RALEIGH, N.C. �� A high-stakes trial against the world's largest pork producer began Wednesday, in which jurors are asked to consider how badly hog waste can smell and whether the nuisance of being its neighbor deserves an award that could potentially run into the millions of dollars.
The federal case against Murphy-Brown centers on Sholar Farm in rural Sampson County, 80 miles south of Raleigh, where eight plaintiffs living around the farm seek unspecified damages for years of odor, truck noise and flies.
Some of those plaintiffs can trace roots on that land back a century, said their lead attorney Michael Kaeske of Dallas, who described an idyllic, family-based lifestyle interrupted by Sholar's arrival in the mid-1980s.
"That all ended when (farming magnate) Wendell Murphy decided the end of this dead-end road was a suitable location for his hogs," Kaeske said. Sholar Farm has 6,000 hogs and 10 million gallons of waste in its lagoons, he said.
Over an hourlong opening statement, Kaeske argued that the plaintiffs cannot enjoy their property enough to host a family barbecue, let children play outside or tend a garden because unpredictable smells chase them inside.
Kaeske noted North Carolina's 1997 moratorium on new hog lagoons _ the grandfathered Sholar Farm uses two without covering _ and several new technologies he said it declines to add because of high costs. Jurors saw pictures of hogs packed shoulder-to-shoulder on concrete floors, covered, Kaeske said, in their own waste.
"Hogs are eating, urinating, defecating machines," Kaeske said. "That's all they do all day long. ... This mess is the result."
In August, a federal jury awarded $470 million to neighbors of a Pender County farm run by Murphy-Brown, an award that was reduced to a state cap on punitive damages.
The new trial is the fourth such case against Murphy-Brown this year.
Murphy-Brown's parent company, Smithfield Foods, is represented Dallas attorney Robert Thackston, who characterized Kaeske's David-and-Goliath argument as "fiction."
"Everybody likes a good, entertaining story," Thackston said. "The big, powerful bad guy coming and crushing the little guy, that's been the staple of stories for years. But it's fiction."
The industry is heavily regulated and subject to permits, Thackston said, though the plaintiffs' attorney said inspections take only an hour a year. Thackston listed 15 improvements at Sholar Farm, including a mortality freezer for dead hogs and expanded and more distant fields for spraying hog waste.
"They don't want to be a bad neighbor," Thackston said.
He noted many of the plaintiffs built their houses well after Sholar Farms arrived, adding that an unidentified neighbor built an in-ground swimming pool only 1,000 feet away.
No one in the case has complained of any injury, Thackston said, but the kind of damages being sought are for "people who need health care for the rest of their life."
