📅 Prepared September 6, 2026 | 🔄 Revised September 24, 2026 ✍️ Dirk Adams with the assistance of AI ⌛ 27 min read 58 sources

PORK INDUSTRY RESEARCH SERIES | RESEARCH PAPER

North Carolina’s Hog CAFOs in 2026: A Regulatory Record That Closed, and a Label That Never Opened

The lagoon-and-sprayfield system North Carolina barred for new farms is still the system in use, the reporting around it has narrowed, and none of it reaches a package of pork.

Prepared for publication by Farm Animal Transparency | September 2026

The carbon intensity of gas made from North Carolina hog waste is certified by a state agency. The waste system that produces it appears nowhere on the pork.

Photo: Hog farming in Kansas 04 by KSRE Photo, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

At a glance

Third-largest hog state. North Carolina held 7.20 million hogs on June 1, 2026, behind Iowa (24.7 million) and Minnesota (9.30 million). Sampson and Duplin counties held about 45% of the state herd on December 1, 2025.

A ban with an exception. N.C.G.S. § 143-215.10I bars new lagoon-and-sprayfield permits unless the permit does not increase a farm’s permitted capacity. Existing farms keep renewing. DEQ’s permit data show 2,146 active swine permits.

A technology met the standard and was not adopted. The Super Soils system, funded under the 2000 Smithfield agreement, met all five statutory performance standards but was judged too costly to retrofit onto existing farms. The 25-year payment term ended in 2025.

Reporting has narrowed. The N.C. Supreme Court struck the general permit’s annual reporting condition in October 2025; the legislature repealed the swine violation-points statute in June 2026; federal air-release reporting for animal waste has been exempted since 2018–2019.

Nothing on the label. Federal pork labels carry no information about the farm or its waste system.

Abstract

North Carolina’s swine industry runs on the anaerobic lagoon and sprayfield, a waste system the state barred for new and expanding farms in 1997 (temporarily) and 2007 (permanently). The permanent law contains a capacity exception that lets existing farms renew without limit. A 2000 agreement between the N.C. Attorney General and Smithfield Foods funded development of an “environmentally superior technology”; one was developed and met all five statutory standards, but was found not economically feasible to retrofit, so the installation obligation never took effect. The 25-year payment term ended in 2025 with no commercial deployment.

The larger recent change is in disclosure. Between October 2025 and June 2026, the general permit’s annual reporting condition was struck and the swine violation-points statute was repealed. Federal air-release reporting for animal waste was already exempted. The general permit renewal planned for 2024 was replaced by legislative extensions to 2028. DEQ maintains permit data but publishes no integrator affiliation and no lagoon inventory. Federal labeling law requires no disclosure of farm or waste method. This paper by Farm Animal Transparency (FAT) sets out that record from statutes, court opinions, state and federal agency documents, SEC filings and peer-reviewed research. Where a fact rests on press reports, the text says so.

1. The statute: a prohibition with an exception

North Carolina’s swine waste law followed a run of lagoon failures in the mid-1990s. In June 1995 the dike of an eight-acre lagoon in Onslow County failed and released about 25 million gallons of wastewater into the New River, according to the N.C. State Climate Office. Hurricane Floyd in 1999 later flooded lagoons across the coastal plain.

S.L. 1997-458, the Clean Water Responsibility and Environmentally Sound Policy Act, established “a moratorium on the construction or expansion of swine farms and on lagoons and animal waste management systems for swine farms” from March 1, 1997 to March 1, 1999. S.L. 2007-523, codified at N.C.G.S. § 143-215.10I, made the restriction permanent. The section is titled “Performance standards for animal waste management systems that serve swine farms; lagoon and sprayfield systems prohibited.”

The title overstates what the section does. The Environmental Management Commission may not issue or modify a permit for a lagoon-and-sprayfield system unless the permitting action “does not result in an increase in the permitted capacity of the swine farm, as measured by the annual steady state live weight capacity,” or the system meets five performance standards. A farm that does not expand may keep renewing its existing system. The statute forecloses growth on lagoons; it does not require replacement.

The five standards require that a system:

“Eliminate the discharge of animal waste to surface water and groundwater through direct discharge, seepage, or runoff.”
“Substantially eliminate atmospheric emission of ammonia.”
“Substantially eliminate the emission of odor that is detectable beyond the boundaries of the parcel or tract of land on which the swine farm is located.”
“Substantially eliminate the release of disease-transmitting vectors and airborne pathogens.”
“Substantially eliminate nutrient and heavy metal contamination of soil and groundwater.”

Numeric limits are set by rule at 15A NCAC 02T .1307 (effective January 1, 2009; readopted September 1, 2018). Ammonia emissions may not exceed an annual average of 0.2 kg NH₃-N per week per 1,000 kg steady state live weight from treatment and storage, 0.2 kg from land application, and 0.9 kg farm-wide. Odor is measured at the property line under 15A NCAC 02D .1808. Land-applied material must meet Class A or Class B biosolids standards, and fecal coliform in the final effluent may not exceed an annual average of 7,000 MPN per 100 mL.

G.S. § 143-215.10C(g) directs the Commission to “encourage the development of alternative and innovative animal waste management technologies” and to allow flexibility in evaluating them. It does not waive the standards.

2. Scale, as the government records it

USDA’s National Agricultural Statistics Service (NASS) reported on June 25, 2026 that North Carolina held 7.20 million hogs and pigs on June 1, third behind Iowa (24.7 million) and Minnesota (9.30 million), out of 73.7 million nationally. The common description of North Carolina as the second-largest hog state is out of date.

County (NASS, Dec. 1, 2025)	Hogs and pigs
Sampson	1,780,000
Duplin	1,740,000
Bladen	630,000
Wayne	430,000
Greene	340,000
State total	7,900,000

Sampson and Duplin together held about 45% of the December 1, 2025 state inventory. Sampson now ranks first.

Facility counts. DEQ’s annual report to the General Assembly for fiscal year 2023–24 (issued October 1, 2024) counts 2,047 swine operations among 2,202 permitted animal facilities. DEQ’s public permit feature service, queried by FAT in September 2026, returns 2,146 active swine permits and 2,222 swine permit records across all statuses. The two sources measure different things (operations versus permits and certificates), and DEQ publishes no reconciliation between them. The Animal Feeding Operations program page states no facility count.

What DEQ does not publish. The permit data carry an owner field but no integrator or corporate-affiliation field, so the record identifies the grower who holds the permit, not the company that owns the hogs. FAT found no statewide DEQ inventory of anaerobic lagoons or other waste structures; the permit layer holds one point per permit, with no lagoon count or geometry. Lagoon totals that circulate publicly do not trace to a state dataset.

3. The Smithfield agreement: a standard met, and not adopted

On July 25, 2000, Attorney General Michael F. Easley entered an agreement with Smithfield Foods and several subsidiaries, including Brown’s of Carolina, Carroll’s Foods, Murphy Farms, Carroll’s Foods of Virginia and Quarter M Farms. The N.C. Supreme Court later described the agreement as following “a five-year period during which ruptured or flooded hog waste lagoons spilled millions of gallons of waste into North Carolina’s waterways.” A parallel agreement was signed with Premium Standard Farms.

As recited by the Supreme Court in 2020, Smithfield committed:

$15 million “for the development of Environmentally Superior Technologies for the management of swine waste.” With $2.1 million from Premium Standard Farms, N.C. State University reports a $17.1 million research pool.
To “pay each year for 25 years an amount equal to one dollar for each hog in which [Smithfield and its subsidiaries] . . . had any financial interest in North Carolina during the previous year, provided . . . that such amount shall not exceed $2 million in any year.”

Smithfield also agreed to install qualifying technology on its company-owned farms once a designated evaluator found a technology both environmentally superior and economically feasible. The Designee was Dr. C.M. (Mike) Williams, director of N.C. State’s Animal and Poultry Waste Management Center.

The science succeeded; the economics did not. Eighteen candidate technologies were evaluated. According to a 2024 review in Frontiers in Sustainable Food Systems, only one on-farm liquid treatment technology met the standards: the Super Soils system, later commercialized by Terra Blue Inc. of Clinton, N.C. (U.S. Patent 7,674,379, issued 2010). Compared with a conventional lagoon, it reduced ammonia emissions by 94.4% in the warm season and 99.0% in the cool season, odor by 99.9%, pathogens by 99.99%, nitrogen and phosphorus by more than 90%, copper and zinc by 99%, and greenhouse gases by 96.7%. A third-generation system tested by USDA’s Agricultural Research Service at Jernigan Farms in Wayne County (report dated August 2013) removed 99.0% of ammonia-nitrogen, 97.3% of total suspended solids, 88.5% of total phosphorus and 97.0% of zinc by concentration.

The same review states that “no biogas digester technologies met EST determination on their own.”

System	Cost per 1,000 lb steady state live weight per year	Source
Super Soils, generation 1	$399.71	USDA ARS (2013)
Super Soils, generation 2	$132.24	USDA ARS (2013)
Super Soils, generation 3	about $157	Inside Climate News (secondary, 2026)
Conventional lagoon and sprayfield	$87	ProPublica; Inside Climate News (secondary)

Williams’s Phase 3 determination report is dated March 8, 2006. According to an ARS paper, Super Soils was determined an unconditional environmentally superior technology “for new farms which are permitted and constructed for the first time after March 2005 and for expansion of existing swine farms.” ProPublica reported in 2018 that it “was too expensive to retrofit existing hog farms,” and that the economic standard allowed no more than 12% of the state’s hog farms to be forced out of business. Because the obligation applied to existing company-owned farms, it never took effect. Farm-level cost comparisons of this kind do not price odor, air emissions or groundwater risk borne off the farm.

The 25-year payment term ended in 2025. Inside Climate News reported in August 2026 that Smithfield never deployed the technology and has opted not to build new farms. Because new or expanded lagoon systems must meet the performance standards, the law has in effect frozen the lagoon system at its existing footprint rather than replacing it.

The grant program. The annual payments fund the Attorney General’s Environmental Enhancement Grants. The N.C. Department of Justice reports “more than $43 million to 228 projects” since 2002, including “closure of 240 abandoned hog waste lagoons” and restoration or conservation of more than 31,000 acres. The department states the program “is currently paused as a result of ongoing litigation.” In Randolph County Board of Education v. Stein (No. COA25-130, Jan. 7, 2026), the Court of Appeals held the payments are not penalties that must go to public schools and reversed a trial-court order. A petition for review was filed with the N.C. Supreme Court in February 2026, according to Carolina Journal reporting; FAT found no ruling on it as of September 2026.

4. Three disclosure mechanisms, closed in sequence

4.1 The annual report condition: struck October 17, 2025

In N.C. Department of Environmental Quality v. N.C. Farm Bureau Federation, Inc., No. 338PA23, decided October 17, 2025, the N.C. Supreme Court held that three conditions DEQ attached to the 2019 animal waste general permits were rules that required notice-and-comment rulemaking under the Administrative Procedure Act (APA). Carolina Journal reported the vote as 5–2.

Condition	Substance	Reach (per the opinion)
Annual reporting	Annual report summarizing operation of the waste management system	All general-permit holders (roughly 2,000 swine, cattle and poultry farms)
Phosphorus Loss Assessment Tool	PLAT analysis of high-phosphorus fields, with mitigation at set ratings	About 5% of fields
Groundwater monitoring	Wells at waste structures in the 100-year floodplain	50–55 facilities, about 3%

Justice Trey Allen wrote for the majority that such conditions are subject to rulemaking “in the absence of an explicit or implicit exemption,” adding: “The APA’s rulemaking process is not a pointless bureaucratic exercise. It represents an important check on the regulatory power of administrative agencies.” Justice Anita Earls, joined by Justice Allison Riggs, dissented. She wrote that the conditions “do not directly regulate a class; they carry the force of law only when a permit recipient opts to apply for and receive a general permit,” and warned the holding could “cast entire permitting regimes designed to protect public health into uncertainty.”

The annual report applied to every general-permit holder. It is now unenforceable until adopted by rule. As of September 2026, the Environmental Management Commission’s proposed-rules page lists eight rulemakings, covering the dry-cleaning solvent cleanup fund, dam safety, emergency generators, PFOS/PFOA/GenX and 1,4-dioxane monitoring, and amendments to 15A NCAC 02T .0114 and .0118, 02B .0202, and 02B .0206 with 02H .0107. None concerns animal feeding operations, animal waste, phosphorus or floodplain groundwater monitoring.

4.2 The violation-points system: repealed June 22, 2026

Section 10.1 of S.L. 1997-458, codified at N.C.G.S. § 143-215.6E, required the Commission to create a points system for swine farm permits. It designated the most harmful violations as “significant” and required permit revocation after three significant violations, or a set point total, within five years.

S.L. 2026-11 (Senate Bill 401, an omnibus agricultural act), ratified June 11 and signed by Governor Josh Stein on June 22, 2026, provides in Section 4: “G.S. 143-215.6E is repealed.” The statute had been law for 29 years. FAT found no state document reporting how often it was used. Its repeal removes the only statutory mechanism tying a swine facility’s compliance history to its authorization to operate. The same act corrected cross-references in the swine farm siting law (Section 5) and extended an animal waste fertilizer cost-share program to people converting lagoon sludge into fertilizer (Section 6).

4.3 Federal air-release reporting: exempted 2018–2019, upheld 2025, on appeal

In Waterkeeper Alliance v. EPA (D.C. Cir. April 11, 2017), the court vacated EPA’s 2008 rule exempting most farms from CERCLA and EPCRA air-release reporting. Congress responded with the Fair Agricultural Reporting Method (FARM) Act, part of the Consolidated Appropriations Act, 2018, signed March 23, 2018, which amended CERCLA section 103(e) to exempt air emissions from animal waste at a farm. EPA extended the exemption to EPCRA by rule (84 Fed. Reg. 27,533, June 13, 2019); it now appears at 40 CFR 355.31(g).

In Rural Empowerment Association for Community Help v. EPA, No. 1:18-cv-02260 (D.D.C.), the court remanded the rule to EPA without vacatur in February 2022 and upheld it on August 7, 2025. The plaintiffs appealed to the D.C. Circuit in October 2025, according to Earthjustice and Waterkeeper Alliance. FAT found no appellate decision as of September 2026.

The result, for now: an animal feeding operation has no federal duty to report air releases of ammonia or hydrogen sulfide from animal waste to the National Response Center or to state and local emergency planning bodies, regardless of quantity. Combined with Sections 4.1 and 4.2, a North Carolina swine facility in September 2026 faces no enforceable state annual operations report, no statutory compliance-points mechanism and no federal air-emissions reporting duty.

5. The permit that did not renew

North Carolina’s animal waste general permits run on five-year cycles. The swine general permit, AWG100000, took effect October 1, 2019. The digester general permits (AWG400000 swine, AWG500000 cattle, AWG600000 wet poultry) took effect July 1, 2022. Both sets were written to expire September 30, 2024.

DEQ prepared renewals for October 1, 2024. The public comment period closed November 3, 2023, after hearings in Kenansville (October 5), Goldsboro (October 10), Statesville (October 24) and online (October 26). The renewed permits were not issued. The General Assembly extended the existing permits instead: S.L. 2024-32, § 5.1 to September 30, 2026, and S.L. 2025-97, § 4.1 (signed October 22, 2025) to September 30, 2028, for all six permits and their certificates of coverage.

The 2019 swine permit is in its seventh year. The renewal that could have carried the struck conditions through rulemaking is on hold, and no rulemaking is pending.

6. Biogas: verified carbon, unverified everything else

Align RNG, a joint venture of Smithfield Foods and Dominion Energy, lists two North Carolina projects: one drawing on 19 farms in Sampson and Duplin counties (321,456 dekatherms of renewable natural gas a year) and one in Duplin County drawing on 35 farms (304,866 dekatherms). Inside Climate News reported in February 2026 that the central processing facility in Turkey, N.C. came online in November 2022, that about 30 miles of pipeline were planned to link 19 farms, and that six farms were connected at the time.

DEQ approved digester modifications for four operations on March 31, 2021, and issued the digester general permits effective July 1, 2022. In these projects the digester is added to the existing system: according to Inside Climate News, digesters are installed over existing lagoons, and treated wastewater still goes to open lagoons for field application. This is consistent with the finding in Section 3 that no digester met the environmentally superior standard on its own.

The value comes from California. Under California’s Low Carbon Fuel Standard (LCFS), manure biomethane is credited for the methane an uncovered lagoon would otherwise have emitted. That makes its computed carbon intensity strongly negative. The Union of Concerned Scientists, citing a January 2024 analysis by UC Davis economist Aaron Smith, reported dairy biomethane carbon intensities ranging from about −103 to −790 gCO₂e/MJ. CARB’s 2024 LCFS amendments, adopted in 2025, limit this crediting going forward: according to Trinity Consultants, pathways certified before July 1, 2025 may claim three ten-year crediting periods, and projects breaking ground after 2029 may earn avoided-methane credits only until 2040. Inside Climate News reported that Align’s LCFS application was finalized in March 2025.

The carbon intensity of the gas is modeled, verified and certified by a state agency, and sold. The waste system that produces it appears nowhere on the pork. According to Inside Climate News, the companies describe credit volumes and buyers as “proprietary business information.”

Civil rights complaints. On September 27, 2021, the Southern Environmental Law Center filed a Title VI complaint with EPA (No. 05RNO-21-R4) challenging DEQ’s March 31, 2021 permits for four operations in Duplin and Sampson counties (AWI310035, AWI301139, AWI230466 and AWS820005). The complaint states that the permits “authorize the continued use of” the lagoon and sprayfield system while adding digesters, and cites DEQ’s own environmental justice report as identifying about 2,700 households and congregations, predominantly people of color, within one mile. EPA accepted the complaint on January 13, 2022, and on October 3, 2022 suspended its investigation timeline while the parties pursued an informal resolution agreement. FAT found no published resolution.

An earlier complaint, No. 11R-14-R4, filed September 3, 2014 by the North Carolina Environmental Justice Network, the Rural Empowerment Association for Community Help and Waterkeeper Alliance, ended in a settlement agreement dated May 3, 2018; EPA closed the complaint on May 7, 2018. The agreement states that it “does not constitute an admission by DEQ or a finding of any violations of Title VI.”

7. The nuisance verdicts, and the laws that followed

Some 500 neighbors filed 26 nuisance suits against Murphy-Brown LLC, Smithfield’s hog production subsidiary, in the Eastern District of North Carolina. Five went to verdict, all for the plaintiffs.

In the first, McKiver v. Murphy-Brown, involving Kinlaw Farms in Bladen County, the jury in April 2018 awarded ten neighbors $75,000 each in compensatory damages ($750,000) and $50 million in punitive damages, according to Courthouse News reporting. The court applied North Carolina’s statutory cap and reduced punitive damages to $2.5 million. A later verdict of about $473 million, in Artis v. Murphy-Brown, was reduced to about $94 million.

The Fourth Circuit affirmed liability on November 19, 2020 (McKiver v. Murphy-Brown, LLC, No. 19-1019), and vacated the punitive award for a new hearing because of the evidence admitted about the parent company’s finances. Judge J. Harvie Wilkinson III, concurring, wrote: “It is past time to acknowledge the full harms that the unreformed practices of hog farming are inflicting.” Smithfield announced a confidential settlement of the remaining cases within hours of the ruling.

The General Assembly acted while the cases were pending. S.L. 2017-11, codified at N.C.G.S. § 106-702, limits compensatory damages in nuisance suits against agricultural operations to the reduction in fair market value of the property (permanent nuisance) or fair rental value (temporary nuisance). S.L. 2018-113, the Farm Act of 2018, added that the plaintiff’s property must lie within one-half mile of the source and the suit must be filed within one year of the operation’s establishment or a “fundamental change,” a term that excludes changes in ownership, size, technology or product. It also bars punitive damages unless the operation had a criminal conviction or a civil enforcement action by a state or federal environmental agency within the prior three years. The Fourth Circuit noted the parties agreed that McKiver “if filed today would likely be barred.”

A constitutional challenge to both laws was dismissed; the Court of Appeals affirmed on December 21, 2021, and the N.C. Supreme Court dismissed the appeal and denied review on December 16, 2022.

The 2018 punitive-damages rule now interacts with Section 4.2: punitive damages require a recent enforcement action, while the statute that graded and escalated swine enforcement has been repealed.

8. Who lives nearby: the peer-reviewed record

Three lines of published research, spanning 23 years, reach a consistent distributional finding.

Wing, Cole and Grant (2000) analyzed 2,514 intensive hog operations. They found 18.9 times as many operations in the highest poverty quintile as in the lowest (7.2 after adjusting for population density), and about five times as many in the three highest quintiles of percent nonwhite population. Operations run by corporate integrators were more concentrated in poor and nonwhite areas than independent operations.

Mirabelli and colleagues (2006) studied 226 North Carolina public schools. Schools with less than 63% white enrollment and at least 47% of students receiving subsidized lunch averaged 4.9 miles from the nearest swine operation; higher-white, higher-income schools averaged 10.8 miles. The first group was 2.93 times as likely to be within three miles of a swine CAFO. About 66 schools (29%) were within three miles of one.

Lewis and colleagues (2023) modeled ammonia and hydrogen sulfide from 1,292 hog CAFOs. Exposure was 16% higher than the regional average for people of color, 13% higher for low-income households, 32% higher for adults without a high school diploma, and 66% higher for households that spoke English less than “very well.” The largest operations, with 21,000 to 53,000 animals, were mostly in block groups where more than 56% of residents were people of color.

Wing and Wolf (2000) found quality of life, measured by how often residents could not open windows or go outside in good weather, was greatly reduced near an approximately 6,000-head hog operation compared with a control community and a community near cattle operations.

9. What reaches the label

None of the above appears on a package of pork. Under 9 CFR 317.2, the required label features are the product name, ingredients where applicable, the name and place of business of the packer or distributor, net quantity, and the inspection legend with establishment number. Nothing requires the farm of origin or the waste system.

In FAT’s framework, the environmental dimension can be reached only through upstream categories:

Category 4, Farm/Ranch. Waste method is a property of a specific farm. Conventional pork discloses no farm.
Category 7, Who (corporate ownership). Integrators control hogs, feed and siting, and the research in Section 8 found integrator-run operations more concentrated in disadvantaged areas. Conventional pork discloses no integrator, and DEQ’s permit data carry none.
Categories 15 and 16, supply-chain intermediaries. The biogas joint venture is a second commercial channel from the same waste stream. It appears in neither the meat’s price nor its label.

The FSIS establishment number identifies the plant, not the farm. Smithfield’s Form 10-K for fiscal 2025 reports more than 240 company-owned farms and more than 1,300 contract farms in the U.S., and says about 40% of the hogs processed in its Fresh Pork plants came from its own Hog Production segment. The filing also reports that Smithfield sold North Carolina sows and associated hog inventories to Murphy Family Farms and VisionAg, which now supply it with about 3.2 million and 600,000 hogs a year. An establishment number cannot be traced to a farm within that structure.

Verified, audited disclosure exists in this system; it is pointed away from the consumer. California requires verification of the carbon intensity of gas made from the waste. USDA runs an audited program for a ractopamine-free claim because export markets require it. Neither the waste system nor the enforcement record is verified for, or disclosed to, the person buying pork.

10. Practical implications

For producers. A producer using a different waste system has no federal label vehicle for saying so and no verification program like USDA’s Never Fed Beta Agonists pathway. The available route is farm-identified marketing, supplying Category 4 disclosure voluntarily.

For processors and retailers. A “raised without antibiotics” claim on pork addresses drug use, not waste. Where a company takes part in a biogas venture, the carbon credit belongs to the fuel, not the meat; presenting captured methane as an attribute of the pork would call for disclosure of the lagoons and sprayfields that remain in service.

For consumers. Conventional pork carries no statement about waste management. As of September 2026, the operation behind it faces no enforceable state annual report, no statutory violation-points mechanism and no federal air-emissions reporting duty. The reliable signals are upstream: a named farm, a disclosed parent company, or a production claim tied to an audited program. The FAT App is built to show these gaps at the shelf, including where the answer is that the record does not exist.

11. What this paper could not establish

A single authoritative count of North Carolina swine facilities. DEQ’s annual report and permit data use different units, and DEQ publishes no reconciliation.
Integrator or corporate affiliation for permitted farms. No DEQ source located carries it.
A statewide lagoon inventory. None was found in DEQ publications.
Align RNG’s certified carbon intensity score, credit volumes and revenue, which are not public.
The outcome of EPA Title VI complaint 05RNO-21-R4 and of the D.C. Circuit appeal on EPCRA reporting; FAT found no published decision in either.

Related FAT maps

FAT’s pork supply chain map shows FSIS-inspected pork plants alongside EPA ECHO permit compliance records.

Sources

Working paper. First prepared September 6, 2026; revised September 24, 2026 with data as of that date. Corrections welcome: dirkadams@farmanimaltransparency.com.