"A few days before Christmas in 2023, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency received a complaint through its National Response Center: “There has been a horrible smell in the air for almost a week,” the caller said, according to state records. “It’s so bad it’s making people throw up.”
The caller thought the odor was emanating from Smithfield’s enormous hog slaughterhouse in Tarheel. But the rendering plant wasn’t the culprit. The stench instead came from poultry manure that farmers were slathering on agricultural fields throughout Bladen County, an investigation by the North Carolina Division of Air Quality found.
Spreading dry poultry feces on fields is legal, as is the secrecy underpinning North Carolina’s poultry industry.
With a few exceptions, state law allows poultry CAFOs, or concentrated animal feeding operations, to operate without a permit."
