Two anniversaries nobody marked on the same calendar
Two anniversaries passed almost unnoticed in 2025. One ended with the quiet cancellation of a federal research grant. The second dated back to 2000, and expired that year without delivering what it had promised.
The grant would have measured, for the first time with any rigor, what the air and water actually carry into homes near North Carolina’s industrial hog operations (Sorg, 2025). Scientists from Duke University and the University of North Carolina (UNC) had already sampled wells and logged air quality when the funding stopped — one of more than seventeen hundred grants pulled from the same federal health agency that year.
The other agreement was older: a deal Smithfield struck with the state in 2000, trading legal cover on its waste lagoons for a promise to help fund “environmentally superior” alternatives within twenty-five years. Most farms in Duplin and Sampson counties — the two highest hog-producing counties in the entire country — still use the same open lagoons today.
Nobody canceled a lawsuit or vetoed a bill. A grant lapsed. A deadline passed without ceremony. Two dates. No headlines connecting them.
A fence built out of paperwork
Three centuries ago, English commons — pasture and woodland a village shared by custom, not deed — sustained families who owned nothing but depended on everything held in common. The Enclosure Acts fenced that land into private holdings, one parliamentary petition at a time. Each act followed procedure. By the nineteenth century, millions of acres that had fed smallholders for generations belonged to a shrinking number of estates, and the displaced became the first generation of factory labor.
The commons being fenced off today rarely has a name on a map. It is air quality. It is a private well. What one operation can quietly externalize, an entire county downstream has no choice but to absorb.
The instrument changes. A commissioner’s survey. A biogas contract. A grant that quietly stops being renewed. The shape underneath tends to stay the same: something communal or inherited absorbed into someone else’s ledger, through channels too gradual and too legal for any single moment to look like theft.
The vineyard hard by the palace
“Naboth the Jezreelite had a vineyard, which was in Jezreel, hard by the palace of Ahab king of Samaria… And Ahab spake unto Naboth, saying, Give me thy vineyard, that I may have it for a garden of herbs, because it is near unto my house.” (1 Kings 21:1–2)
Naboth refused; the land had come down from his fathers, and Israelite inheritance law bound it to family rather than royal appetite. Jezebel hired two witnesses to swear falsely that he had cursed God and king, had him stoned outside the city, and Ahab took the vineyard the same day.
It’s the paperwork. Letters, seals, sworn testimony — every form due process could offer, used to accomplish what a simple robbery could not have accomplished with the same legitimacy. What the story describes, in modern language, sits closer to regulatory capture than to crime: the machinery of legitimate process, redirected until it serves the very appetite it was built to restrain.
Micah, writing of a later generation of land-hungry officials, described men who “covet fields, and take them by violence… so they oppress a man and his house” (Micah 2:2). Proverbs warns the courts directly: “Rob not the poor, because he is poor… for the LORD will plead their cause” (Proverbs 22:22–23).
Scripture does not require that every catastrophe be interpreted as divine judgment; it does, however, insist that societies eventually reveal the moral conditions under which they have chosen to live.
Thirty hogs for every person
Smithfield entered Bladen County in 1992. Within six years, North Carolina’s hog population climbed from roughly two million animals to more than ten million, and the state became the country’s second-largest pork producer (Riazati, 2020). That growth settled into a permanent arithmetic: in Duplin County today, researchers at UNC estimate there are roughly thirty hogs for every human resident.
In 1999, Hurricane Floyd answered the arithmetic with a flood. Waste lagoons across the coastal plain overtopped, and the pink-tinged water that rose through Duplin and Sampson counties carried hog waste into rivers, wells, and front yards alongside the storm surge itself. It was the clearest possible image of a system built to hold, tested by weather it was never designed to survive.
The following year, the state reached its agreement with Smithfield: legal cover for the existing lagoons, in exchange for a promise to fund “environmentally superior” alternatives within twenty-five years. Ryke Longest, co-director of Duke University’s Environmental Law and Policy Clinic, has described the agreement’s central weakness in blunt terms — “a loophole so big Smithfield has been driving 18-wheel hog haulers through it” ever since, built around a clause requiring change only when “economically feasible.” The company has invoked that clause for a quarter century. The waste has never been sent to treatment facilities the way human sewage is.
Naboth’s vineyard was land that had come down to him from his fathers. Elsie Herring’s version of that inheritance was a tract in Wallace her great-grandfather, a freed man, had bought in 1891 — land that stayed in the family for five generations before an industrial hog operation moved in next door. For nearly thirty years she wrote to regulators, governors, and attorneys general about waste that she said blew onto her mother’s house “like it was raining.” She testified in federal court, watched the case travel through appeals and a legislature that tightened rather than loosened what neighbors could sue for. She died in May 2025 — months before the twenty-five-year agreement quietly expired, still unmet.
She was not alone. More than five hundred residents joined the federal lawsuits filed against Smithfield’s subsidiary starting in 2014, twenty-six cases in all. Alexandria McKoy testified at fourteen, describing what had changed on her family’s Bladen County land since an industrial farm moved in next door. Joyce Louretha Richardson McKiver lived two decades beside the Kinlaw Farms operation at the center of the first case to reach a jury, which in 2018 awarded its ten plaintiffs $50 million — later reduced under a state damages cap. A federal appeals judge, upholding most of that verdict in 2020, wrote that the conditions were unlikely to have persisted “had the neighbors… been wealthier or more politically powerful.”
The pattern echoes rather than repeats. In the Naboth story, the mechanism was manufactured testimony. Here, it has run almost in reverse — not by inventing false witnesses, but by quietly preventing true evidence from being completed. The 2025 grant was designed to produce the one thing decades of testimony had never fully secured: independent, peer-reviewed data on what the air and water were doing to the people nearest them. It did not have to be disproved. It only had to lose its funding. The timing of these two anniversaries landing in the same year may well be coincidence. The indifference that let both pass unremarked is not new at all.
Meanwhile, a second biogas processing facility near Bowdens is on track to be completed by the end of 2026, drawing methane from as many as thirty-five farms under an Align RNG partnership between Smithfield and Dominion Energy. Smithfield argues the project represents meaningful environmental progress and that the lawsuits have exaggerated the underlying problem; it has consistently declined interview requests from reporters covering the litigation. Yet it leaves untouched the central question: where does the waste still go? A second open lagoon. The same fields. The same wind, over the same houses that have absorbed it for forty years.
A vineyard does not need a new owner announced in the paper. It only needs its rightful keeper to stop being asked.
The wind does not read deeds
Naboth’s vineyard was never really about a vegetable garden. The circumstances differ; the moral logic is familiar. Three thousand years and an ocean away, the ground in question is a family plot in Duplin County that has outlasted five generations and the woman who spent half her life defending it.
The wind still carries what it always did. What has changed is how easily a society learns to stop asking what it carries.
Sources: Lisa Sorg, “Trump Cancels Study on Health Impacts of Industrialized Hog Farms That Produce Biogas,” Inside Climate News, Sept. 6, 2025 · Sarah Riazati, “The Dirty and Protracted Battle Over Foul-Smelling Hog Farms in North Carolina,” The Outline, 2020 · “Whole Hog: Pulled Apart,” University of North Carolina Journalism Project, wholehognc.unc.edu · Barry Yeoman, Food & Environment Reporting Network, Dec. 20, 2019 · Fourth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals opinion, Nov. 19, 2020 · Ryke Longest interview, MIT Environmental Solutions Initiative / North Carolina Health News, 2021 · Duke University School of Medicine, Environmental Health Scholars Program, CAFO proximity mortality study, cited in Yale E360, 2021.