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.

More False Tales About the Hog Industry: A Response to Food & Environment Reporting Network

The latest attack on North Carolina hog farmers arrived Friday — an article about the ongoing nuisance lawsuits that was full of false and misleading information produced by anti-agriculture activists and a freelance journalist named Barry Yeoman. 

It reads like a “greatest hits” album, filled with a familiar cast of characters repeating claims that have been debunked time and time again. The outfit behind the story — the Food and Environment Reporting Network (FERN) — Is that same group that published a wildly inaccurate and discredited story about livestock complaints in North Carolina earlier this year.

FERN is funded by the Schmidt Family Foundation, which has a goal of harming animal agriculture.The foundation recently provided $190,000 to FERN, in part, for “modern muckraking.” It has been funding an array of efforts that are aimed against modern agriculture, including directly paying for an ongoing effort to organize class-action lawyers to bring more lawsuits against, among others, Smithfield Foods.

It’s unclear why anyone thinks that destroying farms, driving up food prices and dismantling rural economies is a worthwhile endeavor.

If you read the article, it’s important to understand the context of what you are reading — that is, what you are reading is underwritten by a well-funded advocate who is against agriculture. It isn’t actual independent journalism, though it’s presented with that veneer.

One of the more laughable passages seems to suggest that state Rep. Jimmy Dixon, a farmer himself, is somehow compromised because the pork industry has accounted for about 12 percent of his campaign contributions.

This, in a story that is 100 percent paid for by an anti-agriculture advocacy group.

The tale is as one-sided as the trials were – recall that no juror, not one, ever visited any of the farms that were on trial. The Texas lawyers on the other side of the courtroom didn’t want that. They didn’t want the jurors to see and smell for themselves.

The story prominently features Elsie Herring, the most-quoted neighbor of a hog farm on the planet. She is given free rein to say that the farm she lives near “is blowing waste” on her. This is simply not happening, and no respectable media outlet should repeat these falsehoods.

The story also lends much credence to Steve Wing, who was both a UNC-Chapel Hill professor AND founder of the N.C. Environmental Justice Network (NCEJN), which is also funded by Schmidt and advocates against agriculture. 

Wing, now deceased, was described as a “committed activist” in his obituary… and has said to students that he literally “made arrangements” with advocacy groups in his “research” in order to “subvert the interests” of the university. That much is apparent in the various discredited studies by him.

The story seeks to frame this issue as one about racial division, which is one of the saddest and most despicable aspects of these cases and of the continued efforts by those who wish to close our farms. There remains a continued effort by these activists to divide people based on race. It should be rejected by all fair-minded people, especially when what they say is flatly false.

The irony of the story is that numerous media outlets who have spent time on our farms contradict it. True journalists describe the farms in terms that are vastly different than litigants in lawsuits. And so do neighbors, including in the trial Barry wrote about.

Just last week, a group of media members visited a farm in Sampson County. 

Shortly after the media arrived on the farm, a husband and wife – the farm’s closest neighbors – came walking back to say hello and offer their own testimony.

“We’ve enjoyed living out here,” the wife said. “The farm doesn’t bother us.”

What bothers us all is something else: inaccurate tales told by advocates who are disguising themselves as the media.

Facts Contradict Elsie Herring's Story

She’s an internet star for Earth Justice, Environmental Justice, Environmental Working Group, the Waterkeeper’s and operation R.E.A.C.H. She’s told her story on websites for Mother Jones, Policy Watch, Indy Week, Democracy Now, Raw Story, and in the film Right to Harm. She’s the voice of ‘environmental justice’ groups. The unofficial spokeswoman for lawyers suing hog farmers. She’s Mrs. Elsie Herring.

Elsie Herring’s Story

The story she tells goes like this: The hog farmer next door to her home sprays his field “three or four days on a slow week” – and sometimes “daily.” And occasionally “at night.” The odor is so bad she can’t go outside. She can’t sit on her porch. She’s trapped, a captive in her own home.It’s the dramatic tale of ‘the captive lady and a cruel farmer’ and Elsie Herring’s told it over and over for years.

The Truth About Hog Farmers

But there’s a problem.Every time the hog farmer sprays his field he has – by law – to keep a record for state inspectors to review. Here’s a photo of the farmer’s ledger:

Did he occasionally spray at night? No.Did he sometimes spray daily? No. Did he spray 3 or 4 times a week? No.In fact, over the last 6 months the farmer only sprayed on 2 days and, then, he only sprayed an average of 2 hours and 8 minutes each day.Recently, Mrs. Herring was back on the Internet.  She’s told her story many times. A lot of people have heard it. But look at the facts. Look at the farmer’s ledger. Look at this video:

Go down to her home and look at the grove of trees between her house and the farmer’s field. The facts contradict her story. Why does she continue to tell it? We don’t know. But we do know the facts tell a different story.

Update: For the past 3 years, the field closest to Ms. Herring’s house has not been used. This increases the spray field distance to 900 feet—not 8 feet.