The News & Observer
Project: Big Poultry in North Carolina
The Charlotte Observer and The News & Observer, two McClatchy newsrooms, took a deep look at North Carolina’s poultry industry that’s very lightly regulated and growing profoundly.The state has implemented a lot of rules to protect the industry from public scrutiny, including keeping the locations secret. As part of its project, the paper mapped all the poultry operations within the state, the first publicly available resource documenting where operations are.
Raleigh, North Carolina
https://www.newsobserver.com/
Interview with Cathy Clabby, Investigations / High Impact Editor; Gavin Off, data reporter, Charlotte Observer
Time:
10 months
Technology used:
Excel
R
QGIS
Google Street View
Google Earth
How it started:
A decade prior, the paper’s data reporter, Gavin Off, had covered emissions from the hog industry in Missouri for a grad-school class project. Yet, Missouri made that information public. In North Carolina, the information on the poultry industry, which by 2022 was producing 1 billion birds a year, was kept secret. This piqued his interest.
Gavin and his editor were aware that while North Carolina’s industrial-scale hog farms were long controversial due to the waste and nuisances they produce, the state had disclosed in recent years that the poultry industry was producing more manure than the swine industry. Coupled with the interest and experience of Off and the paper’s environmental reporter, the newsrooms decided to explore the secret industry further.
Challenges:
The largest challenge was creating the map of the poultry farms as the state did not release public information on the farms location. So the team pulled together a collection of maps from various sources - such as environmental groups and universities- that gave them different sets of information and compiled it into one map, then fact-checked the findings - resulting in plotting about 8,000 points that required even more fact checking. Coupled with Census data, the team was able to - for the first time - plot out how many residents lived near poultry farms, which had spread to at least 79 of North Carolina’s 100 counties.
Data/Documents:
Environmental Working Group poultry location map
Stanford University poultry location map
U.S. Census Bureau data
North Carolina parcel map
North Carolina animal permit data
North Carolina water quality data
USDA loan data
Impact:
Big Poultry won several national awards including:
-IRE Award for Division 4 newspapers
-M.I.T's The Victor K. McElheny Award
-National Headliner Award for environmental reporting
-National Press Foundation’s Thomas L. Stokes Award for best energy & environment reporting.
-Society of News Design for investigative or public service reporting
The series also lead to some change:
-The series was cited numerous times in a federal complaint to the U.S. EPA. The complaint said North Carolina’s failure to regulate poultry farms has endangered the environment and jeopardized human health, leaving people of color to suffer disproportionate impacts from the waste
-A new bill proposes regulating North Carolina’s industrial-scale poultry farms more aggressively to reduce risks to neighbors and the environment.
-The EPA is studying pollution from industrial-sized animal farms, potentially a first step toward new rules that could impact North Carolina’s booming hog and poultry industries.
Advice:
Data will only get you halfway, knocking on doors and shoe-leather reporting will push you over the finish line and get people to care.
Do not be discouraged - when you hit a wall, be prepared to pivot.
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