Hog farmers in North Carolina took another hit in the courtroom Friday.
The state’s $11 billion industry was saddled with the fifth loss in as many hog nuisance lawsuits in a federal courtroom in Raleigh. This was the second case involving the farm of Joey Carter in the Duplin County community of Beulaville, and jurors awarded 10 plaintiffs $420,000 in damages.
The compensatory amount was $139,000, and the punitive was $281,000.
Their lawyer, Michael Kaeske of Texas, had asked for between $30 million and $50 million for each, or up to half a billion dollars — nearly the combined amount awarded in the first four cases.
In all the cases, Smithfield Foods’ subsidiary Murphy-Brown is named as the defendant. The practical implications, however, are that hogs have to be removed from farms that are deemed a nuisance by the jury.
Like previous cases, an appeal is expected.
The next case involves a farm in Sampson County owned by the Butler family.
In a statement on its website, the N.C. Pork Council said, “It is gratifying that the jury rejected the Texas lawyer’s pleas to award the plaintiffs tens of millions of dollars in this case, especially since the lawyers themselves would have been the beneficiaries of a substantial amount of the verdict. Nonetheless, we continue to believe there are numerous issues in these lawsuits that merit careful review in the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals.”
Smithfield Foods is a subsidiary of the WH Group, which is based in Hong Kong. It’s the world’s largest pork producer.
The case was heard by Judge Earl Britt, the same judge who heard the first three cases when hundreds of millions of dollars were awarded plaintiffs. A fourth trial that ended in December was heard by Judge David Faber; the proceedings as related to evidence for the jury went significantly different, and the jury awarded $102,400 to eight plaintiffs — with four of them getting $100 each.
The total awarded in the five cases is $549,772,400.
Duplin, Sampson and Bladen counties are the leaders in hog production for the state, and rank among the top 15 in the nation. The industry provides 46,000 jobs in North Carolina, which is second only to Iowa in hog production.
Two of the cases decided thus far are linked to Bladen County, one with Kinlaw Farms and the other with a farm in Fender County that is under the Elizabethtown-based HD3 Farms of the Carolinas umbrella.
The first involved Kinlaw Farms, owned by Billy Kinlaw along N.C. 53 where about 15,000 pigs were being raised. The jury on April 26 said 10 neighbors were to be awarded $50.75 million, an amount reduced to $3.25 million by the punitive damages law.
The first case involving the Joey Carter Farm near Beulaville ended June 29, with plaintiffs Elvis and Vonnie Williams awarded $25.13 million — $65,000 each in compensatory damages, $12.5 million each in punitive damages. The punitive cap, $250,000 each, put their combined award from the jury at $630,000.
Pender County farms involving Elizabethtown-based HD3 Farms of the Carolinas’ subsidiary Greenwood Livestock LLC, owned by White Lake businessman Dean Hilton, were involved in the third lawsuit. A judgment of $473.5 million on Aug. 3 included $450 million in punitive damages and $23.5 million in compensatory damages. State law reduced the combined amount to $94 million.
HD3 Farms has operations in Bladen, Sampson, Robeson, Scotland, Columbus, Duplin, Hoke and Pender counties.
The fourth case involved the Sholar Farm in Sampson County. The jury on Dec. 12 awarded eight neighbors between $100 and $75,000 compensation. Faber, citing a lack of evidence to be presented by Kaeske, tossed the punitive damages claims.
The plaintiffs’ awards from the jury, published reports say, were $100 each to four of them, $1,000 to two of them, $25,o00 to one and $75,000 to the eighth.