Now, Smithfield is partnering with another major utility, the Richmond, Virginia–based Dominion Energy, to complete another biogas energy development in Duplin and Sampson Counties by summer 2021.
This project collected methane from five hog farms and turned it into energy for Duke Energy, the state’s primary electric utility. Energy providers struggled to make it happen until 2018, when Optima KV, the first successful swine biogas program in the state, was created in Duplin County. In 2007, North Carolina’s government mandated that 0.2 percent of energy from local utilities operating in the state come from renewable natural gas. Environmental advocates and many local residents, however, argue that an investment in so-called biogas will only further perpetuate a practice that harms neighboring communities.
The move is pitched as a solution twofer, a win for the community and the climate, too. Pork producers say they have a solution, specifically to the methane issue: capturing the gas coming off of these hog lagoons and using it as fuel, a form of “renewable natural gas,” or RNG. And not 8 feet from the home of Herring’s late mother, separated by a thin strip of trees, are the so-called spray fields - corn fields on which hog manure is sprayed as a fertilizer.Ī map shows the location of hog operations in North Carolina, Duplin and Sampson Counties, seen in red near the center, contain the majority of the state’s hog operations. These houses have slats in the floor that allow swine excrement to fall into troughs below, from which it is pumped into malodorous lagoons just outside the structures. There are two hog houses where pigs are lined up side to side, butt to head, with little space to move. The farm, now owned by Smithfield Foods, the nation’s top producer of pork, is relatively small. In the late 1980s, a hog farm was constructed next door to the siblings’ homes, on a contested portion of land that Herring believes rightfully belongs to her family.
Herring and her older siblings were born and raised on the land, and they continue to live in simple houses and trailers sprinkled throughout the fields.īut there is also an unwelcome guest on the Herrings’ property. Her mother was born and raised there and farmed and cultivated those fields for 99 years. The land that Elsie Herring lives on, about 60 acres of farmland in southeastern North Carolina, has been in her family since her grandfather purchased the property in 1891 from his former enslaver.
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