N.C. trial starts over smell from 6,000-hog operation

RALEIGH, N.C. — A case against the world’s largest pork producer went to trial Wednesday, with jurors being asked to consider how bad hog waste can smell and whether the neighbors deserve a nuisance award that could potentially run into the millions of dollars.

The federal case against Murphy-Brown centers on Sholar Farm in rural Sampson County, 80 miles south of Raleigh, where eight plaintiffs living around the farm seek unspecified damages for years of odor, truck noise and flies.

Some of those plaintiffs can trace roots on that land back a century, said their lead attorney Michael Kaeske of Dallas, who described an idyllic rural lifestyle interrupted by Sholar’s arrival in the mid1980s.

“That all ended when [farming magnate] Wendell Murphy decided the end of this dead-end road was a suitable location for his hogs,” Kaeske said. Sholar Farm has 6,000 hogs and 10 million gallons of waste in its lagoons, he said.

In an opening statement that took more than an hour, Kaeske argued that the plaintiffs cannot enjoy their property enough to host a family barbecue, let children play outside or tend a garden because unpredictable smells chase them inside.

Kaeske pointed out North Carolina’s 1997 moratorium on new hog lagoons — the grandfathered Sholar Farm uses two without covering — and several new technologies he said the company declines to add because of high costs.

“Hogs are eating, urinating, defecating machines,” Kaeske said. “That’s all they do all day long. … This mess is the result.”

In August, a federal jury awarded $470 million to neighbors of a Pender County farm run by Murphy-Brown, an award that was reduced to a state cap on punitive damages.

The new trial is the fourth such case against MurphyBrown this year.

Murphy-Brown’s parent company, Smithfield Foods Inc., is represented by Dallas attorney Robert Thackston, who characterized Kaeske’s David-and-Goliath argument as “fiction.”