Otis Byrd looks over a part of his herd inside a barn on his farm. Byrd is an independent farmer not under contract with a grower. (N&O photo by Robert Willett)

North Carolina's biggest hog companies often refer to themselves as family farms, and in at least one sense the term is accurate: They're just about all related.

Murphy, Prestage, Carroll's, Brown's, Smithfield -- many of the major players -- are interconnected through a web of stock deals, supply contracts and joint ventures. Collectively they control a 15 percent chunk of the nation's hog market and the vast majority of the state's inventory.

In size and structure, they bear virtually no resemblance to the traditional family farm -- except in the eyes of the law.

North Carolina, unlike Nebraska and several other Midwestern hog states, has no restrictions on corporate ownership of farms. In fact, there are no legal distinctions between a factory farm with 20,000 pigs in metal buildings and a independent grower with 250 animals in an outdoor lot.

As a result, hog companies are covered by farming laws that give them protections that normally wouldn't apply to large industries. Here a few examples:

• Zoning. Under the law, any livestock operation is considered a bona fide farm and exempt from county ordinances. So while a county may be able to dictate where a new factory can be built, it has no comparable controls over a 3,000-sow hog farm.
  
  Scotland County residents stumbled upon this truth late last year when they tried to block Carroll's Foods from opening a large hog farmer near a public golf course. They soon found they were powerless to stop it.
  
  "There was considerable public concern expressed, but there was nothing the county could do," said health director Richard Steeves.
• Right to farm. North Carolina, like most states, has a "right-to-farm" law intended to give farmers limited immunity from nuisance suits resulting from the encroachments of towns and suburbs on rural lands. Today the same immunity applies to very large companies that build massive hog farms in rural neighborhoods.

Farmers often use this defense when neighbors try to bring them into court.

Earl and James Lee of Johnston County did so when neighbors sued them over their 13,000-hog operation named "The Pig Factory" near the village of Meadow in 1992. The barns were built a half-mile from a cluster of older rural homes, one of which was owned by a woman with a life-threatening asthma condition.

Shortly afer the farm opened, the neighbors sued, complaining of a "noxious, nauseating and sickening" odor from the farm. The farm's formal response to the suit, which is still pending, began with a single, seven-word sentence:

"The defendants have a right to farm."

The case is expected to be tried this spring.

In addition, corporate farms also benefit from broad agricultural exemptions from labor and transportation laws. Farmers aren't bound by minimum wage laws or workers' right to union representation. They are not subject to vehicle weight restrictions on country roads -- an exemption that now extends to the overweight trucks operated by swine companies.

In other states, courts have begun to pick away at some of those protections. Neil D. Hamilton, director of the Agricultural Law Center at Iowa's Drake University, says state legisltors may also be forced to examine whether corporations need the breaks given to traditional farmers.

"The issue for the legal community today is, as agriculture loses its uniqueness, how should it be treated under a variety of laws -- especially those dealing with property use and the environment," Hamilton says.

Some North Carolina officials indicate they are ready to examine these issues as well. Steve Tedder, director of the water quality section of the Division of Environmental Management, suggested that state may eventually considered a two-tiered system of environmental rules: One for small family operations and another for very big and corporate-owned farms.

"These large ones may be family businesses, but they're not family farms," Tedder said.

Although competitors in name, Prestage, Carroll's, Murphys and others act as partners in business. The companies have personal and historical ties and they all sprang up within a few miles from each other.

On a clear day, you can stand on the top of Murphy's massive feed mill, "The Chief," in Rose Hill and see the feed mills of Carroll's and Prestage across the Duplin-Sampson county line.

"Those guys work close together. They don't compete against each other," observed Donald C. Ledford, a livestock and poultry statistician for the state Agriculture Department who works closely with hog company executives.

"You see them at a hog meeting, and you don't see any dissent," he said.

"They're kind of a family. They're a family within their own company, but then they're also a family within that group."

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