they’re responsible for, and we have guidelines that we’re responsible for.”
It’s an artful dodge, but Kaeske is ready for it. “Murphy-Brown controls the requirements of the grower’s facilities through the standard operating procedures, correct?”
After a turgid chuckle, Sargent replies, “Again, we don’t control…We control…Actually, I want to say it right. We have a specification of the facilities they are supposed to have. If we find a better way to do it, we can change those requirements.”
As if prompted, Kaeske turns to the contract itself. In a series of short queries, he outlines the shape of the growers’ servitude. “You get to mow the grass if you don’t like the way the grass is being mowed, right?…You get to spray for weeds if you don’t like the way the weeds are being sprayed, right?…Murphy-Brown gets to decide when the hogs are ready to leave the grower’s facility, correct?…Murphy-Brown controls the feed brought to the facility, right?…And Murphy-Brown controls when the dead hogs are picked up, right?”
All of this Sargent admits, albeit reluctantly.
Next, Kaeske illuminates the way the growers are paid. It’s a take-it-or-leave-it offer. It’s not a living wage. It’s not adjusted for inflation. It’s nonnegotiable. The growers receive a flat day rate for each hog in their custody, along with a small performance bonus. But they don’t get to choose how many hogs they take, or how long those hogs stay in their barns, or when the barns get replenished after the hogs are taken to market. In addition, Sargent can’t recall the last time the growers got a raise. He doesn’t know if there’s been any increase in the past ten years.
Toward the end, Kaeske zeroes in on the hog waste. He gets Sargent to admit that, even with all the control the company exercises over the growers, it has never attempted to monitor the odor level or manage waste disposal at any of the farms in the discovery pool.
The portrait that emerges from Sargent’s deposition turns the parable of the Prodigal Son on its head. Instead of treating its growers like favorite sons, the hog barons rule them with an iron fist, pay them with pig scraps, and let them clean up the shit.
The next Smithfield executive to tangle with Kaeske is the vice president of environment and support operations, Kraig Westerbeek. In contrast to Sargent, Westerbeek has the stolid face and glowering eyes of a rodeo bull. And he takes a decidedly bovine approach to his testimony, trying repeatedly, if vainly, to throw the trial lawyer off his back.
The documents Kaeske shows him are not grower contracts but news articles and scientific studies that Mona’s team uncovered in Murphy-Brown’s own archives. Back when Wendell Murphy was at the helm, the company kept an exhaustive record of negative media coverage. As a consequence, Kaeske doesn’t have to browbeat Westerbeek about whether Smithfield knew about the health studies and neighbor complaints and award-winning exposés. The Bates stamps on the documents from McGuireWoods are as good as fingerprints.
Westerbeek, however, insists that all the scientists and journalists were wrong. He takes issue with a Yale study and a Johns Hopkins study and University of Iowa study and a host of other peer-reviewed research on the adverse health effects of industrial agriculture. He disagrees with Steve Wing’s work on hog CAFOs. It’s as if he thinks that all the scientists are living in a hermetically sealed bubble and have no clue what they’re talking about. Westerbeek doesn’t see the trap Mike Kaeske has laid for him until the jaws snap shut.
“Sir,” says Kaeske, “can you name me a single scientific study published in the world’s literature that says there are no human health effects from industrial hog operations?”
“I don’t think studies like that are necessary,” Westerbeek replies.
Kaeske asks the question again, but Westerbeek dissimulates. “I think what we see in these studies is people trying to prove that something exists that I think folks that live in these communities know doesn’t exist.”
Asked the same question yet again, Westerbeek pivots and offers the vague hypothesis that the “National Pork Board” has conducted such a study, but he’s not prepared to identify it.
Eventually, Kaeske reframes the inquiry in the guise of common sense. Westerbeek isn’t really trying to deny that hog waste sprayed into the air around a residential neighborhood has an unpleasant odor, is he? Surely, Westerbeek isn’t saying that shit doesn’t stink.
Westerbeek blinks. “In specific situations, that would be possible.” Then he backtracks quickly. “I didn’t say there would be bad odor. I said in certain situations there could be odor.”
Westerbeek doesn’t seem to realize how ridiculous this farce is going to look to a panel of jurors. In spouting nonsense in front of the camera, he has placed his own neck in the noose.
He has given the jury carte blanche to kick over the stool.
Don Butler doesn’t help, though he gives it the old college try. He is a classic company front man, well practiced in corporate statecraft and double-speak, and firmly in control of his manners. With an implacable stare that almost never wavers, he looks a bit like an Easter Island head. And his messaging is equally unyielding. After decades spent flogging for Carroll’s Foods and then Murphy-Brown, he has recently been promoted to run public affairs for the entire Smithfield empire. He can recite the company line in his sleep. He wrote the book on it.
But he has never had to tangle with the likes of Mike Kaeske.
As with Sargent and Westerbeek, the trial lawyer is clear-eyed about his goal with Butler. He wants to dismantle the human shield that the PR man has erected to ward off public censure and invite public sympathy—the illusion of the Smithfield family farmer. He knows Butler isn’t going to swing the wrecking ball willingly. He’s going to have to force the man’s hand.
Kaeske puts the seminal question to Butler bluntly. “You use this term ‘family farmer’ a lot. What does the term ‘family farmer’ mean?”
“It means a family that’s engaged in agriculture,” replies Butler.
“I’ve seen you say many times—you, Don Butler, on behalf of Smithfield—that 80 percent of all the hog operations in North Carolina are owned by family farmers. Correct?”
Butler affirms the statistic, then clarifies that, in his view, a hog farmer doesn’t have to live at his operation—or even near it—for his farm to be considered a “family farm.” Indeed, the farmer’s family doesn’t have to work at the operation. The farmer doesn’t have to get most of his income from the operation. The farmer doesn’t even have to own the hogs. “A family farm is just a farm owned by a family that’s engaged in agriculture,” he explains.
Kaeske presses him on this.
“So, basically, the requirement is that there be a human who owns an operation and he have a family. Is that what’s required to be a family farmer?”
“A family farmer is a person who owns a farm,” replies Butler.
“A person who owns a farm?”
“Or a family,” Butler adds.
Kaeske gives him a hypothetical. Robbie Montgomery is one of three investors in Bandit 3 LLC, which owns the Crooked Run hog operation in the Anderson case. Montgomery is a Smithfield employee. Neither he nor his brother or father (the three members of Bandit 3) manages Crooked Run on a daily basis. They bought it as an investment. Indeed, Montgomery’s only link to the hog operation is the stake he holds in the LLC that owns the facility.
“Is he a family farmer?” Kaeske asks.
Butler’s composure splinters. “That farm would be a contract operation,” he says, with a trace of irritation, “and would fall under my definition of a family farm.”
Kaeske raises the Farm Families advertising campaign. “In your public relations efforts on behalf of the hog industry, you do not tell the people of North Carolina that many of the hog farms that you’re referring to as ‘family farms’ are really investments bought by people with no background in agriculture, correct?”
Butler doesn’t bite. If a hog farm isn’t company-owned, he says, it’s a family farm in his book. Full stop. Indeed, he takes offense. “I’ve been involved in recruiting many of these people who are today contract growers, and they are in every sense of the word ‘family farmers.’ ”
It’s an effective parry, but Kaeske doesn’t relent. “So if Exxon, for example, owned fifteen hog operations, you would call them a family farmer, correct?”
Butler stares into the middle distance. “No,” he finally admits. “Family farmers are people who invest in agricultural operations, including livestock production.”
Mike Kaeske continues to spar with him, but no amount of verbal jiujitsu can force Don Butler to give ground. What the PR man’s deposition does reveal, however, is that the Big Ag revolution has so transformed the economics of agriculture that a contract farmer in 2016 bears almost no resemblance to the Old MacDonald that generations of American children have sung about in their nursery rhymes. This iconic figure in our national landscape, a man whose wealth and virtue are grounded in the land, this independent patriot that Thomas Jefferson lauded as our “most valuable citizen,” has been reduced to a scabrous shadow of his former self. His farm has been turned into a machine, his animals into cogs and pistons. The modern contract farmer is a servant to his lenders and a pawn in the hands of global corporations that siphon off his labor and leave him diminished and dependent.
The hog kingdom isn’t just a dystopia for the neighbors. It’s a dystopia for the farmers, too, though men like Don Butler have conditioned the farmers not to see it.
That’s where Mike Kaeske and the team from Wallace & Graham travel next, after all the company men have been deposed. With permission from Judge Britt, they go down east into the heart of hog country to see the CAFOs for themselves.