North Carolina Factory Farms

North Carolina, with some 11 million hogs, ranks second in swine production in the U.S. Virtually all of the hogs are concentrated in the eastern third of the state, and produce far more waste than this coastal ecosystem can absorb.

The region's sandy soils act as a sieve, allowing untreated feces and urine to leach through unlined waste pits and fields where the waste is sprayed into shallow groundwater. Heavy seasonal rains carry untold volumes of this waste into wetlands and rivers. Further, millions of tons of ammonia evaporate every year from the estimated 4,000 waste pits in North Carolina, and is then re-deposited as nitrogen on land and in coastal waters. Excessive nitrogen triggers massive algae growth and suffocation of the region's rivers and estuaries, destroying wetlands, killing fish, fouling wildlife habitat, and forcing the closure of shell fishing grounds.

The Southern Environmental Law Center continues to work as part of a broad spectrum of citizens groups to bring the pork industry, unregulated for years, under control in North Carolina. Together with community groups, river basin advocates, sustainable agriculture community and larger environmental organization, we garnered support needed to extend a moratorium on new and expanded hog farms for another four years while research continues on environmentally superior waste management techniques. We also successfully fought to limit a proposed to dramatically increase slaughter capacity in the state that would have brought significantly more hogs - and pollution.

• Rose Acre Farms
• Smithfield Agreement
• Regulating CAFO discharge
• The problem with hog factories