The Waterkeepers leader in North Carolina, Rick Dove, just posted a comment on Farm Families’ Facebook page, and he doesn’t like our video Eighteen Years Ago.Our video tells the story of what happened, almost twenty years ago, when Mrs. Elsie Herring complained about a hog farmer spraying too close to her home: How the company investigated her complaint, agreed with her, moved the farmer’s irrigation equipment and planted a wide buffer of trees between her home and the farmer’s field.That happened almost twenty years ago. But, a few months ago, one of the Waterkeepers’ allies reported, on its website, the farmer was spraying too close to Mrs. Herring’s house now.We made a video to set the record straight. And Rick Dove didn’t like that. He claimed our video was “alternative facts.” Here’s the video so you can judge for yourself:
Not long ago, Rick Dove had a problem with ‘alternative facts’ himself.The morning after Hurricane Matthew, Dove set out to spin a story to the press about an environmental disaster – and blame it on hog farmers. So he climbed into an airplane to fly over flooded farms to take photographs.We know now, according to state records, only one half of one percent of the lagoons on hog farms were inundated during the floods. One other lagoon on a shuttered hog farm (that hasn’t had a hog on it in five years) had two minor ‘breaches.’
In all, on 99.5% of the hog farms, nothing happened to harm the environment. But that wasn’t the picture Rick Dove and the Waterkeepers wanted to paint. So he resorted to a ruse: He posted nine pictures, all taken from a plane, all taken at different angles, of one flooded farm. But he didn’t explain, This is one farm. He posted four pictures of another farm, two of another, four of another. Dove even posted a picture of a flooded municipal waste treatment plant in Hookerton and called it a hog farm.Dove then spun his story to the press. The Washington Post even published Rick Dove’s photo of a flooded municipal waste treatment facility in Hookerton and called it a hog farm.Those were “alternative facts.” And Rick Dove hasn’t set the record straight.