Wastelands: The True Story of Farm Country on Trial, by Corban Addison
Review by Dave Gamrath
In Wastelands: The True Story of Farm Country on Trial, author Corban Addison turns the story of corporate greed with industrial hog farming into an exciting page-turner.
Book Review:
I’ve read many stories about how, in their drive for greater profits, Corporate America has abused powerless American citizens. These stories can be extremely aggravating as the reader slogs through account after account of injustice. Even in the rare case where David slays Goliath, the details can be mundane and excruciating. In Wastelands: The True Story of Farm Country on Trial, author Corban Addison achieves the rare success of turning a story of corporate greed into an exciting page-turner.
Addison’s story covers industrial hog operations, centered in North Carolina. In four North Carolina counties alone, “there are five million hogs and only two hundred thousand people.” With the 1980s came the transition of tobacco farms into family hog farms, and then family hog farms into industrial hog operations. Two local farmers made it big by creating concentrated hog feeding operations, or CAFOs, which located “thousands of hogs in a single barn.” The first of these was Wendell Murphy, “the godfather of industrial swine.” The second was Joseph Luter III, who hailed from Smithfield, Virgina, and turned Smithfield Foods into an industrial powerhouse.
Murphy and Lutter expanded their operations up and down the production chain, and contracted local farmers to raise hogs for them. “The day the first Duplin County farmer became a Wendell Murphy grower was the day the modern hog industry was born.” Industrial hog farms are in rural areas, hidden away from all, except for their neighbors. “Most of the neighbors were poor and Black, the children of sharecroppers with limited education and only modest sophistication.” Black families had owned their properties for generations, but suddenly these new industrial hog farms were despoiling their land.
What exactly was happening? “All those hogs generate an unfathomable amount of waste, equivalent to a city twice the size of New York. Yet the method of waste disposal that Smithfield uses at all of its company-owned and contract hog farms – close to two thousand across the state – is as antiquated as an outhouse.” Hog waste is placed untreated into multi-million gallon “waste lagoons.” When the lagoons are full, the hog farmers dissipate the waste using “giant guns that shoot liquified hog waste into the air, leaving it to drift like a cloud on the breeze.” This “shit-tinted spray” travels whichever way the wind is blowing, and by no means stays on the hog farms. Also, the farms include large “dead boxes” that are overstuffed with the carcasses of hogs that have died from their mistreatment. These dead boxes are often sitting directly on property lines, and as one can imagine, attract an inordinate number of buzzards and flies. As the industrial hog industry raked in profits in the billions, they befouled the air and land in dozens of communities, and had never been held to account. “’Don’t bother about that smell,’ said Wendell Murphy. ‘It’s the smell of money.’”
The neighbors tried every method available to them to get the industry to change, without success. The hog industry literally treated them like the shit that was being sprayed onto their homes. Wastelands is about a five-year lawsuit brought by these neighbors, who had been waiting twenty-five years “for the chance to speak of the befouled air, the poisoned water, and the degraded soil that is their heritage, and to demand a measure of justice from the company whose factory farms have transformed the once-idyllic rural geography around their homes into a farrago of forested wastelands.” The type of lawsuit they brought is known as a “nuisance” lawsuit, which contends that “the right of a person to enjoy his home without unreasonable interference from his neighbors” must be upheld. The smell from the hog farms caused headaches, brain fog, burning eyes and noses. Neighbors had trouble breathing; the odor triggered asthma and heart issues. Nearly six hundred neighbors banded together against fifty-nine hog farms, “alleging that Smithfield’s hog operations are a menace to their way of life.” At its core, the lawsuit was about racism inherent in North Carolina. The neighbors were Black; the hog farmers white.
But the lawsuit was against Smithfield, not the contract hog farmers, who were pretty much struggling to survive. Addison writes how “the growers, in effect, are modern-day sharecroppers.” Smithfield and the other CAFO companies enforce strict rules on the growers, but force the growers to take all the risk. Of course, in the lawsuit, Smithfield portrays themselves as promoting the “family farmer,” but through industrialization, Smithfield actually “put 15,000 actual family farmers out of business.”
The book also describes the horrid conditions suffered by the hogs in Smithfield’s operations. They are “cooped up by the thousand in cages of misery and debasement. It’s enough to make an animal lover shed tears.” Industrial hog farms result in “shit-caked hogs, intelligent animals crammed into cages and left to wallow in their own excrement.” “The dark stains that spread across their hides look like mud. But there is no mud in a CAFO. Only shit.” Addison’s descriptions of industrialized hog farming may well make the reader reconsider eating pork.
Addison does a great job in recreating the suspense of the trial, and enables the reader to feel that you actually know the protagonists on both sides. He also explains the science used in the trial, such as the ability to test for the DNA markers of hog fecal bacteria, which was found throughout the inside of the neighbors houses. Addison also covers the relatively simple measures to clean up hog farms, such as lagoon covers, converting methane into electricity, and treating “the waste in real time while recovering the water and the nutrients.” But Smithfield refused to implement any measure unless it came at zero cost.
An aggravating plot twist in the story is the political backlash in the North Carolina legislature. Many Republican legislators worked to pass new legislation making lawsuits like this one illegal. They claimed that the lawsuit was “an attack on our way of life!” They even try to make the legislation retroactive, to kill the lawsuit before a jury could determine their verdict. At the same time, the hog industry spent millions on a public relations campaign, claiming that “family farmers are under siege by hog-hating environmentalists and greedy out-of-state lawyers.” All this results in many death threats against the plaintiffs and their lawyers.
How does the trial turn out? I won’t give that away. But to me, this lawsuit seems remarkably straight forward. As Addison writes, “common sense tells you that seven million gallons of feces and urine stored in an open-air pit a thousand feet from someone’s house is going to stink.” No shit.
Reviewer Opinion:
Well written.
Reviewer Rating of Book:
Thumb up.