Standing Up for North Carolina Agriculture
March 14, 2026
| Friends, First, I want to congratulate the NC Ag Leads team for a great Imagine Ag Day 3.0 on Thursday. Sarah Grace Lee kicked off the day by asking whether we are being proactive or reactive in the agriculture space, and that question is the perfect lead-in to today’s Dispatch. This week’s topic comes directly from our Chairman, Peter Daniel. Peter keeps his ear to the ground on issues affecting agriculture and rural communities, and this is one he is passionate about keeping a close eye on. The Activist Playbook: Mapping Farms North Carolina is one of the nation’s leading producers of pork and poultry, with thousands of farm families helping feed millions of people across the country and around the world. In our state, animal agriculture accounts for more than 70% of farm cash receipts each year. These farmers and the supply chains that support them help sustain rural communities and jobs across North Carolina. If you’re reading this newsletter, I assume you’re a fan of our animal agriculture producers and (hopefully) partake in your fair share of barbeque, chicken, turkey and steak. When you know and love the producers of these products like many of us do, it’s easy to forget that across the country, activist groups continue to push misinformation campaigns designed to restrict or phase out modern agriculture. Peter recently shared a website from an activist group in California that claims “California has one of the largest factory farming industries in the nation, with over 1300 large-scale animal operations that collectively raise hundreds of millions of animals every year. With this map and database, you can see exactly where these facilities are located and learn about their impacts on our state”. The site includes a map and database where users can see exactly where these facilities are located and learn about their “impacts” on the state. The site then lists and maps hundreds of farm locations with details including the farm’s ranking in size, the number of animals on site, the address, estimated greenhouse gas emissions, the amount of money received through USDA programs, and even where the farm’s products are sold. Not every listing includes all of these data points (and who’s to say they’re even correct) but every listing is intrusive. The real kicker is the call to action. The site includes a canned letter urging California’s elected officials to end subsidies for these farms, redirect funds to “plant-based farming” (what?), phase out “factory farms and support a just transition for workers to safer jobs” (again, what?), prosecute suspected animal cruelty, and place a moratorium on new or expanded feeding operations. I’m purposely not listing the name of the website so we don’t give them free publicity, but email me if you want the link to see this all for yourself. I hesitated in writing this Dispatch for fear of giving local activist groups ideas, but I’m grateful to Peter for pushing me to address this tough topic. Why This Matters for North Carolina North Carolina’s animal agriculture community is not immune to these types of targeted attacks. Our friends at the NC Farm Bureau reminded me that activist groups have already started similar efforts here. The Environmental Working Group launched its own farm-mapping project in 2019, using satellite imagery to pinpoint poultry operations and publicly available data from the NC Department of Environmental Quality to map pork operations. So the California example isn’t new and it will not be activists’ last attempt to “end factory farming”. As we see in California, these campaigns are not about transparency. Their stated goal is to eliminate most forms of animal agriculture entirely. Activists often use the term “factory farm” to describe livestock operations. In reality, North Carolina’s animal agriculture producers, whether large or small, are largely family-operated farms that raise healthy animals and help feed our state, the country, and the world. So if the data is already out there for North Carolina, why does this matter now? For one, there is a strong and compelling reason for why certain farm information is protected: biosecurity. We balance transparency with protections for farm families, animal health, and public safety, including for diseases like avian influenza. Limiting the public distribution of precise farm locations helps reduce unnecessary traffic between farms and lowers the risk of disease transmission. When I visited a poultry operation a few weeks ago, I was amazed by the precautions in place to protect the animals. We visited certain parts of the operation in a certain order so we wouldn’t track anything with us on our clothes, shoes or trucks. We didn’t even touch the ground without boot covers, and then we covered those boot covers before interacting with the birds. I saw firsthand the care these producers have for their animals and the lengths they go to keep them safe. Protecting farm locations is not about covering up nefarious actions; it is about protecting the animals being raised there and the food supply they are a part of. Standing Up for North Carolina Agriculture Activists are not just mapping our farm locations. They are taking their grievances to the courts and working aggressively to shape policy. That’s where organizations like the NC Ag Partnership come in. Our mission is to promote and defend a strong economic and regulatory environment for North Carolina’s agriculture and rural communities. Achieving that mission requires supporting elected officials who understand agriculture and why certain protections exist in the first place. Animal agriculture supports tens of thousands of jobs in rural communities and contributes billions of dollars to North Carolina’s economy. Those farmers deserve leaders who understand their work, not activists who are trying to regulate them out of existence. The NC Ag Partnership will continue working alongside farmers, commodity groups, and partners like the North Carolina Farm Bureau to ensure that the voices of North Carolina’s agricultural community are heard, respected, and understood by elected officials and activists alike. |
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| Tori Rumenik Executive Director, North Carolina Ag Partnership |