Hurricane Florence will pour 15 to 25 inches of rain onto the Carolinas when it reaches land on Thursday, with up to 35 inches in some places, according to the National Hurricane Center. The North Carolina hog industry says it survived Hurricane Matthew with minimal losses in October 2016 and asserts it is prepared for Florence.
“Our farmers take hurricane threats extremely seriously,” said hog farmer Brandon Warren, president of the North Carolina Pork Council. In a release, the farm group said environmentalists will try to seize on the storm as part of the long-running dispute over large confinement livestock farms.
Green groups say the farms generate unmanageable amounts of waste and spread foul odors. Neighbors of North Carolina hog farms won three lawsuits this summer that alleged large hog farms created a nuisance because of noise, insects and odor.
In the floods that followed record rainfall from Hurricane Matthew, 14 lagoons were flooded on hog farms and one was breached partially, but it was on a farm that was not in operation. By comparison, Hurricane Floyd inundated 55 hog lagoons and breached six of them in 1999. A breach, which empties a lagoon, is more serious than flooding. Some 21,474 hogs died in Hurricane Floyd vs 2,800 in Hurricane Matthew.
The North Carolina state Agriculture Department said poultry producers lost 1.8 million birds due to Hurricane Matthew. There also was $400 million in damage to field cxrops and $200 million in losses for landscape and nursery crops, it said in a December 2017 summary. Green groups said 39 barns on 10 large-scale hog farms and 102 barns on 26 broiler chicken farms were flooded by Matthew.
North Carolina ranks second in the nation in hogs, with 8.9 million head and is third in the nation in broiler chickens. The largest U.S. hog slaughter plant, with a capacity of 32,000 hogs a day, is in Tar Heel, NC. The owner, Smithfield Foods, is expected to close the plant for at least two days as a precaution during the hurricane, said Reuters.
Smithfield has 14,000 employees, 250 company-owned and 1,500 contract farmers in eastern Virginia and North Carolina, said National Hog Farmer magazine.
Private forecaster Radiant Solutions said rainfall of up to 20 inches from Hurricane Florence “will certainly cause widespread flooding as well as some significant damage to any unharvested crops such as corn, soybeans and especially cotton.”