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.

Firing back against another attack on the pork industry

Another media outlet — funded by activists who oppose animal agriculture — has taken aim at North Carolina’s pork industry. The Food & Environment Report Network (FERN) and The Guardian published an article from a freelance reporter decrying the relatively low number of complaints filed against North Carolina hog farms and implying that complaints had “vanished.” (The News & Observer and The Charlotte Observer subsequently jumped at the opportunity to run another negative article about hog farmers.)

The article reports that North Carolina received only 33 public complaints against livestock operations from 2008 to 2018, while other hog states registered “literally thousands” during the same time period.  

An interesting theory, perhaps, but one that is factually wrong.

State records, publicly available and posted online, show that there were at least 474 complaints in North Carolina during that 10-year period. Not 33.

That’s still fewer than a state like Iowa, which had 2,393 complaints (assuming that data is accurate) during those ten years.

A good reporter might ask “why is that?” and do a little digging. He might, for example, consider that Iowa has three times as many hog farms as North Carolina.

Or, a good reporter might explain that North Carolina has one of the nation’s most stringent regulatory programs for hog farms, including mandatory on-site inspections of every hog farm in the state — every year — to ensure they are complying with the rules and regulations.

That means that, during that 10-year period, there were more than 24,000 on-site inspections of our hog farms. A good reporter might consider the idea that a rigorous inspection program leads to fewer complaints. Rather than attack state regulators, he might praise them. 

Instead, this freelance reporter jumps to his own conclusion and speculates that complaints simply vanish into thin air — despite no evidence to support that claim.

To bolster his argument, the reporter points to a sudden rise in complaints from November 2018 to April 2019.

The state received 138 complaints related to animal agriculture during that time-frame, resulting in 62 violations. Only 11 of those violations involved hog farmers. 

Two reactions:first, it’s worth noting that fewer than half of the complaints resulted in any type of violation. Farmers have often been upset about unfounded allegations that are made against them.

Second, if there were 11 violations against hog farms, that means there were 51 violations (82%) that involved something other than hog farming. So, why did the reporter direct his attack at hog farmers?

We all know the answer. Because hog farming is constantly in the cross-hairs. And activist organizations that want to do away with animal agriculture are often involved in directly funding this type of “reporting.” (Read more about that from the North Carolina Pork Council.)

The bias is clear.

Here’s one example: The article featured comments from Rene Miller, from Duplin County, who lives near a hog farm. Here’s what she says about living near a farm: “it smells like a body that’s been decomposed for a month.”

The reporter initially failed to mention that Miller is a plaintiff in the ongoing series of nuisance lawsuits filed against Murphy-Brown and thus had a clear motivation for making such outlandish, ridiculous and unbelievable comments.

But it sure did make a great quote! The Guardian actually used her quote as the headline for its story.

The reporter went on to dutifully highlight a litany of allegations against the pork industry, including unsupported claims of health issues and false accusations about the demographics around hog farms.  

The NC Pork Council provided detailed rebuttals to both “studies” — providing factual data about who lives near North Carolina hog farms and a report from a PhD that outlines serious problems with the health study mentioned in the article.

The reporter gave scant attention to those objections, mischaracterizing the Pork Council’s concerns and failing to explain why it believes the studies are flawed.

This type of reporting about our industry is disappointing, but not surprising. Our farmers have been under constant attack and there are no signs of it letting up. NC Farm Families will continue to stand up for our farmers and fight back against these blatant mischaracterizations of our industry.