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Transcript on deposit at The Southern Historical Collection, The Louis Round Wilson Library
Citation of this interview should be as follows:
“Interview K-0818, in
the Southern Oral History Program Collection #4007,
Southern Historical
Collection, The Wilson Library,
University of North Carolina at Chapel
Hill”
Hog farmer Jim Connor lost his hogs in the flooding during Hurricane Floyd, but he managed to save five cows, a horse, three cats, and a fox. That devotion to animals is a major theme of this interview, one Connor frequently describes in connection with his environmentalism. He defends the environmental practices of hog farmers and attacks environmentalists who sue farmers without good reason, even as he welcomes stiff penalties on polluters. In addition to illustrating one farmer's approach to animal husbandry and the environment, this interview reveals many of the details of hog "growing," including the workings of the automated hog houses and waste disposal systems.
Hog farmer Jim Connor describes the impact of Hurricane Floyd and the details of his business, and emphasizes his concern for the environment.
[START OF TAPE 1, SIDE A]
Come back to your house.
Smell different though.
I don't know if I got the ones I wanted you to show you.
How has your wife been faring with this big change with the flood? Is she been doing okay?
She's been doing better than I am.
Has she?
She says 'She gets all new stuff.' And I say, 'Yeah and I got to pay for it.'
Exactly.
That's the way it ought to be isn't it. Or the way it is anyway.
A friend of mine got my gun. There's my gun collection. I caught the Mexicans trying to spy in the window.
Rode up in a boat, looking in the window.
Yeah. I had a picture somewhere where we floated those animals out but I can't find it. There's a little house down there next to Steve's Restaurant.
Oh yeah. Tenant house.
Two rental houses I have. Now there's his store. That's during the flood.
Oh man.
Water, oh the ice machine turned over sideways.
Yeah. There are the hog houses we just left. That's after the water went down. I'd liked to get in there.
That just makes you sick.
There's my partner's government truck sitting over there by the hog houses. He got that high where it wouldn't get wet.
Water didn't get into the toolbox.
Yeah. That one got totaled. There are my two sons. There's that seat of water was up to here on the truck. And there our ring we put in. You can see the dead animals floating in there.
Several dozen.
Like two hundred.
Two hundred in this one.
Oh, I see them in there.
That kept them contained after the water started down. There's the end field up there loading them up.
Is that a government truck?
Yeah. National Guard.
That's hardly any water there.
There's still seven feet of water there where you turn off the road going in there.
Okay. How long after the first flood waters rose is this?
About twelve days.
Almost two weeks.
Yeah.
Those hogs were smelling ripe by then, weren't they?
They were pretty clean. There wasn't any odor in there with the dead hogs because they hadn't started to decompose or anything. They were just—.
Because the water was so cool maybe. Kept it like a refrigerator.
This is really an interesting photograph.
You can see the watermark right there on that fence.
This is such an interesting photograph, I mean with the reflection here and all of this. That's nicely done.
Thank you.
Okay and this is the government truck loaded with them.
Right.
I didn't even see that one. Maybe it was sticking. No this was the one I didn't see.
This is just water. Right there's another similar one to it. That's the old house that's right across the road. You might even notice that thing is built back in eighteen hundred and something.
I did see that one.
They had water that was up half way to that window. FEMA gave them four thousand dollars to redo it. You couldn't even do the floors.
Yeah.
The lady said, Look. We'll do it for four thousand dollars if I wrap the place up in saran wrap.' I told you. Here's the guy's cows and horses standing on the porch of that trailer.
Oh yeah.
We put the floating dock right up on it and walked them on it and carried them, pushed them up to the forestry station.
How many cows?
There were five cows and a horse.
Were you—I've got the tape running. Will you tell the story of what happened?
Well, when the water got up so high back in this pasture area, he brought them up here and got them on his porch. You see, the water still got up about six or eight inches in there. It kept on coming on up and so he had a floating dock over by Holland's Restaurant. We cut it loose and backed it up against the porch and the first trip we took the horse and three cows out. Took two johnboats and put them like a tug and pushed them right up to Highway Fifty-Three to the forestry station and put them off. We came back and got the rest of them and took them up the same way.
They just stood on this dock.
Yeah. It was Jimmy and his wife. They road on the barge and kept the
animals calm. We put some feed on there for them so they'd be munching.
They rode pretty good. The only time you'd have a problem if another
boat tried to get around you and caused a wake and make it rock. Then
they'd get kind of nervous. So we had one guy hanging off the back—you
know Randy Wells that had the bulldog down there the
In boats.
Yeah.
There were people zooming around in their boats?
Yeah. Jet skis. They were having—.
Just for fun.
Oh yeah.
Okay. Let me say on this tape that we're here in the tenant house on the hog farm of Mr. Jim Connors. It is December 19, 1999. We're looking at pictures of the flood that he took.
I had a tractor over on this side and it got up under water. There's my Jeep there. It got under water. That's another one of Holland's Restaurant. There's that truck when the water was up pretty good. There's my Jeep.
Oh man.
There's another one of the cows there on that porch.
That' s the Jeep that's sitting out here.
Yeah. We got it going.
Oh okay. How hard was it to get a car going after being filled with water.
Well, we had to drain all the fluids and several times. Put transmission fluid in it and redo the bearings on the wheels and everything.
How about the gas tank?
Drain the gas tank. Drained all the fluids. All the fluids—.
How about the carpeting inside?
Rip it out and dry it out. Take the seats out; take the carpet out.
Did you have to put new carpet.
Well, we put the same carpet back in but we took it out and disinfected it and dried it out.
Watch.
You like that huh?
I really do. I love pictures like this when you can kind of do both ways like that.
Now that's right there.
This is the right way. It's sharp. The only way you know it is the sharper; you can see the reflection in the water. Fuzzing the lines. That's neat.
There's where the fox and the three cats were up there. The fox is right there but you can barely make him out.
Tell us about that.
Just had three cats I was feeding up on the beams of the barn that the top blew off of. One day I went to feed the three cats in the boat and there was a gray fox up there with them. They just all eat out of the same bucket. They were all in trouble. It looks like nature knew it. I've got one in here that you won't really like if I can find it.
You obviously are somebody who loves animals.
Can't you tell.
Yes, I can. You saved five cows and horse, a fox, three cats. How many? Have I got them all?
There's a beaver dam inside a ten by ten culvert. All they had was about nine inches of completely blocking it off.
Wow.
We were in there blowing it out. We put a third of a pound on this corner, this corner, this corner and this corner and one pound right in the middle. I had it on a timed explosion.
Did you work for—.
A third of a pound of dynamite. Ammonium nitrate.
Well, it was an Oklahoma City bomb.
Right. Ammonium nitrate with
They call them mini-packs.
Look at this, this is amazing.
Yeah. I did see that.
Here's my son walking around in the house in waders. There I had my generator running until the water got up over it, off my PTO.
This is right there where we were?
Yeah. There's back on the other side of my lake looking at the house.
Oh that's one of the pictures that Rob's going to like. That is your house.
Yeah.
You can't tell which is sky and which is water.
Yeah, this is wonderful. What a cool picture.
I can't believe I got one—.
Same picture.
I guess the damn thing is somewhere. I had one I wanted to show you Rob. I can't find it. You can see-this is what I'm looking for. That sign says, 'Water subject to flooding.'
Oh.
And it was right up to the bottom of the sign.
You've got an eye for photography.
Yeah, really.
I told my wife I wanted that thing blown up poster sized and put up on the wall in there for my camp.
I'll say. You call this your camp.
This is certainly nice. This is—do they provide you with this when you get the prints.
It comes with it.
It's a little contact sheet.
It's numbered so you can have them made.
Well, when I—I shoot black and white and I do the same thing. I put the whole roll on one eight by ten sheet so they're a little bit bigger with the size of the film. But I've never seen this. This is very nice.
I bet she's going to surprise me and have that thing made for Christmas. Probably—.
Say it a little bit louder.
It's disappeared. She does stuff like that.
You do have a good eye. You've got a real good eye.
I'll tell you what this one is. I love a big Christmas tree. That's the way we had it over at the other house last Christmas.
Wow.
How big is it.
Wow. It's—.
Eleven, twelve feet. Eleven or twelve feet.
It looks like it's two or three feet above those beams in the house.
Oh yeah.
Those sky beams.
Oh my gosh.
I love a—.
Is that a cedar tree.
It came right up from Avery County.
Is that right?
Avery County.
Frazier fir, then.
Frazier fir.
That's not too far from me at all. Actually we've got—we go every year and cut trees over at some neighbor's house or dig them and stuff like that. We dig one about every other year.
There's one when I was initiated into the Jesters. I had somebody—a friend of ours took that picture. That's when I first day I came out. Dawn met me up at the bridge.
Now, the first day you came out, tell—what do you mean, you came out? Where were you staying?
I stayed upstairs in my office because people were looting and everything so bad. I wouldn't leave the place. It was twelve days before I even came out to get supplies or anything. I met her up there at the bridge.
What were you eating?
Let's—let me ask you some questions and let you talk. When did you move here to the community?
1974.
And you had been an airline pilot.
I was then.
You were then.
I moved up here to get my boys out of town into a little more open environment.
You were flying for?
Piedmont.
Describe the place you picked out to buy and why you liked the looks of it.
Well, I was in the Shrine Drum and Bugle Corps down in Wilmington. A friend of mine was in the real estate business. I told him to look for me a farm because I wanted to get the boys out of town. About a year later, he hadn't said anything and we had a practice every Monday night. We were practicing and I said, 'Jack, you found me a farm yet.' He said, 'Well I've been kind of looking.' I said, 'Well, look. I've got this money saved up to buy a farm. If you don't find me one this month, I'm going to buy a boat and start fishing.' So he found this place. I said, 'I want a farm but I don't want any buildings on it because whatever goes in there, I want to build what I want.' He came up with this piece of property that had one old run down tobacco barn. That's all that was there. I just fell in love with it. I bought it. My wife did not want to move to the country. So that's when I told her to get a set of blueprints and put everything in them that she'd ever wanted in a house and I'd build it on a farm. Well y'all can see she laid a pretty good one on me. But you know back in '74 when we built that house, it was $47,650, turn key job. The last time I had it appraised it was $340,000 so it wasn't a bad investment. But I got like seven and a half acres of yard area right there at the house with tennis courts, and the basketball and the lake in the back for the boys to fish in and swim in. It just turned out really, really—well I say a smart thing to do—an ideal thing to do. Dawn, come in here. Meet these guys. This is Charlie Thompson and Rob. I can't remember your—.
Rob Amberg.
This is my wife Dawn.
How are you?
Fair to middling. Thank you.
You did a beautiful job in here. This is just great. DC: You should've seen the before pictures.
That's what Jim has been saying.
Find me the pictures that Kelly took if you get a chance. They might be
over in
Yeah. That's—.
So you moved to your farm. You were still flying planes. How much longer did you do that after you moved there?
Twenty-three years.
So you were going down to Wilmington to pick up a flight and—were you flying out of Wilmington?
Yeah. At one time, that was one of Piedmont's largest crew bases. I flew out of there until Piedmont got the 727s and the crew base for it was in Charlotte. Then I'd commute over to Charlotte and pick up my flight. Then when they got the 767s, I had to go there. I flew domestic on those for about a couple of years going from Charlotte to LA, back and forth and San Francisco. Then they got the international; so I'd go to Charlotte and do that. They were doing London and Frankfurt out of Charlotte. If we'd go to Paris, I'd have to deadhead to Philadelphia or Pittsburgh and take the Paris flight. So it was pretty neat. I was gone a lot. Lived out of a suitcase a lot.
When you drive up in your yard, you can't tell necessarily that you live on a farm. It's sort of residential and has a tennis court there that now you use those as a dog lot. When did you decide you wanted to be a farmer and raise hogs?
Always have.
You always have?
Always wanted to live on a farm.
Is that right. Why?
I don't know. I guess it was from when I was a kid and going spending summers with my grandparents and things like that. They were farmers.
What kind of farmers were they?
Just a living. They had chickens, hogs, cows, mules, tobacco, corn, peanuts, and soybeans. They just made a living off of the land. All my ancestors have.
In which county?
Columbus County. My dad's father, he had a lot of farms up until the
Depression. He was pretty much a go-getter, I call it. The guy had a
third grade education. He could spell every word in the dictionary. He
typed with two fingers. Before the Depression, he had a Ford agency in
Whiteville, a movie theatre in Whiteville, a restaurant in Whiteville, a
Ford dealership in Chadbourne and fourteen farms. During the Depression,
of course people were getting stuff on their signature. After a lot of
people got wealthy after it confiscating. My dad used to tell me a story
that my granddaddy—my dad had five brothers. There were six boys.
People'd owe granddad money. He'd say, 'All right boys let's go out
there. We're going to have to get their chickens and mules and cows and
whatever we can to salvage some money.' He said that they'd go out and
some lady'd come to the door with a bunch of little crying kids. He said
they couldn't take these people's stuff so he lost everything he had
because he would not confiscate people's property. That takes a pretty
big man, a pretty big man. I've got a friend right here in Pender County
whose family's absolutely wealthy through the kazoo.
You always wanted to be a farmer; butt you decided to be an airline pilot in the meantime somehow. How did that?
Well, I don't know. I started off at Piedmont as a flight attendant. At that time, they called them pursers. They didn't have any stewardesses. We'd during from one leg to the other, the purser would go back in the baggage bin and sort out the baggage that was going off at the next stop, and the mail that was going off at the next stop, and serve coffee. Back then when they got on the airplane, you gave them two samples of cigarettes—a sample box that had five Winstons in it and one of them had five Salem cigarettes in it. They had you do a chiclets chewing gum. You'd go by and give them before you started your descent for them to chew to keep their ears from popping because none of the airplanes were pressurized. I started doing that as a flight attendant. I rode back there about a year.
Was that in Raleigh?
No, I started off, they sent me to Washington, DC. They hired me in Winston-Salem. That was the home office. I had to go to Washington. We lived up there six years. I tell everybody it took us six years to save up enough money to be able to leave because it's a high rent district. Then I went back to Wilmington and bought a house. Got to looking around for some property to get in. I started flying after about a year as a flight attendant. I said, 'You know if you're going to ride around on one of these things, you might as well drive.' Of course back then, a pilot didn't make any money. I think a Captain with Piedmont at that point was making $800 a month.
Man.
I was a flight attendant. I made $225.
Man.
And got four dollars and twenty-five cents a day for meal expenses and if you flew past midnight you got an extra dollar for a midnight snack. It's been a real, real—.
So you decided, you had to go to flight school.
No. I bought an old airplane, a Veronica L-3, a two-seater. It looks
like a J3 Cub except a J3 Cub the pilot flies it from the back seat. The
Veronica, the pilot flies it from the front seat, tandem type.
Okay. Thank you. So I had to go out and contract to do that and when I
got all my hours in—you had to have a commercial, an instrument rating,
and that was it to go on as a co-pilot back then. That's all you had to
have was a commercial and an
Twenty-eight.
So you bought one hundred and some acre when you were still—.
They called it ninety acres more or less; you give them a ten-percent play.
At one point you must've been still flying but deciding to do something to make some money off of your farm. When did that start being an idea in your head?
I always do other things. Back when I was in Wilmington, I started a
portable toilet business called Rent-a-John and rented to contractors.
When you're in the flying business you've got to have a first class
physical every six months. Well if you bust the physical, you're out of
work. So I always was piddling with something else in case something
happened with the flying end of it. I'd have something to do. I started
that toilet business and it was real successful. Ran it for about twenty
years and turned it over to my dad. Then after a few years, he decided
he wanted to retire so he sold it.
What year was that? You might have said but I didn't catch it.
Probably late seventies because we hadn't been up there long. So then I got another friend that was in the hog business; I bought ten bred gilts from him. I built the old barn. You didn't go to them on the other side. I was working up to a fifty-sow fare to finish operation. I had that running pretty good. I had to go to school on an airplane. I was going to be gone about six weeks. I rented my hog operation out. When I came back, that's when Prestage's was just cranking up. When I came back, a friend of mine in the turkey business said, 'You need to talk to Bill Prestage. He's looking for growers.' So I did. Man, this takes all the gamble out of it. I build the buildings; I furnish the building, the labor, and utilities;and he furnishes the hogs, the feed, the medication; he sells them; and I get a percentage.
And all that's written into the contract.
Yep. But they gave you a five-year—he gives you a five-year contract. At the end of that five years, if you didn't take anything out of it, the operation's paid for. Only thing I took out of it was enough to pay my utilities.
So you got a five-year contract on the hogs?
Yeah. And it's renewed. I've got the original contract. It just—if you
don't screw up, it just renews itself. Like I've been growing for him
for fifteen years on that
You don't have to pay for the feed. You don't have to pay for the medication. You don't have to pay for the transportation.
No.
About how much would it cost to build a building like that?
Today?
Today.
Probably a $100,000 per building.
You could pay for that in five years today?
Yeah. The return on investment is still about the same, about thirty-two to thirty-four percent.
And you like that better than being your own boss so to speak?
Well, I am my own boss.
Okay.
People talk about that you're a factory farm and like that. I'm not a factory farm. I just got a supplier. It's still a family farm. We run the thing. The only difference is that once a week they've got a serviceman that comes by to look at their animals. He makes sure I keep the feeders adjusted the way they want them, that we're not wasting. We get a premium on feed conversion. It starts at four oh. Anything under four oh you get bonus money on.
Four pounds of feed to one pound of hog. I just wanted to make that clear.
Right. So any difference, like this last one, my feed conversion part of the check was over $12,000.
That was a bonus that you got just for feed conversion was so good.
Say if I wasn't doing a good job, if say it was four oh. I wouldn't have gotten that $12,000.
What was yours?
It was two point four six, two point four eight. Somewhere right in there.
Less than two and a half pounds of feed to make a pound of hog. Is this because hogs are just finely bred today?
Yeah. It's in the genetics for a long lean hog because they don't put any additives in the feed. They put a soybean meal to give them their protein. It's just corn and soybean meal. Unless you have to do some medication, where you get a whole sick herd or something like that. They'll put it in the feed and water so you can knock it out. But the mortality will usually run under two percent on a turn. If you do two percent or less, you're doing an excellent job. I've seen guys that would get pseudo-rabies in a herd or something like that and lose eight to ten percent of the herd. When you start losing heavy hogs like that, that really screws up your feed conversion because you bury a two hundred-pound hog, you're burying six hundred pounds of feed. If you don't keep those feeders adjusted where they can get that trough full of feed, then they get in there and flip it out. When it goes through them cracks, it's gone.
You're still paying for it in a sense.
Well they are. It comes off your feed conversion bonus.
You find this to be a—you said you only spend four to six hours a day on the hog operation. That's a pretty good job. But you have to do it seven days a week.
Well you can do it in less than that. If you don't have a lot of sick animals where you're giving shots. You can walk through one of those buildings and check the waterers, check your feeders, check the fans, your curtains, make sure you're not getting build up underneath the slats where it flushes. If you've got a dead animal or something, you pull it out and put it in the Dumpster. You can do a building, if you don't have a problem in it, in thirty minutes. These four houses, it'd take two hours and do a good job.
What is the minimum you can have a still get a contract? Can you just do one house? Do you have to have three?
When I started, I had an old finishing floor that would hold three hundred and sixty. Bill came down and looked at it and said we needed a thousand to justify hauling feed this far because the feed mill's in Clinton. So I built that six twenty finishing floor by that one. Well, actually, it's six forty, which you keep one pen for a cull pen to keep the others from killing him or beating him up. Once they establish the peck order. You take the weak ones out and put them down in the cull pen and move those out like three times during a cycle. It's pretty interesting.
And you have a son who's decided to go into it?
He's managing a two thousand sow unit for Prestage.
You and he both make a good living at it you said.
Yeah. I hope that one day he comes and takes over this operation. They'll probably shut that one down. That one knocks sixty thousand a year off his potential income.
That one you're referring to is the one in the flood plain.
The flood plain.
Can you describe the deal they're offering you and what you're reaction to that is?
I don't know what the deal is because the package hasn't come out.
Is this FEMA?
No, this is state.
State Department of Agriculture?
They've appropriated $5.7 million to buyout fifteen farms that's in the flood plain.
Is that all that in the flood plain in the entire—
They don't know. They say it might be as many as 180. They just don't know. They've got—like one of the guys they've got on the list is over on the other side of Wallace. They had an article in the paper last week, his family doesn't grow hogs. They've got cotton, peanuts, and corn. They've got him listed as having an intensive livestock operation in the flood plain.
Why just fifteen?
Those are the ones they know that were impacted during this hurricane.
So they don't know—and part of that too I guess is they haven't really established where the flood plain is.
Yeah. The records they're going on are so old. They don't know. I'm on
the Pender County Planning Board, and we go through that stuff every
month and people come in here wanting to do subdivisions. Of course now
we've got where they have to
You had water in your house.
Sixty-two inches.
Sixty-two inches.
Yeah.
There's so much to talk about that you brought up but—.
I should've never told you about Sammy.
I know.
Everything is pretty much automated. It's climate controlled. You've got
fans in there to circulate the air all the time. You've got kit fans to
pull the ammonia out so they won't stay in there with the animals.
Curtain drawn thermostats. You've got foggers around the side if the
temperature gets up over eighty-eight degrees it puts a mist
So the pigs are comfortable?
Oh yeah.
They're happy.
Oh yeah. You saw how they're jumping around when you went in to take pictures. That's their whole thing in life is for the consumer. You keep them comfortable. You can't just be cruel to animals. You've got to like them. You go in there and giving them shots. They'll get to know you. They'll talk to you when you come in there and run up to the gate. When a strange person goes in there, they're kind of lay back until they see everything's all right and then they'll come out.
A pig's pretty smart.
Oh they're the smartest animal there is. They say that's the only animal that's ever been able to figure out a three-way latch. Horse can't do it; cow can't do it; a dog, a cat, a monkey. But a pig can. That's pretty neat.
So you feel like you have a relationship with these pigs somewhat like you do those cats out there.
I look after them like I look after that lab. You got to worry about their health. Keep them happy; keep them comfortable.
What would you say to a person who says, 'I just don't understand how you can care for animals and then go and know they're going to be killed?' What would you say?
That's why they're grown. That's what one of these abortionist rights people was telling me one time. I think you're the least caring of the—and this just happened in our family. My son that's a pilot, his wife was four month along and they went to do the scan to see if it's a boy or a girl. When they did it and looked at it, the doctor said, 'This is not good.' The liver and lungs were on the outside. They said she could go full term but it'll live five minutes. They went to Wake Forest two weeks ago and took it.
That's really hard.
But anyway, the story I was going to tell you is this abortion person was telling me, that's wrong, that's wrong that's wrong. You should never do that to anything. I don't care.
Do what?
Kill or abort a baby or something like that. I said, 'You eat eggs?'
They said, 'Yeah. I said, 'You're eating an unborn chicken. What's the
damned difference?' And my youngest son, the one that's managing the two
thousand unit—my mom about twelve years ago had to have heart surgery.
The valve on top of her heart was bad. They couldn't put a synthetic
valve in; so they put a pig valve in. It comes from a special Russian
hog. They had to put a pig valve in there, and he was doing a paper his
senior
Yeah. My father has a pig valve.
It's amazing. The synthetic ones just wouldn't go in there because she had rheumatic fever when she was a child and it damaged the flapper valve on top of the heart. They had to put that pig in there. You look, all your burn tissue comes from pigs, where they graft. Heart valves, shoes, belts, bacon, pork chops. And a pig is the only animal that you've got three shots a day at the consumer. You've got bacon, sausage, and country ham for breakfast. You've got your sandwich meats for lunch. You've got pork chops and ham roasts and stuff like that for dinner. It is the only animals that you've got three shots a day at the consumer. You think about that. People don't eat steak three meals a day. You don't eat chicken three meals a day. You might if you went to Hardee's and get a chicken biscuit or something like that or a steak biscuit. But really, you're wide open, three meals a day at the consumer.
So do you think that the market is going to be good from now on for hogs.
Yeah. I think it's going to be good. You're going to have to put up with the environmentalists, so called, and the activists and people like that. But as long as you're eating and as long as you keep the pigs tissue for skin grafts and things like that. I don't see any slacking off on it. Unless the whole country goes to vegetarian. That's not going to happen.
So you've got people out here eating meat and you've got international markets now, like you said, China, Russia. Is this the best way to raise them?
Yeah. I think it's the only way to raise them. If you were to raise these same hogs that I've got on this farm, twenty four hundred eighty of them and you had them out on the range, it's going to take you twice as long to get them to market. They're going to be in the ditches and in the streams and everything else. It's just making one mess.
Is that polluting too?
That's more pollution that what you do—there's no pollution at all here. None.
Where's it all go then?
It goes in these spray fields out here.
Go back to the time when the manure drops through the slats. Tell what happens to it?
They've got an automatic flush system on it that flushes it out of the building into a lagoon.
And the lagoon is about how big?
It's predicated on how many animals. You have to build the lagoon to accommodate how many animals are going to be on that facility. I don't know the formula on that. The soil and water people calculate it, and then you do it to their specifications.
To build the lagoon you say you have to put clay in it.
You don't have to put clay in it but preferably you have a clay base
seals it so it won't seep out. They have rubber liners they put in them
but they can't say that when they put them in that the equipment doesn't
puncture it or something like that. But you can tell whether it's
leaking or not. You've got to pump that thing out four or five times a
So we were up there and it was raining. But I didn't smell the lagoon. I smelled the fans, the hog odor coming out of those. The lagoon—.
You won't smell them.
Why not? Why wouldn't you smell it?
It's just the aerobic action of the lagoon is like a great big septic tank without a lid on it. It's decomposing all the time. If you get a real foggy heavy morning, you'll smell it. But most of the time you won't. I'd say ninety-nine percent of the time, you'll never know it's there. That's not like turkeys and chickens. That's some strong litter. I guess, it's the amount of ammonia in it or something. I don't know how.
The ammonia is staying in the hog.
Well, it's going of into the atmosphere, pretty much is the way it works.
Okay, so it's flushed out every so often, every thirty minutes.
Whatever long it takes to fill the tank up.
And then it goes into this holding unit, and then what do you do with it?
We've got an irrigation system. We pump off the top eighteen inches because the solids are going to the bottom. You pump off the top eighteen inches and put it on your fields through a—I use a portable reel, which I can put the reel out and pull my hose out eight hundred and eighty feet. You just calibrated to how much you want to put on the land, which the ideal situation. Well my waste management plan calls for each application to put a half-inch of water to the acre.
Now who gave you that plan?
The soil and water. Then you calculate it when you have your lagoon analysis done. Now like those over there that got flooded, it's like point two three. This one, because it's got a lot of hogs in it and it's never under water, it's like one point seven eight. One point seven eight pounds of nitrogen to a thousand gallons of water. So that's the way I know my gun puts out a hundred fifteen gallons a minute. I keep track of how many minutes it runs over how much acreage and just divide it. I can tell how much I put and probably a pound to the acre. That acre is probably, depending on the type grass, will be able to take any where from eighty to one hundred twenty pounds of nitrogen a year.
What does that grass do then? How do you use it?
I use it for hay. I feel my cows with it and sell it. We do a nitrate check on that before we sell the hay. We plug it; send it off and they come back and tell you if the nitrate level is too high then you don't sell it to people with horses because it'll kill them. If it's two stages higher, you don't feed it to cattle. It'll kill them.
Those are your own cattle.
That's right. They aren't going to kill them.
Has some of that ever—when you've sprayed it on the fields—has that run off? We hear about agricultural run off.
Not if you use your application rate. Half inch of rain on a field isn't
very much. It pretty much absorbs that. You don't pump when it's
raining. You don't pump when you've got a whole lot of water on the
ground. You've got to have adequate grass cover to absorb what you pump.
That's why it changes. In the summertime on Coast Bermuda, you can put
about twice as much as I can put this time of year on winter rye.
You have to have how much property for four hog barns out here in order to have enough land to spray it on?
Twenty-seven acres. About nine acres to the barn for this six twenty size.
Six hundred and twenty hogs finishing barn.
Figures about nine acres.
And then you bale that hay and sell it and that gives you more income.
Yeah. I need twenty-seven acres for these and I've got a hundred and twenty-eight.
That you're spraying on.
So you're doing more acreage than your plan recommends.
Oh yeah and then that cuts down on the nitrate that I'm putting on it because I'm spreading it on more area. Actually I've got more land than I have water that I can pump.
[END OF TAPE 1, SIDE A]
[START OF TAPE 1, SIDE B]
So let's get back. It's already one. Do you think we should?
I think you ought to call.
I know, let's go back to—Rob just got a picture of you with a beaver that you'd trapped. Now how—. Tell about your, well it's really kind of a relationship with the river that you have, this creek. Tell about that. How did you get to know that creek and tell about how you spend a lot of time on it hunting, fishing?
Well, you know with the kids coming up, we hunted and fished back in the creek and the rivers. We did trapping. We trapped rabbits, coons, foxes and stuff like that.
Sell the hides?
No. Basically, we were catching rabbits, to eat them. Coons, we'd sell the hide. Then I got into beaver trapping because they were flooding my land. I was doing it on my own. Friend of mine is head of the wildlife specialists in this area. He's retired game warden. He was down at Steve's Restaurant one morning, and he said he had to hire two trappers. He had a couple of guys who were interested but he said, 'You know by the time I outfit them and with benefits. I've got $30,000 tied up, and I can only guarantee these guys four months work and they've both got good jobs.' I'd retired from the airline at that time. This is only been a year ago. I said, 'Well Herman I'll make you a better deal than that.' He said, 'What?' I said, 'I like to trap beaver.' And I said, 'I've got my own trucks. I've got my own boat. I've got my own traps, and I don't need your benefits.' Well the next morning, he came in with the application.
How many are you supposed to trap for him?
There's no amount. What they're doing is if a land owner calls and tells them they've got a flooding problem, then I'll go out and check it out and estimate the damage on it. I'll catch the beavers for them, and we'll tear the dams out or blow them out. I do, most of the work primarily I do is for the Department of Transportation, where they're causing problems under culverts and bridges. Like the culvert I showed you where they had that thing plugged up. We had all this water. If hadn't have gotten that culvert open before that water, it'd have blew the highway out. That would've been three or four hundred thousand dollars to repair. It's just—one guy over in Atkinson, Combs, his place called Combs Folly. He lost like fifteen million dollars worth of timber to the beavers.
Were they overpopulated or what?
The state introduced them I believe it was in 1939 for farmers to supplement their income in the winter. But beaver pelts at that time were sixty-five to seventy dollars apiece. If a guy go out there and caught a beaver, well he's made a week's wages. But now with the animal rights people, pelts are three and four dollars.
In other words, there aren't many people that don't particularly want to wear fur.
Well you've got—it's not that they won't wear fur. A guy isn't going to buy the equipment to go catch them if he's only going to get three or four dollars for them.
You mentioned the animal rights people. Now why do they get—.
Why do they do, I don't know.
How do they make the price go up?
They just affected the market.
Okay, so people are not wanting to buy fur coats because of the animal rights people.
There's a stigma from it.
And that's dropped the price.
There you go but I can't
Well, let's keep it running and talk about what we said back on the farm. I was just half joking you talked about the environmentalists in sort of a negative sense. But then I said, 'You're kind of an environmentalist.' And you said, 'I am.'
You don't farm and not be a good steward of your land because you're cutting your own throat. That's like I told the fellow from the News and Observer when he was talking about. I said, 'I was the first one to put an incinerator in down here to burn dead animals rather than bury them because I was concerned about ground water.'
This was before the flood?
Oh this was fifteen years ago. And then since now, we have these dumpsters. We can put the dead animals in the dumpsters and the truck comes by every day and picks them up and takes them to a rendering plant and process them and they go into animal feed for protein. Dog food, cat food, stuff like that, which is a lot better way to do it. I was burning them before that just because I did not want to pollute the ground water.
You care about that creek up there, don't you?
I love that creek. My kids swam in there when they were little. I've got
two houses there by Steve's. We've got a pier we'd dive in there and
swim and have a good time. We'd eat the fish out of it. The ditches
around here are the same thing. They feed into that creek. Why would I
want to fool with it? I don't understand it. Most of the
What do the jerks do? I mean, the ones who—. They just don't spray at the right rates or something?
They had some guy in another county, it's been about a year ago. The Department of Water Quality does an annual inspection on every farm, and Soil and Water does an annual inspection on every farm. They don't come—they come once a year unless they get a complaint. Then they'll come every day if they need to. You stand up to a $10,000 a day fine if you're causing a problem. You're pumping too much and causing run off and like that. You're not following your procedure. This guy had a farm, I'm thinking it's over somewhere around Newton, but I'm not sure. DWQ comes by to do his annual inspection. Well he's not there, and he's got people working. The guy comes around and he's checking his lagoon out and he says, 'When was the last time you pumped this lagoon?' He said, 'We ain't never pumped it.' The guy said, 'Well.' Well what had happened, he'd put an overflow pipe in that thing. It got so high and it went out this four-inch pipe and into the creek. They'd have never known that if that guy hadn't have said, 'We never pump that lagoon.' Then they started looking because