Hog Farmer: The Trials of Joey Carter, directed by Jason Arthurs
A cowboy I used to work with claimed that he liked the smell of feedlots. He used the all-too-common aphorism — which is really a rationalization — that it’s “the smell of money.”
Joel Salatin, on the other hand, famously calls this “the smell of mismanagement.”
Odor from hog houses — and how serious a problem it is — is the central theme of the new film Hog Farmer, which is available on Amazon video.
This film will induce a variety of conflicting feelings from Acres U.S.A. readers and regenerative farmers and ranchers.
On the one hand, the vast majority of ag documentaries seem to follow a pretty familiar script these days. The food system is broken; the medical system only encourages easy chemical fixes instead of true nutritional solutions; farming methods are poisoning the land and our water, enhancing climate change and destroying the environment. I.e., a pretty bleak picture.
Hog Farmer is different, in that it presents a very sympathetic portrayal of a farmer who does believe he’s helping feed the world. And Joey Carter — the hog farmer — is very easy to like. He is a kind, decent man and an important part of his rural community — a hard worker who started with very little, built half a dozen hog houses in the 1980s that put his kids through college, and continues to serve his neighbors as volunteer fire chief. There’s nothing not to like about him.
All of us who live in the country know a couple Joey Carters. While they’re the bad guys in most modern farm documentaries because they spray and confine animals, we know and respect them and interact with them every day. They help us fix equipment and lend us tools and are great neighbors.
But, good farmers like Joey Carter are using practices that we know are unsustainable. Animals were created to live in pastures and woods — not on concrete, where they are unable to express their most basic instincts. Fundamentally, Joel Salatin is right: bad odor is a symptom of bad farming practices.
However, the trouble Joey Carter finds himself in results from nuisance lawsuits brought by his poor neighbors, instigated by trial lawyers from out of state — pretty much the epitome of carpetbaggers. They may have profound and sincere ideological issues with confinement farming, but recruiting Carter’s neighbors to sue him, in the hope of massive payouts, is just sleezy. As the film demonstrates, the neighbors neither suffered health issues from Carter’s farm, and they clearly just wanted the money — not for the farm to change its practices or shut down.
Nonetheless, the trial lawyers have a point: odor from farms is a nuisance. The film tries to point out that it’s not nearly as bad as portrayed by the trial laywers, but they don’t deny that it is a reality. One of Carter’s close neighbors, who supports him and didn’t join the lawsuit, admits “It’s Duplin County. It’s hog — it’s [the] farming industry — everything’s not gonna smell good.”
The pork industry executive who’s interviewed believes that “pigs outdoors are very challenging. People don’t realize that. There’s disease; there’s animal wellbeing [which] can be challenging; food safety can be an issue. And the environmental effects of pigs being outside is something that really requires attention and management.” These are obviously true statements, to a point — but they are much more true about confined animal operations. The only thing that becomes easier when pigs are moved inside is the work for the humans.
And yet, Joey Carter’s farm seems to be just about a model operation, for what it is. He does everything according to the system taught by the experts at N.C. State. His lagoon is clean and has never been breached (yet). Many neighbors have built houses close to the farm since the hog houses were built, so the smell can’t be horrible or constant. Joey seems to really love the animals and love to farm (I originally wrote “his animals,” but it turns out that Smithfield actually owns the pigs — Carter is contracted merely to fatten them). For a confined animal operation, Carter’s is about as good as it gets.
But still, the way the documentary frames it, everyone just needs to support farmers. They need to trust that farmers have to do things certain ways, or else we’ll all starve. The film never uses the term “CAFO” and doesn’t consider whether there’s a way to support farmers by supporting farming practices that do a much better job of honoring the land and the animals. The smell from the hog houses and the flies are just a “nuisance” — a term the documentary paints as so subjective as to be meaningless.
Nevertheless, though the muckraking techniques of the trial lawyers who brought the suits definitely deserve criticism — and while it’s easy to bemoan how litigation-happy our society has become — these lawsuits have led to improvements in the operation of CAFOs. While it should be stressed that this is merely treating the symptoms instead of addressing the causes, new technologies are being used to mitigate the spread of odors. Deliveries of fattened animals are starting to happen at different times of day in order to reduce smell and noise.
I encourage you to watch a video from the trial lawyers’ perspective at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u7FCw5ZCC5g. The documentary also makes an important point about the prevalence and potential problems of advocacy-funded media, which in this case presented stories in major media outlets that oversold how bad Smithfield operations likely are.
However, reducing odor via different practices and new technologies doesn’t get the pigs back into their natural environment. Reforming farm nuisance laws — one of the results of the lawsuits, and a good measure if doing so somehow prevents frivolous suits encouraged by people not directly impacted by the farm — may not be the best answer, either. There are farming practices that do cause nuisances to neighbors. Those people need legal recourse.
And it’s not like the producers of Hog Farmer don’t have their own biases. The arguments of the pork council president and the Smithfield lawyer are never questioned. The documentary only presents one side of the case. Our current media environment discourages a more balanced presentation, though — it’s surely more profitable to promote a “pro-farmer” film than one that paints everyone as both wrong and right, to varying degrees and in different ways.
All of the back-and-forth italicizing above is my own attempt to reconcile a good man with that man’s poor practices. Perhaps, in the end, the most basic issue — the one I keep coming back to — is how a pig is designed to live. They should be in the woods, not on concrete.
Joey Carter is a good farmer, but he still fundamentally misunderstands the animals he loves. “I feel like their momma’s entrusted them with me or other hog growers,” he says, “to make sure they, you know, they grow up and get the life they’re supposed to have — even though we know at the end where they’re gonna go.”
But, the life pigs are supposed to have … it doesn’t produce “the smell of money.”
