Funding Shortfalls Hamper North Carolina’s Program to Buy Out Hog Farms in or Near Floodplains

As soon as the skies clear after a hurricane hits eastern North Carolina, Larry Baldwin climbs in the passenger seat of a single-engine plane, usually with his friend and pilot Rick Dove, and surveys the industrialized swine farms inundated with flood water.

“It’s almost indescribable. You look down and see that they’re either flooded or sides of a lagoon—we call them cesspools—are completely blown out,” said Baldwin, the Waterkeeper Alliance’s coordinator for Pure Farms Pure Waters, a nonprofit that advocates for stronger regulations over factory farms.

Meteorologists are predicting an above-average hurricane season, which began June 1. If a storm hits eastern North Carolina this year, flooding could jeopardize the structural integrity of hundreds of industrialized hog farms, whose massive open-air waste lagoons are vulnerable to hurricanes and heavy rain, an Inside Climate News analysis of publicly available flood maps and a state permit database shows.

As of March, there were 8.1 million hogs in North Carolina concentrated animal feeding operations, also known as CAFOs. 

Of the 129 permitted swine operations in Bladen County, about 20 percent lie less than 1,000 feet from flood-prone areas. Closer to the coast, in Pender and Craven counties, the figure is 40 percent.

Removing farms from the 100-year floodplain is critical for the environment and public health. If lagoons overtop, millions of gallons of urine and feces can contaminate residents’ yards, private drinking water wells, rivers, creeks and wetlands with E. coli and other harmful bacteria.

But complex USDA requirements, delays related to the COVID pandemic and underfunding have hampered the state in finishing its voluntary swine farm buyout program. 

The program receives funding from the USDA’s National Resources Conservation Service (NRCS) and the state legislature. President Trump has proposed cutting the NRCS budget by 88 percent, from $916 million to $112 million, part of his plan to shrink the federal government. The state Department of Agriculture uses the money to purchase permanent conservation easements on properties within the 100-year floodplain that are currently used for swine production.

Farmers bid on an amount they would accept to relinquish their permit to operate a concentrated animal feeding operation, known as a CAFO, in the 100-year floodplain and to allow the state to establish a conservation easement on the property. 

Applications are ranked based on several criteria: the facility’s history of flooding, distance to a water supply or high-quality waters, structural condition of the lagoons and the elevation of the hog barns and lagoon dikes in the 100-year flood plain.

If accepted into the program, farmers can still use the land for other agriculture, such as pasture-based beef, row crops, hay and vegetable farming, but it would prohibit using the easement area as a spray field for swine waste. This disposal system sprays liquid waste from the lagoons onto nearby farm fields as fertilizer. The lagoons are also closed when the conservation easements are put in place.

Demand for the program has exceeded funding. A total of 149 swine operations have bid in at least one of the five buyout rounds. The state has purchased easements on 45, at a cost of nearly $20 million, according to Department of Agriculture figures. 

Of that amount, USDA has contributed over $1 million.

The purchases total 1,288 acres of easements and represent the removal of 62,300 hogs and 108 lagoons from the floodplain. 

Will Summer is executive director of the state’s Land and Water Fund, which awards grants to the state Agriculture Department for the buyout program. He said “the timing and availability of federal matching funds have further delayed project implementation.”

The USDA did not respond to repeated requests for comment.

David Williams, director of the state’s Soil and Water Division, who has run the program since its inception, said the USDA has been cooperative, but “it’s been challenging” to make specific conditions at the farms fit with federal requirements.

For example, USDA limits the percentage of concrete or asphalt—impervious surface—on a farm that has applied for a buyout. It was difficult for a smaller operation to meet that requirement because it had less acreage, Williams said, so that farm’s easement was purchased solely with state funds.

The state legislature funded the first round of buyouts in 1999, after North Carolina was hit by a trifecta of strong hurricanes within two months. Hurricane Floyd dropped 17 inches of rain on the eastern part of the state, where floods overtopped waste lagoons and killed at least 100,000 hogs.

After four successful buyout rounds, the legislature stopped funding its share of the program in 2007. That stranded dozens of CAFOs in the flood plains and left a backlog of roughly 100 farmers who had applied for a buyout.

The value of the program became apparent during the 2016 storm Hurricane Matthew. State agriculture officials reported that 32 farms, accounting for 103 lagoons, would have been inundated had they not been removed from the flood plain.

Then came Hurricane Florence in 2018, which inundated eastern North Carolina. Six lagoons were damaged, another 32 overtopped and nine were flooded, state records show. Without a dedicated funding source, the state Department of Agriculture cobbled together $5 million to restart the program. The legislature later kicked in another $5 million.

Recently, the state Agriculture Department received two more grants to purchase easements: $2.5 million from USDA and an additional $719,000 from the state’s Land and Water Fund. 

That’s only a small portion of the $20 million it would cost to purchase easements on the remaining swine farms that have applied for the program, Williams said. 

That doesn’t include the hundreds more farms located next to the flood zones. Some barns and lagoons are as close to a floodway as the distance between home plate and first base on a Major League Baseball field.

The risks also don’t account for the enormous poultry operations and the millions of birds that farmers co-locate with their swine operations. “You see a poultry farm, and right across the field there’s a swine farm, and sometimes there are cattle grazing in the same fields,” Baldwin said.

With a few exceptions, the location of those poultry farms and their waste disposal sites aren’t public record under state law. The only way to locate the poultry CAFOs is to fly over them, consult aerial maps or plow through building permits. 

“The poultry issue has become as big, if not a bigger, problem,” Baldwin said. In flood-prone Robeson County, one poultry farm has 48 barns, holding a total of nearly 1.7 million birds.

Baldwin said post-storm flooding is significantly problematic. “Millions of gallons of hog waste, plus poultry waste and in some cases, waste from treatment plants. The water quality is just horrendous,” he said. “I like to use the term ‘petri dish,’ because that’s what it is.”