“I remember the day that they started spraying hog waste on us. It was a Saturday in the mid-1990s . . . . Just as I was thinking to myself that there was no way that he would begin spraying waste so close to us, I heard a bursting sound. The sprayer had begun to pump waste in our direction.” 

Those were the words offered as testimony at a congressional hearing in November of 2019 by Elsie Herring, activist, organizer, and environmental justice advocate. I first met Elsie a few years before the hearing when I traveled to Duplin County, North Carolina, where her family has lived for generations. Her grandfather, born into slavery, purchased the land in the late 1800s and, at the time of the hearing, Elsie’s mother had lived on the property for 99 years. For much of the twentieth century, the family lived off the land, growing fruits and vegetables, fishing in Rockfish Creek, raising livestock, and drinking water from their well. 

Elsie and her family’s life started to change when the first concentrated animal feeding operation, commonly called a “CAFO,” was established in Duplin County during the mid-1900s. In a county where the hog population has grown to over 2 million, these CAFOs—also known as large factory farms—have become a ubiquitous presence. During my visit, I saw many of them organized together in rows, metal sheds no taller than a single-story house yet stretching the length of a football field, immediately adjacent to neighboring residential properties. Though windowless, I knew that within each of these massive buildings thousands of hogs were being raised in tightly confined spaces. 

Read the full article about factory farms by Cory Booker at Democracy Journal.