G. Mark Mickelson may want to add another service to his CAFO-consulting portfolio: guidance on how to control stink, noise, and bugs so they don’t get sued and have to pay their neighbors $117.5 million.
That’s the penalty Smithfield Foods just incurred for a super-stinky hog lot in North Carolina:
A federal jury decided Friday that the world’s largest pork producer should pay $473.5 million to neighbors of three North Carolina industrial-scale hog farms for unreasonable nuisances they suffered from odors, flies and rumbling trucks.
The jury found that Smithfield Foods owes compensation to six neighbors who complained in their lawsuit that the company failed to stop “the obnoxious, recurrent odors and other causes of nuisance” resulting from closely packed hogs, which “generate many times more sewage than entire towns.”
The jury awarded $23.5 million in compensatory damages and $450 million in punitive damages, which will be reduced to a total of $94 million under limits in state law [Alex Deroster and Emery P. Dalesio, “Smithfield Foods Ordered to Pay Millions in Damages to Neighbors of Hog Farms,” AP via Huffington Post, 2018.08.04].
Smithfield Foods reported $447 million in profit in the first six months of 2016. Smithfield Foods’ parent company, the WH Group of Hong Kong (remember: China owns Smithfield) made $1.86 billion in profit wienerizing 53.8 million hogs. They can handle the North Carolina damages, but the Trump tariffs have knocked 33% of their stock value this year. Of course, they raise piggies in America, so Smithfield’s Chinese owners may be able to pay for the lawsuit and offset tariff losses by claiming some of the farm welfare Trump has promised American producers hit by tariffs… and remember, the Chinese have no problem with socialism.
Here is the best cartoon yet depicting Tangerine Wankmaggot’s I’ll-make-up-for-my-really-stupid-tariff-war-with-this-really-stupid-and-insufficient-farm-bailout plan:
https://www.gocomics.com/m2bulls/2018/08/05
Bonus! It’s created by Marty Two Bull’s of the Pine Ridge.
This will go to the US supreme court and the Republican stacked court will throw it out. My bet!
Just think of what this precedent would mean for modern agriculture. My god….maybe WTO would come out against this. Cheap factory produced food owned by big money is what this country wants.
Hope you folks keep track of this.
I have to admit, Clyde, that I am part of the problem. I do like a good hot dog.
Good comic, Debbo! Smithfield is a good example of how tariffs and farm welfare are self-defeating, letting the big guys win no matter what while the small independent farmer gets creamed.
Those lots in eastern South Dakota are a damned shame. To live anywhere within 10 miles of them must be brutal, what a stink. Take a beautiful countryside, kill all the migratory birds with raw pollution and then say that it is economically viable.
The World Trade Organization would have nothing to do with it, as it deals strictly with fair trade issues. As noted, civil courts made the ruling.
We want all our pork to taste the same from coast to coast, like McDonald’s. Same goes with beef and poultry. When everything tastes the same, it makes you more docile and easy to lead, just like the stock we are finishing. So we jack them full of corn and the animals can only process a portion of that rich food with the rest being crapped out like what happens to you when you eat to much rich food. Stinks, don’t it. Doesn’t make you healthy ether.
Go back to the ways of the past in finishing livestock.