The Unintended Consequences Of North Carolina’s ‘Ag-Gag’ Law

A major reason for this law is to prevent farm animal abuse from being reported. As far as I'm concerned, if the people of North Carolina won't protect farm animals from being abused, it is justice for the humans to be poisoned by pollution!

http://thinkprogress.org/climate/2015/06/07/3666617/north-carolina-ag-gag-environmental-impacts/

by Natasha Geiling Posted on June 7, 2015

On Wednesday, both the North Carolina House and Senate voted to override Gov. Pat McCroy’s veto of House Bill 405 — referred to by opponents as North Carolina’s “ag-gag” law. The bill is set to become law January 1, and environmentalist are worried that its impacts won’t be limited to animal rights and potential whistle-blowers.

“It would have an environmental effect,” Gray Jernigan, staff attorney and communications coordinator with Waterkeeper Alliance told ThinkProgress. “If there was a spill of swine waste due to a lagoon failure, or an equipment malfunction on a hog facility, this would really make an employee second-guess whether they call environment or public health officials to come respond to the problem.”

The bill gives businesses in North Carolina the right to sue someone for gaining access to a nonpublic area in order to obtain workplace secrets or take photographs or video of workplace violations. The bill’s supporters say that it helps protect businesses from bad actors and strengthens private property rights, but opponents of the bill worry that its broad language might deter whistle-blowers and private citizens alike from reporting workplace violations — especially within the state’s large agricultural sector.

North Carolina is one of the country’s leading producers of hogs and pigs — the two top counties in the country in terms of hog and pig sales are Duplin and Sampson, both located along North Carolina’s eastern coast. Most of those pigs are raised in factory farms, with an average of 4,300 hogs per farm in the state.

The hog industry is big business, with sales totaling $2.9 billion in 2012, but it also leaves North Carolina with a big problem: how to dispose of the millions of tons of waste created by the hogs each year.

To combat the waste problem, hog farmers have adopted the lagoon and sprayfield system, using open-air pits called lagoons to store the manure before it is applied to nearby fields. But, as Jernigan points out, lagoons are often unlined or leaking, threatening contamination of ground and surface water around the farm.

“I think the lagoon and sprayfield system of waste disposal, at hog facilities in particular, is really just a broken system,” Jernigan said. “It leads to pollution of the air, through emissions of gases and odors from the exposed waste sitting out in the open air, it leads to groundwater contamination from unlined or poorly-lined lagoons, and it results in surface water and further groundwater pollution from spraying on a ditch or open field that is sitting in an area of exposed groundwater.”

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In February, the EPA announced it would launch an investigation into North Carolina’s hog farm regulations — environmental and civil rights groups have long claimed that the state is lax about regulating the factory farms because they tend to be located next to poor communities of color. To Martin, House Bill 405 would become another way for the state to silence these already disenfranchised communities.

“They are oftentimes people with the least power in society, and this last avenue of showing what is happening in their lives would be maybe illegal,” he said. “It’s really outrageous.”