*To receive my articles directly via email, please subscribe. Like what you're reading? Please share this newsletter with your friends!*
For decades, people who live in communities near industrial hog farms have complained that the noise, smell and pollution greatly disrupted their quality of life and negatively impacted their health. Those complaints have been well documented.
In 2014, more than 500 hog farm neighbors filed 26 federal nuisance lawsuits against Murphy-Brown, the Smithfield subsidiary that contracted out the hog raising to area farmers. When juries in five trials awarded 36 plaintiffs a total of almost $550 million, Smithfield evidently realized that they were not going to win these battles so they began to settle. But the court successes rattled the pork lobby and their friends in the General Assembly.
Led by State Sen. Brent Jackson (R-Autryville), Republicans introduced Senate Bill 711, the 2018 Farm Act, to put an end to these lawsuits. Jackson said that he was fighting to protect family farmers from greedy out-of-state lawyers looking for a big pay day. He argued that, unless we showed Smithfield some love, the company would pack up and move away and those small rural communities would “dry slam-up.”
Here’s what Jackson did not say: The lawsuits were filed against a $15 billion global food company and the world’s largest pork processor and hog producer which happened to be owned by the $22B WH Group of China, not North Carolina “family farmers.” The “big paydays” were automatically reduced by 80-90% in accordance with a 1995 North Carolina law that capped punitive damages if plaintiffs were successful at trial. Jackson himself is a contract hog farmer for Murphy-Brown.
Opponents of the proposed bill urged lawmakers not to further restrict the rights of hog farm neighbors. "While agriculture is vital to North Carolina’s economy, so are property rights that are vital to people’s homes and other businesses,” Cooper said when vetoing the bill. “Giving one industry special treatment at the expense of its neighbors is unfair.”
The legislature overrode Cooper’s veto.
Under the law, a nuisance lawsuit can only be brought within a year of the establishment of the agriculture or forestry operation on which the complaint is focused or within a year of a "fundamental change." By the way, changing ownership, technology, product or the size of the operation doesn’t count as a fundamental change.
Unless a farm operator has been criminally convicted or received a regulatory notice of violation that state farm laws were broken, punitive damages can not be awarded. Given the state’s extremely lax regulations on the industrial hog farming operations and even more lax civil enforcement, it’s highly unlikely that any hog farm neighbor will ever be able to make the case for punitive damages. That's probably why the provision was included in the first place.
“These nuisance claims are one of the only legal tools that people can use to protect their property rights. So when the legislature rolls them back, they are effectively taking away the last legal tool that these communities have to protect themselves, their families and their property,” said Blakeley Hildebrand, an attorney for the Southern Environmental Law Center.
*To receive my articles directly via email, please subscribe. Like what you're reading? Please share this newsletter with your friends!*
