CAFO Country: Touring NC's hog and poultry operations from the air

The best way to see the scale of industrial animal farming in North Carolina is from the air.

Pilot Rolf Wallin revs up his single-engine Cessna Skylane on the runway at Duplin County Airport, about 80 miles southeast of Raleigh.

Wallin volunteers with the nonprofit Southwings to fly people over sites of environmental concern. With us is Kemp Burdette, the Cape Fear Riverkeeper, who keeps an eye on pollution threats along the river and its tributaries, including CAFOs.

"So the route is just kind of a tour of Duplin and Sampson, the two most heavily concentrated counties in North Carolina for both swine and poultry CAFOs," Burdette says. "And the Cape Fear basin, in general, is the most heavily concentrated watershed in the world for swine CAFOs. And poultry is expanding rapidly, frequently right next door to swine."

Rows of long, metal-roofed barns are visible on all sides of the plane.

"Everywhere you look, you see either a swine or a poultry CAFO. This one's discharging into the lagoon right now. You can see it coming out of that blue pipe," Burdette says, pointing out the window.

Duplin and Sampson counties not only lead North Carolina, but they also have more hog farms than any other counties in the nation. North Carolina is behind only Iowa and Minnesota, with 8.2 million pigs on nearly 2,500 farms that are grown and processed into meat here. The rest – around 800,000 more – are sent to other states for finishing and processing. It's big business, says Roy Lee Lindsey, CEO of the North Carolina Pork Council.

"Today we're third (nationally) in terms of producing market hogs," Lindsey says. "We're still the second largest in the country in terms of our sow herd, or our breeding herd. And the number of baby pigs that are born in any given state, we rank second only, behind Iowa, in that regard. And roughly 13% of all the pigs in the United States are born right here in North Carolina."

Today's big farms, with tens of thousands of hogs each, are a big change from a few decades ago, when most farms had fewer than a couple thousand animals.