Wastelands: The True Story of Farm Country on Trial by Corban Addison

Author:Corban Addison [Addison, Corban]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780593320822
Publisher: Knopf
Published: 2022-06-07T00:00:00+00:00

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On April 16, the tenth day of the trial, Mike Kaeske calls the plaintiffs’ final witness. The man’s appearance at the rear of the courtroom causes a stir on the industry’s side of the gallery. He makes his way up the aisle slowly, tensely, the glares from his brethren like heat on his neck, their unspoken questions reverberating in his mind: What are you doing, Tom? Aren’t you supposed to be on our side? Their disapproval comes as no surprise. It’s why his son tried to discourage him from doing it, and why he struggled as long as he did with the request that Mona Wallace danced around for two years and that Mike and Lisa Blue finally made explicit on a visit to his farm in the summer of 2017.

They wanted Tom Butler to tell his story on the witness stand.

Tom remembers that visit vividly, the way Mike and Lisa sat in his office behind the hog barns and talked to him for two hours about the cases. He had stayed in touch with Wallace & Graham after meeting Mona in early 2015, and then, serendipitously, he had bumped into her at an environmental summit at Duke in the autumn of 2016. Seeing her again reinforced his instinct that he could trust her, as did the spontaneous praise she received from the podium. Michelle Nowlin, a Duke law professor and luminary in the environmental movement, pointed Mona out to the audience and described the nuisance litigation as a potential watershed in the decades-long fight to humble Boss Hog. A few months later, Mona connected Tom to Mike by telephone, and Tom invited Mike out to the farm for a longer conversation.

Tom felt the gravity drawing him into their orbit, the inexorable drift of his trajectory toward theirs. After crossing paths with Mona at Duke, he had hosted a group of EPA officials at the farm, introducing them to fifteen of his neighbors, including the one who had first raised a concern about the odor. The EPA was in the process of investigating a Title VI complaint against the state, alleging that its hog farm permitting system was disparately impacting people of color, subjecting them to a greater nuisance than white residents. At that meeting, Tom’s neighbors gave full vent to their disgust. They told the EPA investigators that their children hated the hog odor the most. The stories of the kids tugged on Tom’s heartstrings, solidifying his commitment to reform.

For ten years, he had upgraded his farm on his own initiative, without any help from Prestage. He was now so deeply in hock to his lenders that he would likely die in the red. Yet his lagoon covers and anaerobic digester were only partial solutions to the problem. The only genuine panacea—a real-time treatment system that would convert the solid waste into fertilizer and the liquids into potable water—was still in the prototype stage, unaffordable to growers like him.

It didn’t have to be this way. Had Smithfield

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