Disappointed... but not surprised

I was heading back from a turf farm in Bladen County, giddy from having scored a good deal on a pallet of centipede sod. While enjoying breeze from riding with the windows down an all too familiar smell slapped me in the nostrils. There was a hog truck ahead of me making its way to large meat processing plant off of Hwy 87. I felt badly for the swine who were being transported to their certain death. Then, for a minute, I considered what it must be like to live in the vicinity of a hog farm. But after the smell and visual faded, so did my thinking on that topic.

Over the weekend I stumbled across an article that highlighted the growth of poultry farms in North Carolina since 2014. Then I saw the map of all the permitted animal facilities throughout the state. Recognizing the demarcation between animals, my mouth fell agape once I saw the concentration of swine farms in Sampson…. Duplin…. Lenoir…. Wayne… Greene…. wait! These counties seemed strangely familiar. And then it hit me, "these are are counties that had higher proportions of enslaved populations that the rest of the state. These are Black Belt counties. Which, suffice to say is where a lot of present-day Black folks live.

I did a little bit of analysis and pulled my map of 1860 North Carolina with enslaved populations shaded. I went to the NC DEQ website and pulled down the database that listed every animal facility in the state. I then overlaid it over that 1860 map. The results are below. And stupefying.

With one glance I was able to deduce that the majority fo hog farms (and their noxious pollution) were located in communities of color in Duplin and Sampson counties. This is intentional. Disappointing, but not surprising.