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Pig cooling pads and weather forecasts for cows are high-tech ways to make meat in a warming world
More than a third of the heat-trapping gases cooking the planet come from growing and raising food, but millions of cattle, pigs and other animals get to stay cool in the United States and the rest of the developed world.
www.nytimes.com
Meat plant closures mean pigs are gassed or shot instead
Coronavirus outbreaks at meatpacking plants have created a backlog of animals ready for slaughter but with nowhere to go. Farmers are having to cull them.
www.nytimes.com
The agriculture queens of Louisiana
As climate change threatens exports like oysters and rice, residents cling to a pageant tradition that celebrates them.
Originals
Hog confinement operation in Eastern NC. (Credit: Brian Bienkowski/EHN)
Peter Dykstra: At the courthouse, the smell of defeat and the stench of victory
Environmental advocates are getting a strong whiff of justice from American courthouses lately, and oddly, the victories smell worse than the setbacks.
For more than 20 years, residents who live near hog mega-farms in eastern North Carolina have battled water pollution, noise and smoke from constant truck traffic, and the godawful stench of urine and feces from compounds of tens of thousands of hogs.
Lately, sweet-smelling justice has rolled in to foul-smelling hog communities like Duplin County, where pork giant Smithfield Farms is on a legal losing streak.
In May, a federal jury awarded $50 million to neighbors of the Kinlaw farm, a family-run business under contract to sell its pork to a hog-farm subsidiary of Smithfield.
In late June, a couple won a $25 million judgement against another Smithfield-controlled farm in Duplin.
Then on August 3, a blockbuster verdict from another Federal jury awarded $473.5 million to six neighbors of another Smithfield mega-farm, Murphy-Brown.
The verdicts are all likely to be drastically reduced, either on appeal or due to the hog industry's stranglehold on the North Carolina legislature, which, a few years ago, put tight limits on jury awards. But the three suits, and many more in the works, send a strong message that the courts will step in where the legislature dares not go.
Smithfield generally shows up in the middle 200's in the annual Fortune 500 listings. But with China's exploding appetite for all things meat, Smithfield proved a tasty acquisition for WH Group, a China-based pork producer who briefly clamped their cloven hooves on the Fortune Global 500 a few years ago.
Pork news consumers may want to visit EHN's 2017 series Peak Pig for more info.
And in a non pork-related courtroom win for enviros this week, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals ordered the EPA to ban chlorpyrifos, a controversial chemical used to treat, almonds, apricots, cotton and other crops. Trump's EPA was poised to reverse a phaseout of chlorpyrifos, which has been linked in multiple studies to neurological and reproductive damage—with risks especially prevalent for young children.
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