Dr. Brian Jacobsen tried to think of a way to describe the sound.
“Picture two football teams running up and down aluminum bleachers screaming at the top of their lungs.”
At 2:30 in the morning.
That’s the uproar that awakens neighbors of Martin Pork Products when workers unload a tractor-trailer full of unhappy pigs and squeeze them into the holding pens next to the hog-butchering plant.
And unfortunately, neighbors say, that’s not the worst of the changes in their neighborhood.
Ever since Martin Pork Products leased the white cinderblock building near the intersection of Woodleaf and West Ridge roads, the people who live nearby say the stench has grown like a giant mushroom cloud and hovers over their homes and fields, making life miserable.
The problem is simple — volume. Previous owner James E. Bringle slaughtered as many as 200 cattle and 100 hogs a week — and fewer in recent years.
Under the new operators, the butchering plant is killing 300 hogs a day.
That’s a lot more noise and a lot more smell. Intolerable, the neighbors say.
“I can’t have anybody over to my house. I’m too ashamed,” said Rusty Powlas, who lives in one of the homes in front of the plant. “I can’t open my windows to air out my house.”
Powlas’ grandmother lives next door to him.
Until recently, James and Carolyn Smith lived in a third house between Woodleaf Road and the butchering plant. But James Smith said his wife finally said she couldn’t take the odor and noise any more, and they’ve moved to another home in Salisbury.
Now Smith doubts he can get a fair price for his former home.
Mario Triolo shakes his head and holds up his hands in frustration. He wants good relations with people in the neighborhood, but Martin Pork Products pays him to manage the butchering plant.
“I understand the people’s concerns and problems, but we’re a livestock operation, and livestock smell,” he said one recent afternoon. “We don’t feel we’re doing anything wrong. We follow the rules.”
Owner Carlton Martin of Godwin, who’s been in the business 45 years, said in a telephone interview that the smell is under control except for about 15 minutes each day: the time it takes for a contractor to pick up the offal trucked away from the plant.
Offal consists of the waste parts left after the slaughtering process, including intestines and blood, which can be made into blood meal, feed and other products.
Martin said for a while the offal was not being removed daily, and that led to odor problems. But he switched companies, he said, and now the only time there should be an odor is when a truck picks up the offal around 4 each afternoon.
“You can’t control it when you load it on the truck,” he said.
Martin said his workers have done everything in their power to curb the smell of the lagoons, and he challenged the Post to visit the lagoons again.
“They’re not smelling now,” he said.
He said he lives within a stone’s throw of his only other butchering operation, in Godwin, a small town northeast of Fayetteville. His workers control odors there, he said, and they’re doing the same at the Rowan site.
“We’re not here for problems,” Martin said. “We’re certainly sorry if we inconvenienced anyone, because we’re not here for that.”
He said the operation is complying with every law and rule that applies to butchering operations. Local, state and federal officials agree.
Lloyd Pace, a county zoning officer, said the property is zoned commercial, and a butchering plant is allowed in that zoning.
Jeff Greene, an environmental specialist with the county, said the company stores runoff from the processing plant and the hog pens in two lagoons within sight of the plant and many of the homes. The company hires a contractor to pump out the lagoons periodically and haul it to Fayetteville for treatment.
Though Deal’s Creek runs just west of the lagoons, the company doesn’t need any special permits since it doesn’t discharge into the water, which ultimately flows into the Yadkin River.
Official complaints
The Mooresville office of the N.C. Division of Water Quality has received at least two complaints about waste from the lagoons spilling or leaking into the creek.
Jacobsen, a veterinarian who lives with his family in a house behind the butchering plant, said he called in a report to the state agency last summer when a waste-collection truck came to the site to pump out the lagoons. He said he saw liquid waste running out of a hose and running into the creek. But by the time a state inspector could come out to take a look, the company had stopped the leak and the creek water had cleared up.
On Feb. 23, someone else reported another “nonpermitted discharge,” according to a report by John Lesley, an inspector with the Division of Water Quality. Lesley noted that the company has raised the walls of the lagoon 8 feet to increase capacity and that they “appeared to be in good condition.”
Lesley wrote that he checked the stream and found “no evidence of stream impact and no outlets to the stream ... The area was very clean and no odors were evident.”
Bringle defends tenant
James Bringle also stoutly defends his tenant and said that neighbors should clean up the mess left by their own livestock.
“They don’t need to jump on me,” he said this week. “I finally got somebody in there where I can make a living.
“They should give them time to get it corrected. They are reducing it (the smell) now.”
Bringle said he knows the smell from the plant was bad last summer, but he said the company has started trucking out the leftover animal parts every day.
But Karen Huff, whose barn sits just a grassy field away from the butchering plant, said a year is long enough to wait and plead for help.
A group of neighbors gathered recently at Huff’s barn. They said they’re not sure they can do anything about the plant.
“I just want people to know how big a hog-butchering operation is going on right here in Rowan County,” one resident said.
The plant opened on the property in the early ’50s. About that time, Huff moved there as a young girl with her family.
In an article in December 1971, the Bringles told the Post they were butchering about 200 cattle and 100 hogs every week. In June 1992, a Bringle’s employee told another Post reporter the company was averaging 70 to 75 cattle and 30 to 35 hogs a week.
A good neighbor
Huff and other people who live around the butchering plant have livestock themselves. So they’re used to the smell of a farm. They say Bringle’s was always a good neighbor.
“You could smell it every once in a while, especially in the summer, but it was not a big deal,” Huff said. “It was a small family business then, and we all got along.”
That all changed, Huff and the others say, when Bringle retired about a year ago and leased his plant to Martin Pork Products. The operation quickly turned into a large operation “with trucks coming in day and night,” James Smith said.
And what was smelly but tolerable before became an ungodly stench that keeps the neighbors inside their homes.
Though sometimes the pigs go straight from the trucks into the slaughterhouse, they await death at other times in metal pens beside the plant. The pens have a roof but the sides are open, except for a blue tarp on the north side that flaps freely in the wind.
Powlas’ land backs right up to the pens, and he recently stood within several feet — eye to eye — with dozens of swine. Though the occupants of one pen — Powlas said they were boars that have to be kept separate — had room to lounge, the other pens were full, some with pigs piled in three tiers.
“There’s no telling how many dead ones are in there,” Powlas said.
He and other neighbors say they have seen workers dragging dead pigs out of the pens or off the trucks. Though they know the animals are headed for slaughter, they say they are concerned about the conditions in which they have to wait.
Even as the group of neighbors eyed the pens, pigs on the bottom of a pile squealed loudly as others stepped on top of them.
“This is a quiet day,” Powlas said. “Amplify this by 10 or 15 on a normal day.”
Asked about animals being crowded and piled on top of each other in pens, Martin said, “We don’t do that.
“It’s a loss to us to mishandle animals,” Martin said. “We would be foolish to do that. It would cost the company money.”
After noticing the residents escorting a reporter and photographer around the ground, Triolo came out to meet the group. He invited the reporter and photographer into his office and showed them the report from the Division of Air Quality finding no problems with the operation.
Trying to respond
On this particular day, the plant wasn’t operating. Triolo said about half the plant’s 28 employees come from El Salvador, and they were off that day filling out immigration papers that will allow them to return home for a visit and then come back to their jobs here.
Triolo said his company is trying to respond to the neighbors’ complaints. The company recently paid to put bacteria in the lagoons which, in time, should help control the odors.
“That bacteria is not cheap,” he added.
Triolo also said business is good, and the Salisbury plant is running at capacity. Though 80 percent of the meat goes to the “New York area,” Martin also exports meat to Venezuela, Mexico and Puerto Rico.
Dr. Steve Wells, state director for the N.C. Meat and Poultry Inspection Service, said a state inspector is stationed at the plant full time, though the plant falls under federal rules.
Wells said he has visited the plant occasionally, and that there have been no problems since the plant quintupled its volume. He said the state inspector would decide how many pigs the plant can process properly, and that inspector can slow or shut down the plant if he thinks that’s necessary.
Federal officials told a Post reporter to file a request under the Freedom of Information Act to get information about the plant. They had not responded to the Post’s request by this week.
Triolo said he and his boss want to work with their neighbors and accommodate as much as they can.
“It’s not that we don’t want to speak to you,” he told a Post reporter. “We’re not hiding anything. We don’t want to see anything” blown out of proportion.
“It’s a little plant trying to do some business,” he added. “How do you quiet down any livestock?”
But that doesn’t comfort Huff or her neighbors.
“Folks who work there don’t live there,” she said.
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