Beware of "Smell of Money" documentary

Documentaries are supposed to get it right, but sometimes they don’t. Sometimes they just want to push an agenda.

There’s a documentary called “The Smell of Money” that’s been making the rounds among activist groups recently. The film is an 84-minute attack on North Carolina hog farms and the family farmers who operate them.

It features all of the usual suspects—neighbors like Elsie Herring who were part of the nuisance lawsuits against Smithfield. Waterkeepers like Rick Dove and Larry Baldwin who spend their days flying over our farms. And prominent vegans like Sen. Cory Booker, who has introduced legislation to place an immediate national moratorium on large new farms.

You can learn a lot about a film by looking at the people who produced it. That’s certainly true with “The Smell of Money.” The film has deep ties to Mercy for Animals, an activist group with a stated mission to “end industrial agriculture.”

The filmmakers, Shawn Bannon and Jamie Berger, are both vegans who worked at Mercy for Animals. Actress Kate Mara, the film’s executive producer, is a vegan activist who volunteers with Mercy for Animals, PETA, and the Humane Society.

As a result, the film isn’t a true look at hog farming in North Carolina. It’s a documentary designed to drive home one overarching message: Stop Eating Meat.

Don’t spend your hard-earned money to watch this nonsense. Instead, go buy a pack of bacon and watch “Hog Farmer: The Trials of Joey Carter” on Prime Video.   

Revisiting Elsie Herring and the law of propaganda

At a Glance:

• Anti-agriculture activists continue to repeat the same inaccurate claims, but repetition doesn’t make them true.

• Elsie Herring, a Duplin County resident, continues to lie about the neighboring hog farm as seen in a recent Grist article

• Herring claims her house is 8 feet from the spray field, when in fact, it is 200.

• A thick buffer of trees was planted between the farm and Herring’s home 20 years ago.

• Herring complains of constant, unbearable odor, but the hog farmer hasn’t sprayed on the field closest to Herring in more than 4 years.

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President Franklin D. Roosevelt once famously said, “Repetition does not transform a lie into a truth.”

But that’s seems to be the strategy of the anti-agriculture activists who continue to repeat the same inaccurate and untrue claims about North Carolina hog farms.

 An article published by Grist.org earlier this month resurrected the story of Elsie Herring, a Duplin County woman who lives next door to a small hog farm. The story wrongly claims that hog manure is being sprayed onto fields located just eight feet from her home — “bringing with them a constant, unbearable odor.”

That would be awful — if it were true. It is not.

 NC Farm Families examined this issue several years ago and it’s worth revisiting the facts. Watch this video and read this blog post:

Note: because the farmer has not used the field in the video for years, the distance between Ms. Herring’s house and the closest sprayfield is now 900 feet. To read more, visit the blog above.

What do the facts show?

More than twenty years ago, the farmer moved his irrigation equipment further away and stopped spraying close to her home. A grove of trees was planted between her home and the farmer’s fields. Today, those trees have grown into a thick forest that creates a barrier — the length of a football field — between her home and the fields.

And the farmer’s detailed records show that he hasn’t sprayed — not one single time — on the field closest to Ms. Herring’s house in more than four years. Yet she continues to complain in media reports that there is a constant, unbearable odor. It defies logic.

After Ms. Herring testified before a Congressional committee in November 2019, the farmer responded to her allegations. This video shows how these activists will manipulate images and distort the truth to make their case against hog farming:

 This is the exact type of propaganda President Roosevelt was concerned about when he addressed the nation in October 1939. It was shortly after the start of World War II and he was concerned about the “shameless and dishonest” attempts to influence public opinion surrounding the war.

But FDR also had faith in the American public. People were learning to discriminate “between the honest advocate who relies on truth and logic and the more dramatic speaker who is clever in appealing to the passions and prejudices of his listeners,” he said.

“We Americans begin to know the difference between the truth on the one side and the falsehood on the other, no matter how often the falsehood is iterated and reiterated. Repetition does not transform a lie into a truth.”

FDR encouraged Americans to rely on “an unbiased and factual chronicle of developments.” We urge you to do the same.