Will a Raleigh Jury's $50M Verdict Against Murphy-Brown LLC Force Big Pork to Clean Up Its Act?

Last Tuesday, as the first of twenty-six scheduled nuisance trials against pork giant Murphy-Brown LLC came to a close, U.S. District Court Judge Earl Britt slowly turned his chair and gazed at the ten-person jury. Britt, an octogenarian Jimmy Carter appointee with a soft drawl, had just finished reading jurors their instructions, a task that took more than twenty minutes. He leaned back and left the courtroom with a parting thought.

"My only comment is that I am tired of looking at that dirty hog," he said, glancing at the life-size, faux-waste-coated hog replica that had been sitting inside the courtroom for the past three weeks. Spectators reacted with surprised laughter, as they had throughout the trial when the normally no-nonsense Britt made an unexpected quip.

But the coat of "filth" painted onto that pink plastic hog was more than a punch line. It represented the root of a dramatic case that had played out in court over the month of April. The trial, at its core, was about pig feces—and whether the world's largest pork producer should be held accountable for the way that it manages the tons and tons of waste its hog farms produce.

This case marked the beginning of a series of landmark trials in lawsuits filed by more than five hundred neighbors of hog farms against Murphy-Brown, a subsidiary of Smithfield Foods. The plaintiffs in this and the other lawsuits argue that the farms' method of disposing of hog waste produces unbearable stenches that adversely affect their quality of life. That waste-management system, common in large hog farms in North Carolina, functions by storing pig excrement in open-air lagoons and then liquefying and spraying the waste onto nearby fields.

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