THE ANNUAL OUTPUT of the world’s most prolific industrial pork producer is not limited to billions of pounds of packaged meat from the slaughter of tens of millions of animals. The company also generates sufficient waste to destroy rivers, kill millions of fish, and severely impact the lives of residents in hundreds of rural communities. Now that Smithfield has conquered the U.S. swine industry, it is moving rapidly into Poland, Romania, and other hog-producing nations.
Smithfield Foods, the largest and most profitable pork processor in the world, killed 27 million hogs in 2007. That’s a number worth considering. A slaughter-weight hog is 50 percent heavier than a person. The logistical challenge of processing that many pigs each year is roughly equivalent to butchering and boxing the entire human populations of New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Houston, Philadelphia, Phoenix, San Antonio, San Diego, Dallas, San Jose, Detroit, Indianapolis, Jacksonville, San Francisco, Columbus, Austin, Memphis, Baltimore, Fort Worth, Charlotte, El Paso, Milwaukee, Seattle, Boston, Denver, Louisville, Washington, DC, Nashville, Las Vegas, Portland, Oklahoma City, and Tucson.
Smithfield Foods actually faces a more difficult task than transmogrifying the populations of America’s thirty-two largest cities into edible packages of meat. Hogs produce three times more excrement than human beings do. The 500,000 pigs at a single Smithfield subsidiary in Utah generate more fecal matter each year than the 1.5 million inhabitants of Manhattan. The best estimates put Smithfield’s total waste discharge at 26 million tons a year. That would fill four Yankee Stadiums. Even when divided among the many small pig production units that surround the company’s slaughterhouses, that is not a containable amount. Smithfield’s total sales in 2009 will reach an estimated $12 billion.1 So prodigious is its fecal waste, however, that if the company treated its effluvia as big-city governments do—even if it came marginally close to that standard—it would lose money. Many of its contractors consequently allow great volumes of waste to run out of their slope-floored barns and sit blithely in the open, untreated, where the elements break it down and gravity pulls it into groundwater and river systems. Smithfield avows a culture of environmental responsibility, but ostentatious pollution is a linchpin of its business model.
A lot of pig shit is one thing; a lot of highly toxic pig shit is another. The excrement of Smithfield hogs is hardly even pig shit: it would be more accurate to compare it to industrial waste than to organic manure. The reason it is so toxic is Smithfield’s efficiency. In 2008, the company produced 7 billion pounds of pork.2 That’s a remarkable achievement, a prolificacy unimagined two decades ago, and the only way to do it is to raise pigs in astonishing, unprecedented concentrations.
Smithfield’s pigs live by the hundreds or thousands in warehouselike barns, in rows of wall-to-wall pens. There is no sunlight, straw, fresh air, or earth. Sows are artificially inseminated and fed and delivered of their piglets in cages too small to turn around in. Forty fully grown 250-pound male hogs often occupy a pen the size of a tiny apartment. In such internment, hogs with even minor open wounds are vulnerable to cannibalism. Slatted openings in the concrete floors allow excrement to fall into a catchment pit under the pens, but numerous things besides excrement can wind up in the pits: afterbirths, old batteries, piglets accidentally crushed by their mothers, broken bottles of insecticide, antibiotic syringes, stillborn pigs—anything small enough to fit through the foot-wide pipes that drain the pits. The pipes remain closed until enough sewage accumulates in the pits to create good expulsion pressure; then the pipes are opened and everything bursts out into a large holding pond.
The temperature inside hog houses can exceed 90 degrees. The air, at times saturated almost to the point of precipitation with gases from shit and chemicals, can be lethal to the pigs. Enormous exhaust fans run twenty-four hours a day. The fans function like the ventilators of terminal patients: if they break down for any length of time, pigs start dying.
From Smithfield’s point of view, the problem with this lifestyle is immunological. Taken together, the immobility, poisonous air, and constant terror of confinement badly damage the pigs’ immune systems. They become susceptible to infection, and in such dense quarters microbes or parasites or fungi, once established in one pig, will rush spritelike through the whole population. Accordingly, factory farm pigs are doused with insecticides and infused with a large range of antibiotics and vaccines. Without these compounds—oxytetracycline, Draxxin, ceftiofur, tiamulin—diseases would likely kill them. Thus the pigs remain in a state of dying until they’re slaughtered. When a pig nearly ready to be slaughtered grows ill, workers sometimes shoot it up with as many drugs as necessary to get it to the slaughterhouse under its own power. As long as the pig remains ambulatory, it can be legally killed and sold as meat.
The drugs and chemicals Smithfield administers to its pigs, of course, exit its hog houses in pig shit. Industrial pig waste contains a host of pernicious substances: ammonia, hydrogen sulfide, cyanide, phosphates, nitrates, and heavy metals. The waste also nurses more than 100 microbial pathogens that cause illness in humans, including salmonella, cryptosporidia, streptococci, and giardia. Each gram of hog shit can carry up to 100 million fecal coliform bacteria.
Smithfield’s largest holding ponds—the company calls them lagoons—cover 120,000 square feet. The area around a single slaughterhouse can encompass hundreds of lagoons, some of which are 30 feet deep. Even light rains can cause lagoons to overflow; major floods have transformed entire counties into pig-shit bayous. To alleviate swelling lagoons, workers sometimes pump the shit out of them and spray it on surrounding fields, which results in what the industry daintily refers to as “overapplication.” This will turn hundreds of acres—thousands of football fields—into shallow mud puddles of pig shit. Tree branches will drip with pig shit.
Many pig farm lagoons have polyethylene liners, which can be punctured by rocks in the ground, allowing shit to seep beneath the liners and spread and ferment. Gases from the fermentation inflate the liner like a hot-air balloon and rise in an expanding, accelerating bubble that forces thousands of tons of feces out of the lagoon in all directions.
The lagoons themselves are so viscous and venomous that it is often impossible to save people who fall into them. A few years ago, a truck driver in Oklahoma was transferring pig shit to a Smithfield lagoon when he and his truck went over the side. It took almost three weeks to recover his body. In 1992, when a worker making repairs to a lagoon in Minnesota began to choke to death on the fumes, a coworker dived in after him, and they died the same death. On another occasion, a worker who was repairing a lagoon in Michigan was overcome by the fumes and fell in. His fifteen-year-old nephew dived in to save him but was overcome; the worker’s cousin went in to save the teenager but was overcome; the worker’s older brother dived in to save them but was overcome; and then the worker’s father dived in. They all died in pig shit.
The chairman of Smithfield Foods, Joseph Luter III, is a funny, jowly, canny, barbarous guy who lives in a multimillion-dollar condo on Park Avenue in Manhattan and conveys himself about the planet in a corporate jet and a private yacht. At seventy, he is unrepentant in the face of criticism. He describes himself as a “tough man in a tough business” and his factories as wholly legitimate products of the American free market. He can be sardonic; he likes to mock his critics and rivals. “The animal rights people,” he once said, “want to impose a vegetarian’s society on the U.S. Most vegetarians I know are neurotic.” When the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) cited Smithfield for thousands of violations of the Clean Water Act, Luter responded by comparing what he claimed were the number of violations the company could theoretically have been charged with (2.5 million, by his calculation) to the number of documented violations up to that point (74). “A very, very small percent,” he said.
Luter grew up butchering hogs in his father’s slaughterhouse in the town of Smithfield, Virginia. When he took over the family business forty years ago, it was a local, marginally profitable meatpacking operation. Under Luter, Smithfield was soon making enough money to begin purchasing neighboring meat packers. From the beginning, Luter thought amorally and monopolistically. He bought out his local competition until he completely dominated the regional pork processing market, but he was dissatisfied. The company was still buying most of its hogs from independent farmers, and Luter wanted to control every stage of production, from cage birth to mechanized dismemberment and distribution.
So Luter devised a new kind of contract. Smithfield would own the living hogs; its contractors would raise them and be responsible for disposing of their shit and, should they die before slaughter, their corpses. This arrangement made it impossible for small hog farmers to survive—those who could not handle thousands and thousands of pigs were driven out of business. “It was a simple matter of economic power,” says Eric Tabor, chief of staff for Iowa’s attorney general.
Smithfield’s expansion was unique in the history of the industry: Between 1990 and 2005, it grew by more than 1,000 percent. In 1997 it was the nation’s seventh-largest pork producer; by 1999 it was the largest. Smithfield now kills one of every four pigs sold commercially in the United States. As Smithfield expanded, it consolidated its farms, clustering millions of fattening hogs around its slaughterhouses.
Under Luter, the company was becoming a great pollution machine: Smithfield was suddenly generating unheard-of amounts of pig shit adulterated with drugs and chemicals. According to the EPA, Smithfield’s largest farm-slaughterhouse operation—in Tar Heel, North Carolina—dumps more waste into the nation’s water each year than all but three other manufacturing facilities.
Luter likes to tell this story: An old man and his grandson are walking in a cemetery. They see a tombstone that reads: HERE LIES CHARLES W. JOHNSON, A MAN WHO HAD NO ENEMIES. “Gee, Granddad,” the boy says, “that man must have been a great man. He had no enemies.”
“Son,” the grandfather replies, “if a man didn’t have any enemies, he didn’t do a damn thing with his life.”
If Luter were to set this story in Ivy Hill Cemetery, in Smithfield, while he was growing up there, the branches of the cemetery’s trees would be bent with the weight of dozens of buzzards. The waste stream from the Luters’ meatpacking plant, with its thickening agents of pig innards and dead fish, flowed nearby. Inflicting indignity on the deceased is an ancient way of making enemies. In 2005, before he retired as CEO of Smithfield Foods, Joseph Luter took home $10,802,134. He held $19,296,000 in unexercised stock options.
One day in the fall of 2006, a retired Marine Corps colonel and environmental activist named Rick Dove, the former riverkeeper of North Carolina’s Neuse River, arranged to have me flown over Smithfield’s operation in North Carolina. Dove hires private planes to document regulatory violations from the air. He is a focused guy of seventy; it is hard for him to talk about corporate hog farming without becoming angry. After he got out of the Marine Corps in 1987, he became a commercial fisherman, which he had wanted to do since he was a kid. He was successful, and his son went into business with him. Then factory hog farming arrived and killed the fish and both Dove and his son got seriously ill.
Dove and other activists provide the only effective oversight of corporate hog farming in the region. The industry has long made big campaign contributions to politicians responsible for regulating hog farms. In 1995, while Smithfield was trying to persuade the state of Virginia to reduce a large regulatory fine, Joseph Luter gave $100,000 to then-governor George Allen’s political action committee. In 1998, hog operators in North Carolina spent $1 million to help defeat state legislators who wanted to phase out open-pit lagoons. The state has rarely had enough inspectors to ensure that hog farms are complying with environmental regulations.
The airport Dove uses, in New Bern, North Carolina, is tiny; the plane he uses, a 1975 Cessna single-prop, looks tiny even in the tiny airport. We arrived early on a lightly cloudy day. From the parking lot, we walked unnoticed across the noiseless tarmac to the plane. The pilot, Joe Corby, was waiting for us. Corby was considerably older than I’d expected him to be. The Cessna’s cabin had four cracked yellow linoleum seats. It looked like the interior of a 1975 VW bug; possibly it had more dials.
“I have a GPS,” Dove said to Corby as we got in, “so I can kinda guide you.”
“Oh you do!” Corby said. “Well, OK.”
We took off. “Bunch of turkey buzzards,” Dove said, looking out the window. “They’re big.”
“Don’t wanna hit them,” Corby said. “They would be . . . very destructive.”
We climbed to 2,000 feet and headed toward the densest multitude of hogs in the world. The landscape at first was unsuspiciously pastoral—fields planted in corn or soybeans or cotton, tree lines staking creeks, a few unincorporated villages of prefab houses. Then we arrived at the global locus of hog farming, and the countryside turned into an immense subdivision for pigs. Hog farms that contract with Smithfield differ in dimension but are otherwise very similar: parallel rows of six, eight, or twelve one-story hog houses, some holding many thousands of hogs, all backing onto a single large lagoon. The lagoons are not brown. Bacterial activity turns them pink. The pink comes in two shades: dark or Pepto-Bismol—vile, freaky colors in the middle of green farmland.
From the plane, Smithfield’s farms replicated one another as far as I could see in every direction. Visibility was about four miles. I counted the lagoons. There were 103. That worked out to at least 50,000 hogs per square mile. You could fly for an hour, Dove said, and you would see nothing but lagoons and hog houses, with little towns of modular homes and a few family farms pinioned amid them.
Each lagoon was surrounded by large fields. Pollution control at Smithfield consists of spraying the pig shit from the lagoons onto the fields. The idea is borrowed from the past: the small hog farmers that Smithfield drove out of business fertilized their crops with manure. Smithfield says this is what it does—its crops gratefully ingest every ounce of its pig shit, creating a zero-discharge system. “If you manage your fields correctly, there should be no runoff, no pollution,” says Dennis Treacy, Smithfield’s vice president of environmental affairs. “If you’re getting runoff, you’re doing something wrong.”
The environmental scientists who have studied this system say that Smithfield is doing something wrong. So do former and current officials at the North Carolina Department of Environment and Natural Resources, a former director of the North Carolina Department of Health and Human Services, officials at the EPA, and every person I talked to who lived near a lagoon.
Smithfield doesn’t grow nearly enough crops to absorb all of its pig shit. The company raises so many pigs in so little space that it has to import the majority of their feed. In 2009, North Carolina had 10 million hogs.3 Its farmers imported 124,000 metric tons of nitrogen and 29,000 tons of phosphorus for use in hog feed. The hogs ate the feed and then nutritiously shit out 101,000 metric tons of nitrogen and 22,700 metric tons of phosphorus. That kind of nutrient injection into an ecosystem creates what Dan Whittle, a former senior policy associate with the Department of Environment and Natural Resources, calls a “massive imbalance.” Well before hogs reached their current population in North Carolina, three hog-raising counties were generating more nitrogen, and eighteen were generating more phosphorus, than all the crops in the state could assimilate.
Few human food crops can withstand the nutrient loads in industrial pig shit, so Smithfield’s contract farmers plant a lot of hay, which is extremely nitrate-tolerant. In 1992, when the number of hogs in North Carolina was escalating wildly, so much hay was planted to deal with the fresh volumes of pig shit that the market for hay collapsed. The high-potency nitric acid in hog lagoon hay often sickens livestock. For a while, former governor Jim Hunt—a recipient of pork sector campaign money—was feeding hog farm hay to his cows. Locals say it made the cows queasy and irritable, and they kicked Hunt repeatedly, seemingly in revenge. It’s a popular tale in hog country.
When you fly over eastern North Carolina, you notice right away that springs and streams and swamplands and small lakes are everywhere. You are looking down at a pluvial coastal plain, grooved and tilted toward the sea. The sandy coastal soil is highly permeable, and the water table lies just three feet beneath the surface. Smithfield’s sprayfields almost always incline toward creeks or creek-fed swamps. Climate, geology, and topography rinse and drain the sprayfields thoroughly.
Many studies have documented the harm caused by hog waste runoff. One showed pig shit raising the level of nitrogen and phosphorus in a receiving river as much as sixfold. Corporate hog farms in North Carolina are situated almost exclusively in the Cape Fear and Neuse River basins. Nine of the rivers and creeks in those basins have been classified by the state as either “negatively impacted” or environmentally “impaired.”
On our way back to the New Bern airport, we passed over a curiosity: perfectly vertical fountains of shit-mist. Smithfield’s contractors, Dove said, were spraying the contents of their lagoons straight up into the air. What seemed like an inexplicably inefficient irrigation method, he said, was actually a disposal technique. Lofted and atomized, the gossamer pig shit is blown clear of the farms.
Open-pit lagoons emit hundreds of volatile gases into the atmosphere: methane, carbon dioxide, hydrogen sulfide. A single lagoon releases many millions of bacteria into the air per day, some resistant to human antibiotics. Hog farms in North Carolina also discharge 300 tons of nitrogen every day as ammonia gas, much of which falls back to earth, stimulating algal eruptions that asphyxiate lakes and streams.
In 1995, a woman downwind from a corporate hog farm in Olivia, Minnesota, called a poison control center and described her symptoms. “Ma’am,” the poison control officer told her, “the only symptoms of hydrogen sulfide poisoning you’re not experiencing are seizures, convulsions and death. Leave the area immediately.”
People who breathe the air emanating from hog lagoons get bronchitis, diarrhea, and nose bleeds; they suffer from mood disturbances, headaches, asthma, eye and throat irritation, and heart palpitations. Lagoon odors have been shown to suppress immune function: inhaling the particulate waste of hogs with compromised immune systems compromises human immune systems. In eastern North Carolina, virtually everyone lives close to a lagoon.
To wholly appreciate what this agglomeration of hog production does to the people who live near it, you have to appreciate the smell of industrial-strength pig shit. The ascending stench can nauseate pilots at 3,000 feet. On the day we flew over Smithfield’s farms, there was little wind to stir up the lagoons or carry the stink, and because it had been dry, the lagoon managers weren’t spraying very frequently. It was the best of times. We could smell the farms from the air, but the mephitic scent was intermittent and not particularly strong.
To get a really good whiff, I drove down a narrow country road of white sand and walked up to a Smithfield lagoon. At the end of the road stood a tractor and spray rig. The fetid white carcass of a hog lay on its back in a dumpster known as a “dead box.” Flies covered the hog’s snout. Its hooves looked like high heels. Millions of factory farm hogs—one study puts it at 10 percent—die before they make it to the killing floor. Some are taken to rendering plants, where they are propelled through meat grinders and then fed cannibalistically back to living hogs. Others are dumped into big open pits called “dead holes.” The borders of many hog farms are littered with pig corpses and bleached pig bones. The bears and buzzards of eastern North Carolina are said to be lazy and fat.
No one seemed to be around. It was quiet except for the gigantic exhaust fans affixed to the six hog houses. There was an unwholesome tang in the air, but there was no wind and it wasn’t hot, so I couldn’t smell the lagoon itself. I walked the few hundred yards over to it. It was covered with a thick film; its edge was a narrow beach of big black flies. Here, its odor was leaking out. I took a deep breath. Concentrated manure was my predictable first thought, but I was fighting an impulse to vomit even as I was thinking it. I’ve smelled stronger odors in my life, but nothing so insidiously and instantaneously nauseating. It took my mind a second or two to get through the odor’s first coat. The smell at its core had a frightening, uniquely enriched putridity, both deep-sweet and high-sour. I backed away and returned to the car, but I remained sick—it was a shivery, retchy kind of nausea—for a good five minutes. That’s apparently characteristic of industrial pig shit: It keeps making you sick for a good while after you’ve stopped smelling it. It’s an unduly invasive, adhesive smell. Your whole body reacts to it. It’s as if a substance has entered your stomach. A little while later I was driving and I caught a crosswind stench, and from the moment it hit me a timer in my body started ticking: you can only remain functional in that smell for so long. The memory of it makes you gag.
If the temperature and wind aren’t right and the lagoon managers are spraying, people in hog country can’t hang their laundry or sit on their porches or mow their lawns. Epidemiological studies show that those who live near hog lagoons suffer from abnormally high levels of depression, tension, anger, fatigue, and confusion. “We are used to farm odors,” one local farmer told me. “These are not farm odors.” The stink literally knocks people down: they walk out of the house to get something in the yard and become so nauseated they collapse.
That has happened to Julian and Charlotte Savage, an elderly couple whose farmland now abuts a Smithfield sprayfield—one of several meant to absorb the shit of 50,000 hogs. The Savages live in a small kit house. Sitting in the kitchen, Charlotte told me that she once saw Julian collapse in the yard and ran out and threw a coat over his head and dragged him back inside. Before Smithfield arrived, Julian’s family had farmed the land for the better part of a century. He raised tobacco, corn, wheat, turkeys, and chickens. Now he has respiratory problems and rarely goes outside.
Behind the house, a creek bordering the sprayfield flows into a swamp; the Savages have seen hog waste running right into the creek. Once, during a flood, they found pig shit six inches deep pooled around their house. They had to drain it by digging trenches, which took three weeks. Charlotte has noticed that nitrogen fallout keeps the trees around the house a deep synthetic green. There is a big buzzard population.
The Savages said they could keep the pig shit smell out of their house by shutting the doors and windows, but I thought the walls reeked faintly. They had a windbreak—an 80-foot-wide strip of forest—between their house and the fields. They knew people who didn’t, though, and when the smell was bad, those people quickly shut their windows and doors like everyone else, but their coffee and spaghetti and carrots still tasted like pig shit.
The Savages have had what seemed to be hog shit in their bathwater. Their well water, which was clean before Smithfield arrived, is now suspect. “I try not to drink it,” Charlotte said. “We mostly just drink drinks, soda and things.” While we talked, Julian spent most of the time on the living room couch; his lungs were particularly bad that day. Then he came into the kitchen. Among other things, he said: I can’t breathe it, it’ll put you on the ground; you can’t walk, you fall down; you breathe you gon’ die; you go out and smell it one time and your ass is gone; it’s not funny to be around it. It’s not funny, honey. He could have said all this tragicomically, with a thin smile, but he cried the whole time.
Smithfield is not just a virtuosic polluter; it is also a theatrical one. Its lagoons are historically prone to failure. In North Carolina alone they have spilled, in a span of four years, 2 million gallons of shit into the Cape Fear River, 1.5 million gallons into its Persimmon Branch, 1 million gallons into the Trent River, and 200,000 gallons into Turkey Creek. In Virginia, Smithfield was fined $12.6 million in 1997 for 6,900 violations of the Clean Water Act—the third-largest civil penalty ever levied under the act by the EPA. It amounted to .035 percent of Smithfield’s annual sales.
A river that receives copious waste from a confinement hog farm begins to die quickly. Toxins and microbes can kill plants and animals outright; the pig shit itself consumes available oxygen and suffocates fish and aquatic animals; and the transported nutrients foment deoxygenating algal blooms. The Pagan River runs by Smithfield’s original plant and headquarters in Virginia, which served as Joseph Luter’s staging ground for his assault on the pork-raising and pork-processing industries. For decades, before a spate of regulations, the Pagan had no living marsh grass, a paltry and poisonous population of fish and shellfish, and a half foot of noxious black mud lining its bed. The hulls of boats winched up out of the river bore inch-thick coats of greasy muck.
In North Carolina, an abundance of pig waste from Smithfield’s farms makes its way into the Neuse River. In a five-day span in 2003, more than 4 million fish in the river died. In 2004, an estimated 15 million fish died. In 2009, over 100 million died. The largest recorded fish kill in the history of the United States, which had a death toll of over 1 billion, occurred in the Neuse in 1991. Studies have consistently implicated nutrient overload as the cause of all these deaths. Research conducted between 2001 and 2006 showed a 500 percent increase in the river’s ammonia content. Pig waste runoff from the Neuse and other rivers has badly damaged the Albemarle-Pamlico Sound, which is almost as big as the Chesapeake Bay and provides half the nursery grounds used by fish in the eastern Atlantic.
The biggest spill in the history of corporate hog farming happened in 1995. The dike of a 120,000-square-foot lagoon owned by a Smithfield competitor ruptured, releasing 25.8 million gallons of effluent into the headwaters of the New River in North Carolina. It was the biggest environmental spill in United States history, more than twice as big as the Exxon Valdez oil spill six years earlier. The sludge was so caustic it reportedly burned your skin if you touched it, and so dense it took almost two months to make its way 16 miles downstream to the ocean. Over 1 million fish died.
It’s hard to conceive of fish kills on this scale. The 1995 kill began with turbulence in one small part of the water: fish writhing and dying. It then spread in patches along the length of the river. In two hours, dead and dying fish were mounded wherever the river’s contours slowed the current. Within a day, they were covering the riverbanks and coagulating the water. Buoyant dead eyes and scales and white bellies scintillated up and down the river out of sight—more fish than the river seemed capable of holding. The air above the water was chaotic with scavenging birds. There were far more fish than the birds could eat.
Spills aren’t the worst thing that can happen to virulent pig excrement lying exposed in fields and lagoons. Hurricanes are worse. In 1999, Hurricane Floyd washed 120,000,000 gallons of unsheltered hog waste into the Tar, Neuse, Roanoke, Pamlico, New, and Cape Fear rivers. Many of the pig shit lagoons of eastern North Carolina were underwater. Satellite photographs show a dark brown tide closing over the region’s waterways, converging on the Albemarle-Pamlico Sound and feeding itself out to sea in a long, well-defined channel. Very little freshwater marine life remained behind. Feces contaminated beaches; people encountered drowned pigs miles from their cages. A picture taken at the time shows a shark eating a dead pig three miles off the North Carolina coast.
Industrial hog farming fosters another kind of environmental havoc: outbreaks of Pfiesteria piscicida, a multiform microbe that has killed hundreds of millions of fish and harmed dozens of people. When nutrient-rich waste like pig shit floods waterways and precipitates algal blooms, fish arrive in large congregations to eat the algae, and this convergence of life attracts a lethal form of Pfiesteria.
Pfiesteria is invisible and odorless—you know it by the trail of dead. It kills fish by perforating their skin and eating their tissues and blood cells. Afflicted fish appear to dissolve. After the 1995 spill, Pfiesteria attacked and killed several million fish. Pfiesteria also consumes human blood cells: fishermen developed widening lesions on their hands and arms. People found that at least one of Pfiesteria’s toxins could take flight: breathing the air above the harrowed water caused severe respiratory difficulty, memory loss, headaches, blurry vision, and logical impairment. Some fishermen couldn’t find their way home. Others had trouble speaking in complete sentences. Laboratory workers exposed to Pfiesteria lost the ability to dial phones and solve simple math problems; they forgot their own names. Recovering from Pfiesteria’s pulmonary and nervous system damage could take days, weeks, months, or years.
Smithfield is no longer able to disfigure watersheds quite so obviously as in the past; it can no longer expand and flatten small pig farms quite so easily. In some places, new slaughterhouses are required to meet expensive waste disposal requirements. Several state legislatures have passed laws prohibiting or limiting the ownership of small farms by pork processors. North Carolina, where pigs now outnumber people, has passed a moratorium on new hog facilities and has prevailed upon Smithfield to fund research into alternative waste disposal technologies. Politicians in South Carolina, having taken a good look at their neighbor’s coastal plain, have pronounced the company unwelcome in the state. A few of Smithfield’s recent acquisition deals have come under federal and state scrutiny.
These efforts, of course, come comically late. Confinement hog operations control at least 75 percent of the market. Smithfield’s dominance is hardly at risk: Twenty-six percent of the pork processed in this country is Smithfield pork.4 The company’s expansion does not seem to be slowing down: From 2004 to 2006, Smithfield’s annual sales grew by $1.5 billion. In 2006, the company opened a $100 million processing plant in North Carolina. In September of that year, Smithfield announced that it would be merging with Premium Standard Farms, the nation’s second-largest hog grower and sixth-largest pork processor. The acquisition was completed in 2007; Smithfield now manufactures more pork than the next five largest pork producers in the nation combined.
As it grew, the company sought to present itself as an innovator of environmental technology. In 2003, Smithfield announced that it was investing $20 million in a program to turn its pig shit in Utah into clean-burning alternative fuel. It founded Smithfield Bioenergy, LLC, and built a biodiesel facility in Texas.5
“We’re paying a lot of attention to energy right now,” the Smithfield vice president, Dennis Treacy, said of the green energy initiatives. “We’ve come such a long way.” The company had undergone a “complete cultural shift on environmental matters.” In 2007, though, Smithfield Bioenergy still hadn’t turned a profit, and Smithfield dissolved it.6
Nothing could have altered the physical reality of Smithfield Foods itself. “All of a sudden we have this 800-pound gorilla in the pork industry,” Successful Farming magazine warned—nine years ago. There is simply no regulatory solution to the millions of tons of searingly fetid effluvium that confinement hog farms discharge and aerosolize on a daily basis. Smithfield alone has sixteen operations in twelve states. Fixing the problem completely would bankrupt the company. According to Dr. Michael Mallin, a marine scientist at the University of North Carolina at Wilmington who has researched the effects of corporate farming on water quality, the volumes of concentrated pig waste produced by industrial hog farms are plainly not containable in small areas. The land, he says, “just can’t absorb everything that comes out of the barns.” From the moment that Smithfield attained its current size, its waste disposal problem became conventionally insoluble.
Joe Luter, like his pig shit waste, has an innate aversion to being restrained in any way. Ever since American regulators and lawmakers started forcing Smithfield to spend more money on waste treatment and attempting to limit the company’s expansion, Luter has been looking to do business elsewhere. In recent years, his gaze has fallen on the lucrative and unregulated markets of Poland and Romania.
In 1999, with the help of politicians eager for capital investment, Luter bought a state-owned company called Animex, one of Poland’s biggest hog processors. He then began acquiring huge moribund Communist-era hog farms and converting them into concentrated feeding operations. Pork prices in Poland were low, so Smithfield’s sweeping expansion didn’t make strict economic sense, except that it had the virtue of pushing small hog farmers toward bankruptcy. By 2003, Animex was running six subsidiary companies and seven processing plants, selling nine brands of meat and taking in $338 million annually. By 2008, 600,000 Polish hog farmers had lost their livelihoods.
The usual violations occurred. Near one of Smithfield’s largest plants, in Byszkowo, an enormous pool of frozen pig shit, pumped into a lagoon in winter, melted and ran into two nearby lakes. The lake water turned brown, residents in local villages got skin rashes and eye infections, and the stench made it hard to eat. A 2004 Helsinki Commission report found that Smithfield’s pollution throughout Poland was damaging the country’s ecosystems. Overapplication was endemic.7 Farmers without permits were piping liquid pig shit directly into watersheds that replenish the Baltic Sea.
As Smithfield was subduing Poland, it was moving into Romania. A former U.S. ambassador ushered the company’s executives into the offices of the president and prime minister. Smithfield made large cash contributions to the Romanian government. Its lobbying firm opened an office in Bucharest.
Romanian peasants had been raising hogs on the land for hundreds of years. Small farmers produced 75 percent of the country’s pork. Then Smithfield established itself and began extinguishing household farms at an average rate of 100,000 per year. Within five years of the company’s arrival, 90 percent of the independent hog market was gone, and Smithfield was Romania’s largest pork producer. Its facilities foul Romanian air, water, and soil. Residents shut their windows and doors against the smell.
Three thousand miles away, in West Africa, a novel product has begun appearing in local hog markets: frozen packets of pig offal from Poland and Romania. The packets, whose export is subsidized by the European Union, cost far less than fresh pork. Liberian and Ivorian and Guinean farmers are discovering that they cannot compete with scrap viscera from Smithfield’s newest pig factories.