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.