The suit was brought by a coalition including Farm Sanctuary, along with other animal protection, press freedom, food safety, and government watchdog groups.
[MUSIC PLAYING] This industry has taken something from me that's very valuable. When I was a kid, I just wanted to be on the water. And I was going to put on the oldest, dirtiest, grubby clothes I had and get out on that river. The fish were healthy, the water was clean, there were camps along the river, boats everywhere along this river.
And it was nice, you know. We had a garden, we played, we didn't stay inside long, went barefooted, walk on the ground with no shoes on.
It was just a complacent time, a friendly time, it was a neighborly time.
People living in rural America live there because they enjoy the outdoors. And people enjoy the quiet life, and the openness, and the ability to be able to get out. Walk up and down roadways.
When you got all these lakes, and the creek, and the swamp, and you can come down here it's awful wonderful.
Then things began to change. The fish started dying, the crabs started even having holes in their shells. My sons body was filled with sores, mine was covered with sores.
I got death threats. I had no idea that the research that I was doing would be so unpalatable to the industry.
[ENGINE RUNNING]
My name is Violet Branch. My mom and dad bought this farm when I was three months old in 1943, and I've been here ever since. One day the hogs came in, and they came in on school buses. There were three levels, the floor, the middle and then the top. Baby pigs. And then they would come in on 18-wheelers.
They started building the hog houses probably in the '80s. And then later on, probably the early '90s they started putting them on there so you could see them.
Most people do not recognize that for what it is. It's a hog farm.
So where is the-- I don't like calling them lagoons.
We call them cesspools.
So where is the cesspool?
It's over to the left of the building, but on the other side of that tree line.
Behind the trees.
Right.
We had an inkling that there was something amiss with our property but we could never really put our finger on it. We would always try to put together what was going on, but we never could.
What was going on in the river where we lost a billion fish in just a couple of days, with open, bleeding lesions all over their body? And millions, and millions, and hundreds of millions more since then. That had a cause that was beyond the shores of the river.
So I got in an airplane, and I flew all the way to Raleigh. Then I flew up the Trent River into Jones county. And I'm looking down there, and there's this huge pink-- Well they're now cesspools, but I didn't know what they were. And then these buildings that were there, but you couldn't see anything. It was just metal buildings, they didn't even look like barns.
And then these huge open pits with all this stuff in it. So when I landed, I called a friend of mine in the Department of Environmental Management in Little Washington, North Carolina. And I said, I just came out here, what is all this stuff out there? And he says, Rick you don't know? I said, no. He said, that's all hog feces and urine.
And I said, well I saw some of it being sprayed on the ground, what's that? He said, that's how they get rid of it. And then, as I remember his words, he says, Rick it's basically dumping.
In eastern North Carolina, east of 95 we have 10 million hogs. So we've got the same number of hogs, east of I-95, as we have people across all of North Carolina. Hogs produce a lot more waste than people. None of that waste is treated. It's run into an unlined hole in the ground. It's then fired through industrial size sprinklers on to the landscape. And then it rains, and all of that waste from 10 million hogs producing way more waste than 10 million people, runs off into the rivers of eastern North Carolina.
And most people have no idea it's happening, because these huge facilities are in rural areas. And people don't believe that that kind of waste management could happen.
I've seen them spraying in to the river directly. I've seen them spraying in the ditches that went to the river. I've seen them put pipes in the ground with a depression so they could spray in the depression-- the pipe would pick it up and take it to the river. I've seen it again, again, again, and again, and again. Could keep on going for a long time.
The idea was that the soil was supposed to-- is supposed to absorb all the wastes. And it's absolutely impossible, because of where the industry is sited. It's sited in the areas down east, which were formerly wetlands. Where the water table is only three feet from the surface, three feet.
They're spraying back there.
Oh my god, they are!
You get the smell?
Yes. Oh, god.
Very unhealthy. What--
That is unbearable. I mean.
Let's explain some of the other things that you're seeing here. It's breezy today, it's windy.
Right.
There's a mist blowing.
Right.
So that's also has the potential of getting off the property.
Right.
Getting into woodlines, getting into peoples homes. And if you also look at-- just look at that field in general, it's domed. So where's that waste going?
Right, it's going--
It's going to run off.
--down towards the water.
Right.
I just can't believe that people in this community have to live with this on a daily basis. It's super-- it's disgusting.
The odor is-- it just comes in. It smells so bad in there you could see it.
One lady talking about, she would get up in the morning, crack her door -- just a little bit, and see if it's stinking outside. If it's not stinking, then she go out and do what she has to do. But she's rushing to get everything done, because she wants to beat the odor.
It's like a horrific abuse of-- we're big ag so we're going to come in and do whatever we want. And to hell with everyone whose lives we're ruining, whose homes we're making unbearable, because it's got this disgusting smell coming through from this spray.
Well they're polluting my air and others, everyone that's living near these facilities. They've polluted our water, they've disrupted our quality of life. They're affecting our health, our mental status. The embarrassment that comes along with this. The sense of happiness and hopelessness. All of these things we have to deal with on a daily basis.
That was Steven Wing, who was a professor at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. He was working with a community that asked him for help. One of the first things they did was to get the map of North Carolina, go to the Department of Environment and Natural Resources, and they pulled all the permits that had been given to the pork industry to set up operations in North Carolina.
And they used red pins, and they pinned the map for every permit. And when they got done, what they discovered was that, it was almost 10 million animals in North Carolina. The majority of those animals in eastern North Carolina. And looking at the fact that where these animals were, were predominantly African-American, Native American, and Latino communities.
So we began talking about this whole question of environmental racism. Where people are intentionally targeted because of their lack of political clout, and economic power.
Tell me what that is right there.
It looks small from here because of distance. But that's where that spray will come and it's wide open. It shoots out a whole lot of stuff. And that mess just fly everywhere.
Yeah. And you can't go outside when it's--
No.
--spraying?
Mm-mhm. I'm afraid for it to get on my skin because I have sensitive skin. And I don't want to get sick or anything, from that. Break out with sores, or whatever. Yeah.
I don't know where to go from here. As a scientist-- and I have a degree in biology. So before I started going in circles in race cars, I did earn a degree in biology. And it frustrates me to no end that, it's almost like the authority of science has been taken away. What can we do to help science get a little bit more respect from the public and from the politicians?
This is an era that I think is especially dangerous because science is certainly not the be all and end all. It's not the way, the truth, and the light in many respects in life. But there are certain scientific facts you had better listen to, because if you don't, it's your own health that's at stake.
I used to have a mild touch of asthma, and now I have severe, that I have to use a machine. I have to use a mask now, and I used to didn't do that. I only got sick when I moved here, North Carolina.
I have to use this. I got the sprayer here, I shake it up and squirt some in my mouth. And that helps me to breathe a little bit better for a little while.
We had a group of volunteers and other river keepers, and we were sampling in this body of water. Stocking that creek-- which is completely surrounded by CAFOs-- one of the most densely covered sub basins in the Cape Fear basin. And we spent a day sampling in this watershed.
We took the results back to a state certified lab in Wilmington. They ran the results, and we got those results back, and they showed fecal counts in this stream that were thousands of times higher than what the safe limit was. We knew that they were going to be high, but I had just no idea that the creek was essentially an open sewer.
When hurricanes come through here, the flood waters wash over these lagoons, not all, but many of these lagoons. And they take and suck the contents out, and the river turns the color of pink. Then there's hogs floating in the river like during Hurricane Floyd. It's that hurricane last year, Hurricane Matthew, did the same thing. I didn't see hogs in the water this time because they didn't let them out of the barns.
One of the biggest fears with this industry is in the form of just illnesses. The swine flu, from a number of years back, which was then changed to H1N1, because we didn't want to call it swine flu, started here in North Carolina. It's not out of the question that one of these epidemics is going to start again. You cannot ignore the way these animals are being treated.
No one, not even an animal should have to stand in their own faeces and urine, and all those other chemicals and antibiotics. The stuff that's in the waste.
We don't need to subject these animals to the cruelty that they're suffering right now in these factory-- I don't call them farms, their factory facilities, they're not farms. These animals themselves are in cages, they've got to stand up, and they can't lay down, they can't turn around. They lose their piglets when they're born. It's hell inside there.
Well we, we're going to pay. When we do things wrong-- I believe this-- when we do things wrong, and we know it, and we continue to do it, we're going to pay for it one way or the other. When you believe in God, or what you believe in, when you do wrong, you're going to get caught up in something wrong yourself.
If you eat-- whether it's corn or grain or soybeans, or even meat or fish, you're a farmer. You're a farmer at the marketplace. If you buy the products that are in the marketplace, then you are responsible for their growth.
One of the things that you can do is you can vote with your fork. Maybe you want to start off vegetarian, and eventually move to a vegan diet. But don't just sit back and say, well, I can't change anything.
I used to love barbecue. Oh boy, good old hot fresh plate of barbecue seasoned just right, was delicious. I was raised up on barbecue, my daddy used to cook barbecue for people. And now, I don't care about eating barbecue, and barbecue ribs, and pig feet and chitlins and all that kind of stuff.
I started boycotting the major pork industry in 1995.
If it was up to me, I would like for everybody to stop eating pork. Just like me.
The industry has some fear over what we have, and what we are going to be able to achieve.
I think that the North Carolina Environmental Justice Network, along with the Waterkeepers and Riverkeepers, and our community partners of course-- like R.E.A.C.H-- have formed a wonderful working collaboration. And it pissed the industry off, because they were-- divide and conquer is the way of life in this country. And as long as they can keep us apart, they feel like they're winning.
Right.
And so they were enjoying their life, as long as the Waterkeepers talking about the water, and the community talking about the community. But when we all got to talking about each others' stuff, then that's when they got worried and bothered.
There is nobody, in this United States, not even our local representative here I think from Duplin County-- his name is Dixon-- who has gotten tremendous amounts of money from the industry to pass laws that favor the industry. I challenge him to an airplane ride. I challenge him to get in that airplane, and let me fly him over eastern North Carolina. And I challenge him to be honest about his answers or what he sees. My guess is he wouldn't be.
But most people who have any doubt about what's going on here in eastern North Carolina, I say this to them, what I have said and the other people who you've probably interviewed in this piece, they're telling the truth. Don Webb tells the truth, I've never known the man to lie.
I'm telling the truth. I'm telling it as best as I know it from following this problem for over 20 years. Of seeing it up close and personal, of seeing the suffering of people all across eastern North Carolina. To see their lives, their property, being destroyed all for somebody else to be able to make money.
If you don't live here in Duplin County, which is called hog heaven, then you should come down and see what life is like.
Remember rural America. Remember everybody does not live in big cities, or even live in cities. But there is a rural part of this world that people don't think about. And as I begin going in to rural America, the first thought that came to my mind was Third World countries, because that's what it feels like.
One of the things that people need to realize is that, regardless of where you live you are still having an impact on what happens here in eastern North Carolina.
Right.
Because of your food choices.
Right.
And don't think, well, I live in Raleigh, or I live in Charlotte or I live in Asheville or I live in New York City for that matter, that I can't make a difference. You can. Because we're the consumers that drive this industry's success and drive their way of doing things. So we can change that. We can make a difference, and not just that we can, but we will.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
It's time for all of us to really stand up and defend our fellow North Carolina neighbors. And say that this is wrong, and we're not going to let you spray the waste and the urine of your pigs all over their homes, and their cars, and their yards. So as long as people continue to buy factory farmed animals, the fact of the matter is this kind of thing is going to keep happening.
I would ask that everybody that saw this video, that was touched by these stories of what's happening to this community, and these wonderful people, to consider that the next time that you sit down for your meal.
We're all neighbors.
We're all neighbors.
We're all neighbors.
We are all neighbors.
We are all neighbors.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
