Court Punishes Bobby Kennedy, Jr. For Anti-Hog Lawsuit
July 23, 2002
CHURCHVILLE, VA—Bobby Kennedy, Jr. has been publicly promising to sue all of America’s “factory hog farms” out of business, and put 60 million U.S. hogs back outdoors. Having grown up next to a smelly, muddy outdoor hog farm, I know this is a bad idea. Now, a federal judge has dismissed Bobby, Jr.’s lawsuit against America’s biggest hog contractor, Smithfield Foods.
Bobby may argue that Smithfield got off on a technicality: The judge said he and his Waterkeeper Alliance failed to prove that the company’s actions had damaged their property. (Bobby may be surprised to learn that the Kennedy family doesn’t actually own the nation’s rivers.)
However, the judge took an unusual further step: she’s making Bobby, Jr.’s lawyers pay Smithfield’s legal costs. That usually means the judge thinks the lawsuit was frivolous. U.S. District Court Judge Elizabeth Kovachevich wrote in her opinion, “No reasonable attorney could reasonably believe that [the lawsuit] had any reasonable chance of success.”
Bobby Jr. is asserting in his lawsuit that factory hog farms dump millions of tons of raw animal wastes into the nations’ rivers. But that isn’t happening. The hog farmers have reality as a defense.
Bobby, Jr. and his group have also been losing “hog pollution” lawsuits in North Carolina courts, where most of the Smithfield hogs are raised. One of Kennedy’s attorney’s alleged it would take $10 billion to restore the hog damage in just one of North Carolina’s rivers. But the Waterkeepers lawsuit was thrown out by a state court, and a companion suit on behalf of 17 riverbank landowners was also dismissed.
Why? The plaintiffs failed to prove any damage by the hog farms. Confinement hog farms may raise emotions, but they don’t raise pollution levels. The quarterly reports from North Carolina’s Department of Water Quality consistently show that 99 percent of the state’s hog farms have no discharges to surface waters at all.
North Carolina’s Black River, which drains many of Smithfield’s hog farms—and has the densest hog population in the United States—is rated an “outstanding resource water” by the state. The river has no higher nitrate content today, with 9 million hogs, than it did 15 years ago with 2 million.
The total discharge from the hog farms is miniscule—especially when compared with the large amounts of N spewed from the cities’ waste treatment facilities. The nutrient spikes found in North Carolina streams are not associated with hog farms but with its urban sewage treatment plants. Today’s city sewage plants take out only about half of the N from human wastes.
Farmers won another recent victory when the Iowa Supreme Court ruled that county governments could not impose tighter public health requirements than the State government sets. Some counties in Iowa, Colorado, and Missouri had used ultra-tight regulations written by county health departments to discourage confinement hog farms from being built.
In reality, however, a modern confinement hog facility is no health threat to people. I was recently invited to be an expert witness in a hog pollution lawsuit, and reviewed the “evidence” presented by the plaintiff neighbors. They alleged that hog farms caused every case of flu, fatigue, or depression in the county. But they essentially offered no evidence connecting the hog farms to health problems. Their courtroom strategy was to pass around the jury swatches of cloth that had been dipped in the hog farm’s waste lagoon.
The whole lawsuit was about odor.
Ironically, today’s hog farms are less smelly than outdoor hogs, and radically less offensive than the feedlot hog farms of 20 years ago. The best modern hog farms cannot be smelled even 50 yards away, downwind, on a hot day. The hog wastes are injected into the fields so effectively that all you smell is earth.
What angered me about the Waterkeeper hog lawsuit is that even if a confinement hog farm occasionally leaked a bit, essentially it’s putting the hog wastes to good use on growing crops instead of letting the wastes get into the streams. The one certain thing is if the Waterkeepers sue 60 million confinement hogs back outdoors, all of our hog wastes will wash into the streams with every rainstorm. The Waterkeepers lawsuits sabotage their own clean-water mission!
DENNIS T. AVERY is a senior fellow for Hudson Institute in Indianapolis and the Director of the Center for Global Food Issues (www.cgfi.org). He was formerly a senior analyst for the U.S. Department of State. Readers may write to him at Post Office Box 202, Churchville, VA 24421
This article was published by Knight Ridder Tribune
Dennis T. Avery is based in Churchville, Va., and is director of global food issues for the Hudson Institute of Indianapolis.
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