Ep. 06: The Lagoon

The story of what concentrated animal feeding operations—CAFOs—do to the people who live beside, downstream, and downwind of them | In Kewaunee County, Wisconsin, the water coming out of the tap turned the color of rust. In Bladen County, North Carolina, the air grew so thick with gases from hog waste lagoons that families couldn't sit on their own porches. In the Lower Yakima Valley in Washington State, the water looked clean. It wasn't. Sixty percent of the wells nearest the dairy operations that had been running there for decades exceeded the federal safety standard for nitrate.

None of these communities were the victims of an accident. The permits were followed. The lagoons worked as designed. The waste went exactly where the system allowed it to go.

This story is told from three states, across five decades, through the people who got sick, the scientists who proved it, the lawyers who fought it, and the family that built one of the operations at the center of it all. It's a story about a regulatory system that was never designed to protect the communities it was supposed to serve, and about the people fighting back.

Transcript

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Just outside the small town of Luxembourg, in Kiwanee County in the northeast corner of Wisconsin, the Carnop family home sits at the end of a gravel drive, surrounded by fields. This is dairy country, gently rolling land shaped by glaciers and threaded with small rivers and streams running east towards Lake Michigan. Kewani County has 97 cows per square mile, the highest concentration in the state. 105,000 cows and 20,000 people, five cows for every person. Arlen Carnop's great-grandfather was the first in the family to own this piece of land. Four generations of Carnops have lived and raised children here since. The municipal water system in Luxembourg doesn't reach the farmland outside of town, so, like most farming families, they draw their water from a private well drilled into the limestone bedrock underneath their property. 1,000 miles southeast in Bladen County, North Carolina, a sandy cul-de-sac dead ends into a driveway flanked by no trespassing signs. This is the inner coastal plain, flat, low country of longleaf pine and sandy soil, with dark streams winding slowly towards the Cape Fear River. It often floods when big rainstorms come. Daphne McCoy grew up here. Her father was a sharecropper. He didn't have much, and what he earned, he earned with his hands. But what he did leave to his children was this piece of land. When Daphne was young, she'd work the fields alongside him, play in the woods out back, and sit on the porch in the evening. 2,500 miles to the west, in the lower Yakima Valley of Washington State, a businessman named Bob Dolson looked at a stretch of open farmland near the small town of Granger in the early 1970s and saw an opportunity. Dolson was an accountant who already ran a Coca-Cola bottling plant and a leasing business. He didn't come from a farming family, but the valley was wide open country with fields stretching from the rattlesnake hills to the bluffs along the Yakima River, fed by snowbelt from the Cascade Mountains. Land was cheap and water was plentiful, so Dolson bought a parcel, put up a barn, and started milking cows. He called the place Cow Palace. The Carnops from Wisconsin didn't choose to be part of this story. Neither did the McCoys in North Carolina. They were living on land their families had held for generations and drawing water from wells they trusted, until one day they couldn't. The Dulcens were different. They built the machine. That distinction is important to our story. Most stories about KFOs, we'll explain what that means in a moment, are told from the perspective of the community whose water and air got contaminated, not from the perspective of the people who caused the contamination. This story is told from both. We are structuring the story this way because the system that allows factory farms to poison water and air doesn't work without the people willing to run them, regulators willing to permit them, and politicians willing to protect them. The Carnops and the McCoys show you what it costs. The Dolcans show you who profits. This is happening across the country. Except for Alaska, Hawaii, Massachusetts, and Rhode Island, every state in the country has at least one large CAFO. Some, like California, Minnesota, and Nebraska, have more than a thousand. Iowa leads the country with 3,896. The EPA counts more than 21,000 large CAFOs in total nationwide. This is the story of what CAFOs do to the people who live beside, downstream, and downwind of them, and the people who are fighting back. It stands for Concentrated Animal Feeding Operation. At its simplest, a CAFO is a farm where animals don't go outside to graze or roam. They're confined in indoor spaces like metal barns, concrete pens, or buildings with slated floors that let waste drop through. They're brought feed rather than grazing, and the waste they generate is collected and stored on site rather than being absorbed by the land. The confinement is the economic logic. More animals in less space means more product per dollar of infrastructure. The federal government divides these operations into size tiers based on what type of animal is housed there. A dairy operation becomes a large CAFO at 700 mature cows. For hogs heavier than 55 pounds, the threshold is 2,500. For chickens, a large operation must house more than 125,000 birds. The United States has more than 21,000 operations that clear the large CAFO threshold. Thousands more fall into the medium category. The smallest operations aren't classified as CAPOs at all. And the regulatory framework stops there. There is no higher tier, so a dairy farm with 700 cows and one with 7,000 face identical oversight requirements. The system simply wasn't designed to scale with the industry. There's a federal permitting system that's supposed to keep track of all of this. It's called the National Pollutant Discharge Elimination System, NPDES, and it requires KFOs that discharge waste into federally regulated water waste to obtain a permit. The permit requires operators to document how much waste their animals produce and how they plan to manage it. It's the primary tool the federal government has for monitoring what goes into the ground and water around these operations. Those permits cover about 30% of the country's large CAFOs. The other 70% operate without one. To understand why, you have to know that the permit requires proof of an actual discharge into a waterway. The EPA twice tried to expand that requirement, once in 2003, again in 2008, attempting to require permits from any CAFO that was likely to discharge. Both times, the livestock industry sued, and federal courts sided with the industry, ruling that the Clean Water Act only gives the EPA jurisdiction over pollution that has already happened, not pollution that's about to. So, the current system isn't a loophole the EPA left open, but a boundary that the courts drew around it. The agency is left to rely on CAFOs to self-report whether they discharge, and therefore whether they need a permit at all. There's a second problem. Most CAFO pollution doesn't travel via a pipe or a drain that empties directly into a river. It moves when it rains. The Clean Water Act has a specific exemption for what it calls agricultural stormwater. When pollution moves via rainfall rather than direct discharge, it can often be classified under that exemption and escape the permitting requirement entirely. The result is that in some states with hundreds of large CAFOs, Indiana, Idaho, and Arkansas among them, zero facilities hold a federal permit. States can go higher than federal permitting requires, but most don't. CAFOs produce the vast majority of the meat and milk Americans consume, and they produce waste in massive quantities. A single dairy cow produces roughly 120 pounds of waste a day, feces and urine combined. When she's lactating, it can reach 150 pounds. A dairy operation with 1,000 cows produces upwards of 120,000 pounds of raw waste every single day. But here's the difference. That city would have a wastewater treatment plant, sewer lines, and filtration systems. CAFOs don't have any of that. Instead, they have lagoons. That's the industry's word for it. A lagoon is a massive uncovered pit, sometimes the size of several football fields dug into the earth and lined with compacted clay, into which millions of pounds of animal waste are flushed, piped, or drained from the barns above. The waste sits in the pit and is broken down by bacteria. What's left is a slurry of liquefied waste, some good nutrients like nitrogen and phosphorus, but also pathogens like E. coli, salmonella, and cryptosporidium, antibiotics fed to animals to prevent disease in close quarters, and heavy metals from feed additives. Some of it gets pumped back into the barns to flush the next round of waste through. The rest gets sprayed onto surrounding fields, where it's supposed to be absorbed by the soil as a fertilizer. When the soil can absorb it, that's what happens. When it can't, when the ground is frozen or already saturated, or when operators spray in wet or windy weather, it runs off into the nearest waterway or seeps down into the groundwater below. How fast it gets there depends on the geology. In places with what scientists call karst topography, bedrock that is fractured, cracked, or porous, liquid waste can travel from the surface down to the water table in a matter of hours. Think of the bedrock not as a barrier, but as a sieve. Cracks and fissures running through the limestone or dolomite rock that acts as express lanes from the surface to the aquifer below. In karst terrain, when manure is spread on a field, there's no slow filtration through layers of soil. The waste drops straight down. When it moves sideways instead across the surface and into creeks, rivers, and drainage ditches, it carries the same load of contaminants into the surface water system, fueling algae blooms, depleting oxygen, and killing fish. For instance, the place where our story started, Kewanee County, Wisconsin, sits on karst. The upper layer of bedrock is easily dissolved by water and laced with networks of fractures beneath the surface. Those fractures become direct conduits running straight from the surface to the aquifer below. The contamination also moves through the air. Open lagoons release ammonia, hydrogen sulfide, and methane that drifts downwind and settles on whatever is in their path houses, cars, schools, clotheslines. The air around a large CAFO doesn't just smell bad, it carries particulate matter fine enough to enter our lungs. Studies have linked living near a CAFO to elevated rates of asthma, high blood pressure, kidney disease, and certain cancers. Duplin County, North Carolina, close to Bladen County, where Daphne McCoy grew up, has the highest concentration of hog operations in the country. A 2021 study published in the proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences by University of Minnesota researcher Jason Hill found that 89 people die prematurely every year from emissions directly linked to hog farming alone. 89 people every year in one single county. The system that's supposed to prevent all of this is built on a single assumption that's never been true: that if the permit rules are followed, the lagoons won't leak, the spray won't drift, and the land will absorb everything. The 21,000 large CAFOs in America are all operating under the same permitting framework and spreading the same kind of waste on the same kinds of land. The communities living beside, downstream, or downwind of them are finding that the system designed to protect them was never built to do that job. And in many cases, the courts made sure it couldn't. For most of the 20th century, the farms dotting the northeast corner of Wisconsin were small family operations. Maybe a few hundred cows that grazed the pastures in summer and came into the barn for winter and milking. The Carnops neighbors were farming families, people who'd say hello at the feed store and at the county fair, standing at the rail as their kids led dairy cows into the judging ring. But starting in the 1990s, the economics of dairy farming began to shift. Federal price supports weakened and the milk prices rose and fell in a market farmers could no longer control. Small operations were the first to break. If a farm wanted to survive, it had to get bigger, more animals, and larger barns. A thousand could then become 5,000. Eventually, Kiwani County, Wisconsin had 16 large CAFOs housing a combined total of nearly 105,000 cows. In many cases, the CAFOs in Kiwane County are homegrown, run by families who have been farming the land for generations. But the economics left them little choice. The USDA found that farms with 1,000 or more cows had production costs 25 to 35% lower than farms with just a few hundred cows. The math was simple but brutal. Get bigger or lose the farm. Farmers borrowed heavily to build new milking parlors, the kind where cows rotate through a mechanized system rather than standing in stalls. Those parlors can handle 10 times the animals with a fraction of the labor. The debt from borrowing required more cows and more milk just to keep up with the payments, and more cows required more land to spread the additional waste. The regulatory system didn't keep up with the change. So the story of Kiwani County isn't about outsiders coming in to make a profit. It's a story about a community whose own industry outgrew the land's capacity to sustain it. The farmers didn't set out to poison their neighbors' wells. The land simply couldn't handle what they were putting on it. In Bladen and Duplin counties in North Carolina, the transformation looked quite a bit different. There, it was fast, deliberate, and corporate. For most of the 20th century, the coastal plains economy ran on tobacco. But as the tobacco industry buckled under the weight of lawsuits and settlements in the 1980s and 90s, a new commodity moved in. Hogs. North Carolina has always produced pigs, but usually in small numbers on diversified farms alongside other crops and animals. Devin Hall, who grew up in Duplin County, remembered the old way. Gardening and farming, he said, that was just a part of what everybody did. Chickens in the yard, hogs in the pen. It was a way of life. But in the late 1980s, industry arrived. Smithfield Foods, a Virginia-based company that would become the largest pork producer in the world, expanded aggressively into eastern North Carolina. It anchored its expansion with the construction of a massive pork processing plant in the town of Tarheel and the acquisition of major local hog producers like Murphy Family Farms. The contract system Smithfield deployed was the same model that investigative journalist Christopher Leonard documented in his 2014 book, The Meat Racket, the secret takeover of America's Food Business. Leonard traced how Tyson Foods had pioneered what he called chickenizing the meat industry, a system of vertical integration in which the company owns the animals and controls every aspect of production, while farmers take on the land, the debt, and the risk. Smithfield applied the same playbook to pork. Rather than buying individual family farms outright, Smithfield signed contracts with local farmers, many of whom were just trying to replace lost tobacco income to raise Smithfield's pigs on their own land. The farmers kept the deed for the land, but Smithfield controlled what happened on it. The company supplied the hogs and dictated the terms around barn design, operating procedures, feed type, and waste management. As Leonard put it, the farmer never owns the animals. The company delivers them, the farmers tend them, and the company collects them when they're ready. What the farmer holds is the contract, the debt, and the waste. Farmers took on massive debt to build the barns Smithfield required, and they were responsible for managing the waste those barns produced. It was sharecropping with a corporate face. The farmers nominally owned the land and the debt, while Smithfield owned the relationship with the market. Then Smithfield kept the margin. By 2020, contract hog farmers were earning less than 19 cents for every dollar a consumer spent on pork, and the National Farmers Union estimated they were losing 53 cents per pound once their costs were factored in. Meanwhile, Smithfield's profits hit record highs. The growth was explosive. In 1987, North Carolina had roughly 6,900 hog farms raising about 2.5 million pigs. By the late 1990s, the number of farms had been cut by two-thirds to around 2,300, but the number of pigs had quadrupled to 10 million. That meant the animals were concentrated into fewer, larger operations, most of them clustered in the flat, low-lying counties of the coastal plain. Duplin County alone eventually housed 2.3 million hogs, nearly 40 of them for every person in the county. The geography of that concentration wasn't random. A 2000 study published in the Environmental Health Perspectives Journal by epidemiologist Steve Wing and colleagues found that after adjusting for population density, corporate integrator operations like Smith Fields were 20 times more concentrated in the poorest communities than in the wealthiest, compared to just 3.5 times more concentrated in the poorest communities for independently owned farms. The same study found that minority communities were roughly five times as likely as predominantly white communities to have those operations in their immediate area, even after controlling for rurality. This isn't a byproduct of cheap land making certain places more available. It's a pattern that corporate structures amplify. The cheap land and the communities with limited political power to resist made those counties the path of least resistance. The industry built a business model around it. In the lower Yakima Valley in Washington State, Bob Dolson's cow palace eventually grew to 7,200 cows, producing more than half a million pounds of grade A milk every day. But the Dolcans weren't alone. Starting in the 1970s, dairy families began arriving from California, fleeing tightening environmental regulations and rising land prices in places like the Chino and San Joaquin Valleys. They came because the math worked. Land was cheap, water was abundant, and Washington State issued permits for new dairy operations without requiring groundwater monitoring. The waste lagoons were considered adequate. Together, the cluster of megadairies in the Yakima Valley, including Cow Palace, housed more than 30,000 animals. Before the dairies arrived, the valley's irrigation return drains supported trout populations. Return drains are artificial channels that carry excess water from farm fields back towards the Yakima River. Once the dairies moved in, some of these drains became conduits for waste. CAFO operators pumped liquid manure from their lagoons directly into the drains, or let it flow into the drains when lagoons overflowed. The trout disappeared, and the channels that had been fish habitat filled up with bacteria. In Wisconsin, the contamination came from family farms that grew too large. In North Carolina, it came from a corporate system that moved into the state's poorest counties. And in Washington, it came from entrepreneurs who saw cheap land, cheap water, and few rules. The people who would end up paying the price had no choice in any of it. In Kiwani County, the first sign that something was wrong came four days too late. In early March 2004, Stall Farms, a dairy operation in the town of Luxembourg, spread tens of thousands of gallons of liquid manure on a frozen field across the street from the Tremel family's home without informing them. Wisconsin's Department of Natural Resources, the state agency responsible for regulating water quality and environmental protection, had given the farm permission to spread the waste after the lagoon reached its capacity. The ground was frozen solid, so the manure couldn't soak in. Instead, it ran off the frozen field, into a roadside ditch, and into a tributary of School Creek nearby. From there, it reached the Tremel's well. Four days later, Judy Tremel turned on her kitchen tap and outflowed brown water that smelled like manure. She stopped using the water immediately, but the damage was already done. During those four days, the family had used the water for everything drinking, cooking, and bathing their children. The contamination had reached the well before the color changed. By the time Judy saw what was coming out of the tap, every member of the household was sick. The worst was Samantha, the Tremel's six month old daughter. Late that night, she was rushed to the emergency room violently ill with vomiting and diarrhoea. When the county tested the well, the results were shocking. The federal standard for E. coli in drinking water is zero, meaning that any presence is a hazard. The Tremel well wasn't barely over the line, it was contaminated to a degree that would have shut down any public beach in the state. The county told the Tremels to shut off the water and get out of the house. It was the case that turned contamination from one family's private nightmare into a public fight. When Nancy Utesh arrived in Kiwani County later that year and learned what had happened to the Tremels, she founded Kiwani Cares, a citizens' group that would spend the next two decades demanding the state treat the county's water crisis as a systemic failure, not a series of isolated accidents. We'll get back to Nancy shortly. When the contamination that sickened the Tremels was traced back to Stahl Farms Field, the DNR insisted the spreading hadn't violated the farms permit. The state attorney general's office disagreed. It filed a lawsuit against Stahl Farms for violating its discharge permit. Two agencies within the same state government looked at the same event and reached opposite conclusions. One said the rules were followed, the other said they were broken. The settlement required Stahl to pay up to $100,000 in forfeitures. The farm's insurer paid the Tremels $80,000 in civil damages. Judy Tremel said she'd hoped the DNR would use their case to prevent future contamination. That didn't happen. The family moved to nearby Green Bay, but the problems they left behind continued to get worse. In the years after the Tremels left, testing revealed the scale of what Kiwani County was dealing with. 34% of the wells sampled in the county showed unsafe levels of coliform, E. coli, or nitrate. A county board member, alarmed by test results from his own well, spent $10,000 to drill a new, deeper well in 2013. By 2015, that well was contaminated too, this time with four bovine viruses and elevated nitrate. The Algoma School District set up a free clean water kiosk outside the high school for families whose wells had failed. More on the health impacts to humans of consuming these contaminants later. The Carnops well was among those that tested positive. They stopped drinking the water and cooking with it, warned visitors not to use the tap, and were afraid to let their grandchildren play in the yard because the contamination was in the soil, too. In Bladen County, North Carolina, where Daphne McCoy's family had lived for generations, and in county after county across the coastal plain, the hog waste from Smithfield's contract farms drains into open-air lagoons. The bacteria that break down the waste turn the liquid pink. From the air, these lagoons look like enormous swimming pools filled with peptobismol. There were more than 3,000 of them in North Carolina. The disposal method is spraying. Farmers pump the untreated liquid waste from these lagoons through irrigation systems that shoot it across croplands at hundreds of gallons per minute, where it's supposed to act as fertilizer, absorbed by the soil and whatever's growing there. In theory, the nutrients feed the crops. In reality, the land can only absorb so much. The rest goes wherever the wind takes it, onto the porches, rooftops, cars, and clotheslines of every family within range. Elsie Herring knew this better than most. Herring had been raised in Duplin County on land her family had owned since 1891, bought by her grandfather, a generation removed from slavery. She'd left for a career in banking, and when she returned home in the 1990s to care for her aging mother, she found that the farm next door had been converted to an industrial hog operation. The spray from the neighboring fields drifted onto her mother's house like rain. She could smell it in every room and feel it in her throat. On the worst days, she and her mother couldn't stay outside long enough to walk to the car. Devin Hall, a few miles away in Warsaw, watched the same transformation from a different angle. Hall had grown up in Duplin County when it was still a place of small farms and family gardens. He'd seen the hog operations multiply through the 1990s and 2000s and watched his neighbors' quality of life collapse alongside the air quality. The family gatherings that had once defined rural life in Dublin were gone. The smell wasn't just unpleasant. The gases released by the lagoons and spray operations, ammonia, hydrogen sulfide, and methane, were dangerous. A 2018 study by Duke University researcher Julia Kravchenko found that communities in North Carolina near hog farms had significantly higher death rates from kidney disease, anemia, and sepsis. In the most heavily affected areas, there were 30% more deaths from kidney disease and 50% more from anemia than communities without hog operations. In Washington, the contamination was the hardest to detect. It was invisible. Nitrates are colorless and odorless. You can't see them in a glass of water, taste them, or boil them out, as boiling actually concentrates them. The only way to know if your well is contaminated is to test it. And for decades, nobody in the lower Yakima Valley was required to test. The contamination crept outward from the cluster of megadaies north of Granger, including Cow Palace, as nitrogen from the manure they spread on their fields and from the lagoons leaking beneath them seeped into the shallow aquifer that fed the valley's private wells. By the time researchers began testing, the damage was already widespread. More than 20% of private wells sampled in the Yakima Valley exceeded the federal safety standard for nitrate. Within a mile of the main cluster of CAFO dairies, the figure was 60%. The families on those wells, largely low-income and Latino, many of them farm workers employed by the same agricultural industry contaminating their water, had no way of knowing because the state didn't require testing and the dairies didn't disclose. The nitrates accumulated year after year, even though the water that came out of the tap looked clean and tasted fine. Across the county, families living on land their grandparents and great-grandparents had farmed were learning the same thing. The water their families relied upon was no longer safe. The person who turned the crisis in Wisconsin into a sustained fight was a beef farmer named Nancy Utesh. Nancy and her husband Lynn, a Navy veteran, had moved to Kiwani County and established a 150-acre grass-fed beef operation that was the opposite of everything the county's KFOs represented. They raised purebred shorthorn cattle on rotational pasture, moving their herd to fresh grass daily and selling direct to consumers. They taught themselves rotational grazing on their first farm in Washington Island in Lake Michigan, where there was no access to grain and the cattle had to eat whatever the land offered. What they found in Kiwani County alarmed them. Their neighbors' wells were contaminated, and the county's CAFOs were spreading millions of gallons of liquid manure on fields above fractured bedrock that wasn't equipped to handle it safely. Worse, the Wisconsin DNR didn't seem to care. That's why Nancy founded Kiwani Citizens advocating responsible stewardship, or Kiwani CARES for short. The group's goal wasn't to shut down dairy farming, it was to demand that the state enforce the rules it already had on the books and impose the monitoring that the science demanded. In 2014, Kiwani Cares joined other environmental groups in petitioning the Environmental Protection Agency to take emergency action on the county's drinking water, triggering a federal investigation that would reshape the conversation. Lin, meanwhile, became a public face of the fight, a farmer who could speak to other farmers and couldn't be dismissed as an outsider or an activist. He ran for the state legislature in 2016 and appeared in the documentary Right to Harm. For years, he and Nancy did the unglamorous work of community organizing, attending permit hearings, collecting water samples, and knocking on doors to explain to their neighbors what the brown water meant. In North Carolina, the fight began the same year the Utesh family arrived in Kewani, but it came from a very different place. In 2002, Devin Hall and his wife Dothula founded the Rural Empowerment Association for Community Help, REACH for short, in Warsaw, North Carolina. They didn't start with hog farms, but instead by setting up English as a second language classes for the Latino community and emergency relief for families in need. REACH, at first, was a community organization, not an environmental one. The environmental activism came later. In 2004, Hall connected with Dr. Steve Wing and the North Carolina Environmental Justice Network. Together, they conducted the first systematic scientific effort to document the health impacts of living near a hog CAFO. Around the same time, Elsie Herring began what would become a decades-long campaign. She wrote letters to everyone she could think of: the sheriff, state regulators, the governor, the attorney general, state lawmakers, and the U.S. Department of Justice. For years, nothing changed, and the hog operation next to her family's land kept spraying liquid manure. But Herring kept telling her story to journalists, congressional committees, and anyone else who would listen. She became the public face of a community that had been invisible. And in New Bern, North Carolina, a retired Marine colonel and attorney named Rick Dove had moved to the Noose River with a simple plan to spend his days as a commercial fisherman. What he found when he got on the water was a dying river, massive fish kills and fish covered with open lesions. When he touched the water, it made his skin erupt in sores. He read about the Riverkeeper movement in a local newspaper and decided to become one. A riverkeeper is a professionally trained waterway advocate with the legal standing to sue polluters directly, a citizen enforcer for a specific river, empowered under the Clean Water Act to take action when regulators won't. The model had started on the Hudson River in the 1960s and spread from there. He traced the contamination upstream to the hog operations draining into the Noose watershed, and in 1993 he became the Noose's first riverkeeper. Dove organized a network of volunteer pilots who flew over eastern North Carolina to document what couldn't be seen from the ground: lagoon breaches, illegal discharges, and spray operations seen drifting across property lines. Over 30 years, Dave logged more than 3,000 flight hours over North Carolina's hog country, building a visual record of the population that the state regulators wouldn't. In Washington state, the fight started in the courtrooms. The Community Association for Restoration of the Environment, CARE, for short, brought the first citizen enforcements against Yakima Valley Dairies in the late 1990s, using the Federal Clean Water Act and the Resource Conservation and Recovery Act. A decade later, Jean Mendoza took a different approach. Mendoza founded Friends of Toppinish Creek in 2008, after a large CAFO sought to relocate near a wildlife refuge by Toppinish Creek. She focused on the fact that more than 70% of the lower Yacima Valley's population was Latino, that the state hadn't translated a single document about its CAFO permitting into Spanish, and that the communities most affected by the contamination were the ones least able to participate in the regulatory process. Mendoza filed a complaint against the Yacima Regional Clean Air Agency for failing to engage Spanish-speaking residents. She identified the inequity at the heart of the valley's dairy system with a precision that no lawsuit could match. The Yacima Valley sits on two layers of groundwater, a shallow aquifer close to the surface and the deeper one below it. The large dairies drilled down to the deeper, cleaner water for their cows. Their lagoons, meanwhile, leaked into the shallow aquifer, the one that the valley's families drew from through their private wells. The dairies had clean water for their cows, but the largely Latino families living downhill from them did not. Now, let's dig into the scientific proof. In Kewani County, it came from the federal government. Mark Borchart, a microbiologist with the U.S. Department of Agricultural's Agricultural Research Service, spent years investigating the contamination of private wells in Kiwani. His work was painstaking, sampling wells, analyzing contaminants, and building statistical models that accounted for multiple risk factors simultaneously. In 2021, his team published the results. The number one factor for acute gastrointestinal illness from private drinking water wells in Kiwani County was cow manure. The study estimated 230 cases of illness per year from cow manure alone. The primary pathogen was Cryptosporidium, a parasite that thrives in cattle waste and causes severe gastrointestinal illness. It arrived in people's wells through the fractured limestone that underlies the county. And the primary vector wasn't a lagoon breach or a spill. It was routine manure spreading on the fields above, exactly as permitted year after year. One of the study's findings was around the nutrient management plans that were supposed to reduce contamination from agricultural operations. Those plans tell farmers how much waste they can spread on a given field and when. They're the regulatory tool meant to prevent overapplication. Borchart's team found that the more fields surrounding a well that had approved nutrient management plans in place, the greater the likelihood that the well's nitrate levels exceeded the federal standard. The assumption that a nutrient management plan means contamination is being managed, Borchart told researchers, turned out not to be true. What the plans may actually do is formalize and increase the total amount of waste applied to land that can't absorb it. In eastern North Carolina, the proof came from a man who'd spent his career challenging powerful institutions. Steve Wing, who you'll remember as the epidemiologist who showed the corporate farms disproportionately chose poor communities to set up shop, was born in New Orleans on October 3rd, 1952. As a child, he was moved by the funeral parades he witnessed at an African-American church near his family's home. The music and the racial inequities he observed made a deep impression that shaped a lifelong love of jazz and a commitment to social justice that never left him. His family moved to North Carolina when he was 12. He attended Vassar College in New York, where he met his wife Betsy. They returned to North Carolina and built a home in rural Chatham County, where they raised two daughters alongside dogs, chickens, goats, and a donkey. Wing made his name in epidemiology by studying workers at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee, where he found that radiation exposure was linked to cancer mortality, a finding that government officials intensely disputed, but that Wing reported anyways. He later re-examined the Three Mile Island nuclear accident and concluded that it had, in fact, increased cancer rates in nearby communities, contradicting official assessments. In the 1990s, Wing turned to hog farms. He began attending meetings to understand what the KAFOs were doing to people's health. What he found was damning. His studies documented elevated rates of headaches, respiratory symptoms, nausea, and diarrhea amongst residents living near hog operations. He showed that the health impacts fell hardest on communities of color. And in one lecture that colleagues would remember for years afterwards, he projected two maps of eastern North Carolina side by side, one showing the counties with the highest concentrations of slave-holding plantations before the Civil War, and the other showing the counties with the highest concentrations of industrial hog farms today. The maps overlapped perfectly. The hog industry's response was immediate. The North Carolina Port Council demanded Wing's research records, citing state law governing publicly funded research. When Wing refused to hand over the personal identifiers of the community members who'd participated in his studies, information that would have exposed them to harassment and intimidation, the council threatened to sue. Wing refused. This wasn't an isolated tactic. When Wing and his colleagues later launched a separate study documenting odor exposure and health impacts in 16 neighborhoods near swine operations, they obtained a certificate of confidentiality from the National Institutes of Health before research even began, specifically because of legal measures the North Carolina Pork Council had previously used to try to obtain identifiable participation information from earlier studies. The industry's attempts to reach into the research process and expose the names of community members willing to speak hadn't worked on Wing. But the pattern was established. If you studied hog pollution in North Carolina, you'd better protect your sources before you even start. Wing was diagnosed with advanced cancer in February 2015. He continued contributing to environmental justice lawsuits even while undergoing chemotherapy. In his final weeks, he was still working. He died on November 9, 2016, at his home in Pittsburgh, North Carolina, at the age of 64. Today, a framed photograph of Steve Wing hangs on the wall of the Reach Meeting Room in Warsaw, North Carolina, where Devon Hall carries on the work Wing helped start. And at Johns Hopkins, researchers are building on Wing's foundations with a tool Wing never had, a bacterial gene sequence called Pig Tube, unique to pig fecal waste, which can definitively prove when contamination comes from hog operations. For years, the industry's defense had been that the pollution could come from wild animals or septic systems. Pig 2 back closed that loophole. In the Lower Yakima Valley, the proof came from the government, slowly, reluctantly, and only after citizens forced its hand. In 2010, the Environmental Protection Agency found that nitrate contamination of wells in the Lower Yakima Valley presented what it called an imminent and substantial endangerment to human health. The EPA linked the contamination to the cluster of megadairies north of Granger. Rather than take enforcement action, the agency negotiated. In 2013, the EPA and several of the dairies, including Cow Palace, signed a consent order in which the dairies agreed to provide alternative drinking water to contaminated homes, test their groundwater, and control the sources of nitrogen on their operations. A decade passed, but some of the dairies didn't comply. In June 2024, the Department of Justice filed a federal complaint alleging that three dairies had failed to meet the terms of the consent order. The EPA's complaint said that in a single year, the dairies had failed to report the destination of 9 million gallons of liquid manure and 80,000 tons of solid manure transported off-site. In December 2024, the federal judge ordered the dairies to test wells within 3.5 miles and provide alternative water to every home where nitrate levels exceeded the federal standard. 30 years after the first citizen complaints, 20 years after the first lawsuits, and 11 years after the consent order. In Wisconsin, in North Carolina, and in Washington, the contamination had been proven for years. The proof was never the hard part. Making anyone act on it was. On April 26, 2018, in the federal courtroom in Raleigh, North Carolina, a 14-year-old honor student named Alexandria McCoy took the witness stand. She traveled 90 miles from Bladen County, the place where her mother Daphne grew up, whose family land we visited at the start of this episode, to testify against the world's largest pork producer, Smithfield. Her mother and her brother were co-plaintiffs. Their family lived on the sandy cul-de-sac, where, in the mid-1990s, a local farmer had built a dozen swine houses and three waste lagoons under a Smithfield contract. The farmer hadn't wanted to build there. He'd wanted to use a piece of family land farther from the homes. But Smithfield directed him to a different location, one closer to the families who would eventually sue. Before long, the operation housed more than 14,000 hogs on nearly 300 acres. McCoy told the jury about the things she couldn't do: practice her flute outdoors, ride her bike, sit on her grandmother's porch, and read. She described inviting a classmate over and getting off the school bus to an overwhelming stench. Her friend asked where the smell was coming from. Other children on the bus covered their faces with their shirts as they passed. McCoy's mother, Daphne, testified too. She told the jury about the land her sharecropper father had left the family. She said it used to be quiet and the air was fresh. You could spend all day on the porch or under a tree. Nobody does that anymore. She said she wanted the jury to understand how helpless she felt as a mother when her children came home and told her what the other kids said about their house, that it smelled like a trash dump. The McCoys were among roughly 500 plaintiffs in the Smithfield Nuisance Cases, an account reconstructed in detail by author and attorney Corbin Addison in his 2022 book Wastelands: The True Story of Farm Country on Trial. Addison describes how, for years, affected families struggled to find legal representation at all. Most North Carolina lawyers refused to take these cases outright. One who had tried years earlier told of being nearly bankrupted in the attempt. The complaint finally landed at Wallace Graham, a firm in Salisbury, North Carolina, run by Mona Lisa Wallace and Bill Graham. Wallace, who had broken the gender barrier in her small southern town and built a career representing clients against corporate defendants, teamed with trial attorney Mike Kaskey to develop the litigation strategy. Rather than suing the contract farmers directly, they targeted Murphy Brown Farms, Smithfield's subsidiary, and filed in federal court. Court, since Smithfield itself was headquartered in Virginia. This kept the cases out of the state court system where the hog industry's political connections were deepest. The jury deliberated and returned its verdict. Ten plaintiffs were awarded $75,000 each in compensatory damages and $5 million each in punitive damages for a combined judgment of $50.75 million. North Carolina's punitive damages cap reduced the total to $3.25 million. But the verdict wasn't about the dollar amount, it was about the finding. Smithfield had created a nuisance that invaded its neighbors' right to enjoy their own property. It was the first of five trials, and all five went against Smithfield. Across the cases, juries awarded a combined total of nearly $550 million in damages. After the state's punitive damages cap was applied, the total reduced to nearly 100 million. But the hog industry was already fighting on another front. Before the trials were even over, the North Carolina General Assembly passed the Farm Act of 2018, rewriting the state's nuisance laws to make it nearly impossible for future plaintiffs to bring the same kind of suit. Governor Roy Cooper vetoed the bill, but the legislature overrode his veto. The door that allowed Alexandria McCoy to pursue civil damages was shut behind her. In Wisconsin, the legal fight was about authority. In 2012, when Kinnard Farms, a megadai in Kiwanee County housing more than 8,000 cows, sought to expand by adding a second site and more than 3,000 cows, neighbors challenged the permit. They argued that the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources, the same agency that told stall farms it was fine to spread manure on frozen ground, should require groundwater monitoring and an animal cap. An administrative law judge agreed. In 2014, the judge ordered the DNR to add the groundwater monitoring and animal cap. The DNR, under Republican Governor Scott Walker, initially moved to comply. Then, for reasons a circuit court judge would later call obscure, the agency reversed itself. It sought an opinion from the state attorney general and used that opinion to declare that it lacked the authority to impose the conditions the judge had ordered. So, in essence, the state's own environmental agency went to court to argue it couldn't protect the environment. The case climbed through the courts for seven years. The Republican-controlled state legislature intervened on behalf of Kinnard Farms. Industry groups, the Wisconsin Dairy Alliance, the Farm Bureau, and the Wisconsin Manufacturers and Commerce, filed briefs and support. In July 2021, the Wisconsin Supreme Court ruled 4-3 that the DNR did have the authority to impose both an animal cap and off-site groundwater monitoring. The community had won, but the fight wasn't over. Cannard Farms reached a settlement that included groundwater monitoring and a commitment to install technology to eliminate liquid manure disposal on fields. Then, in 2025, the farm sued the DNR again, challenging the new permit conditions. Today, more than a decade after the original permit challenge, the legal battle over a single farm's waste continues. In Washington state, the legal story was even longer. In 2012, the EPA released a damning study. Every well downstream from a cluster of megadaies in the lower Yakima Valley was contaminated with nitrates, bovine antibiotics, and other pollutants. The Community Association for Restoration of the Environment, CARE, had long suspected it, but now they had proof. Working with the Center for Food Safety, they put four dairies on notice, and, when nothing changed, took them to federal court. By 2015, they had won a landmark ruling establishing that the dairy's manure practices were illegal and a threat to public health. Friends of Toppenish Creek, the Center for Food Safety, and the Waterkeeper Alliance used that legal foundation to challenge the state's CAFO discharge permits before the Washington Court of Appeals. In 2021, the court threw the permits out, ruling they didn't adequately protect groundwater. The Department of Ecology rewrote the permits. Environmental groups challenged them again. The Pollution Controls Hearing Board threw them out a second time. The Department of Ecology rewrote them again, and they were challenged a third time. Three decades of citizen complaints, more than a dozen Clean Water Act lawsuits, and the state's general CAFO permit struck down and rewritten three times. Still, in 2024, the EPA had to go to federal court to force three dairies to test their neighbors' wells. The three battles in Wisconsin, North Carolina, and Washington ended differently. In Wisconsin, the community won at the state Supreme Court. In North Carolina, the plaintiffs won five consecutive jury verdicts. In Washington, courts threw out the state's permit three times. On a surface level, the communities seemed to prevail, but there's more to the story. In Wisconsin, the dairy industry responded to the Supreme Court's ruling by suing to eliminate oversight altogether. In 2023, the Wisconsin Dairy Alliance and the Venture Dairy Cooperative filed a lawsuit arguing that CAFOs shouldn't have to apply for water pollution discharge permits at all. The suit targeted the only regulatory mechanism Wisconsin had to control manure contamination from large farms. The effort did not succeed in dismantling the permit system, which today remains in place as the primary tool for regulating pollution from CAFOs. But state regulations still allow manure lagoons to leak up to 500 gallons per acre per day. In North Carolina, the industry's response to the courtroom losses was legislative. The state passed a law that would have imposed fines of $5,000 per day on farm workers who documented wrongdoing at agricultural operations that shared the information with anyone other than their employer or law enforcement. The Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals struck the law down as unconstitutional on First Amendment grounds. But the most revealing failure in North Carolina was a broken promise. After Hurricane Floyd devastated the state in 1999, flooding hog lagoons and sending waves of pink contaminated water through communities, Smithfield Foods signed an agreement with the state to fund research into alternatives to the lagoon and spray system and to implement whatever technology proved both environmentally effective and economically feasible within three years. North Carolina State University received $15 million to develop new technologies, and researchers identified five promising alternatives. The cheapest one cost roughly $400 per thousand pounds of live animal weight. The existing lagoon and spray system cost $87. Smithfield declared the alternatives economically unfeasible and the promise dissolved. In 2007, the North Carolina legislature banned new open-air lagoons and required that any new or expanded CAFO use environmentally superior technology. But every farm whose permit had been issued before 2007 was grandfathered in. Twenty years after the Smithfield Agreement, the lagoons were still there. What happened during Hurricane Floyd in 1999 happened again during Hurricane Matthew in 2016 and Hurricane Florence in 2018. During Florence alone, more than 130 hog waste lagoons were compromised. 33 overflowed to the point of discharging their contents directly into the Cape Fear River watershed. The system that was supposed to have been replaced a decade earlier failed in exactly the same way in exactly the same places. And in Washington state, the Department of Ecology recognized that groundwater monitoring was the only way to understand the impact of large KFOs on drinking water. Yet the agency never required it. Each time a court ordered the permits rewritten, the department produced a new version that carried forward the same deficiencies. Environmental groups challenged, courts agreed, the Department of Ecology rewrote, and the cycle continued. The people most affected, the Lower Valleys Latino families, were excluded from the process at every step. The Department of Ecology conducted an extensive stakeholder engagement process with the politically powerful dairy industry before releasing its draft permit. The communities downhill from the dairies, the ones whose wells were contaminated, weren't consulted until advocates demanded it. In all three states, the pattern was the same. The communities won their battles, the system absorbed the losses, and nothing fundamentally changed. And the communities in this episode aren't outliers. In Iowa, the country's largest hog-producing state, rural wells and agricultural counties show contamination patterns similar to Kiwanies, and rivers run brown after heavy rains. In the Chesapeake Bay watershed, decades of poultry waste from operations under contract to major processors have contributed to one of the most significant water quality crises in the eastern United States. In California's San Joaquin Valley, the same concentration of dairies, the same shallow aquifer contamination, and the same farm worker communities drawing from private wells have been documented for decades. Wisconsin, North Carolina, and Washington are three places where advocates fought hard enough and long enough to produce a legal record, but they're far from the only places where this is happening. There's a detail from the North Carolina story that captures the dynamic better than any legal ruling. Smithfield Foods had been owned since 2013 by WH Group, a publicly traded company based in Hong Kong. WH Group is the largest pork producer in the world. On its operations in China, the company uses biogas digesters and dry manure processes instead of open air lagoons. China's regulations require hog operations to invest in wastewater treatment, odor control systems, and technology that shields nearby residents from the waste. As Corbin Addison documents in Wastelands, his accounts of the Smithfield nuisance cases, the practices that Smithfield uses in eastern North Carolina, the open lagoons, the spray, the unlined pits, would not be legal on the company's own farms in China. In his words, in terms of hog waste management, China has become a place of greater environmental accountability than the communities of North Carolina's coastal plain. Elsie Herring, the woman whose home was covered by spray from the nearby hog farm, died of pancreatic cancer in May 2021. She was on land her family had owned for 130 years, land her grandfather purchased in 1891. In the weeks before her death, an industry group called NC Farm Families published a blog post questioning her account of the spraying, disputing the frequency of the applications, citing a farmer's ledger to argue the records didn't match her story. Herring was too ill to respond. Rick Dove, the retired Marine and attorney, died on August 22nd, 2025, at the age of 86. He had logged more than 3,000 flight hours over eastern North Carolina's hog country, building a visual record of pollution that the state's own regulators declined to compile. Steve Wing, the epidemiologist who projected those two overlapping maps in the lecture room, kept working through chemotherapy but died in November of 2016. His portrait still hangs in the Reach meeting room. In Kewanee County, the Carnops still warn visitors not to drink the water. The well that Arlen's great-grandfather trusted continues to be contaminated with nitrate and coliform. Their grandchildren still don't play in the yard. Lynn and Nancy Utesh are still farming their 150 acres of rotational pasture, raising shorthorn cattle the way their great-grandparents would have recognized. And in the lower Yakima Valley, Adam Dolson, the third generation president of Cow Palace Dairy, announced that the operation was closing. Cow Palace had been in the Dolson family for more than 50 years, started by his grandfather Bob, built by his father, and managed for the last decade by Adam himself. When the EPA filed its 2024 lawsuit, Dolson saw no way forward. Its attorney said Cow Palace had spent extraordinary sums complying with every demand, but the federal judge sided with the EPA and the costs kept climbing. In May 2025, the cows were sold. The operation that had produced half a million pounds of milk a day went dark. The environmental groups that had fought Cow Palace for 30 years said the closure was the consequence of decades of noncompliance. Dolson said the EPA had destroyed a family business. 60% of the wells within a mile of Cow Palace are still contaminated. The nitrates that leaked from the lagoons for over 50 years are still in the aquifer. The water that families in the lower Yakima Valley draw from their wells still has to be tested, filtered, and sometimes replaced with bottled water delivered to their homes twice a month. Cow Palace is gone, but the contamination left behind isn't. In all three places, there was no single moment when it all went wrong. Just a series of economic, political, and legal decisions that, over time, caused these outcomes. Once agriculture at scale became a farm's only path to survival, everything else followed. More cows, pigs, and chickens, more waste, more pressure on landscapes that can't absorb it. And in the end, the consequences didn't stay contained on the farms. They moved through the ground, into the water, and into the homes of the people who lived there. What comes next is uncertain, but history suggests the same outcome again and again across the country where regulators have struggled to keep up with the pace of agricultural development. Here's the theme: large-scale agriculture moves forward with inadequate oversight, and the communities in its path are left to reckon with what remains. If you want to support the organizations working to address KFO contamination and environmental justice in the communities covered in this episode, Kiwani CARES continues to advocate for groundwater protections and well testing in Kiwani County, Wisconsin, and publishes updates on ongoing permit challenges and monitoring efforts. In eastern North Carolina, REACH continues to organize in Duplin and surrounding counties on hog farm pollution and environmental justice. The North Carolina Environmental Justice Network, which Steve Wing helped found, works across the state on environmental racism and community health. Sound Rivers, which now manages the Noose Riverkeeper program that Rick Dubb began in 1993, monitors water quality on the Noose River. The Southern Environmental Law Center represents community groups in ongoing litigation and regulatory proceedings against industrial hog operations throughout the Southeast. In Washington State, Friends of Toppinish Creek continues to work on CAFO permitting and the rights of Spanish-speaking communities in the Lower Yakima Valley. And the Community Association for Restoration of the Environment remains active in Clean Water Act enforcement in the region. You can learn more about all these organizations and find links to donate at EcosidePod.com slash organizations. Who caused it and who paid the price. These are stories about what humans do to the natural world and what it takes to reckon with it.