Rural residents in east North Carolina are being shit on. That’s the crude but literal way to put the very grave injustice captured in The Smell of Money, Shawn Bannon’s infuriating documentary about the harm committed by factory farming against humans, animals and the environment.
The film captures the toxic hog waste produced in North Carolina’s concentrated animal feeding operations, which is then sprayed across fields near people’s homes, producing a foul and debilitating stench that has severe health impacts. Longtime residents like Elsie Herring and Rene Miller (who spoke out in a Guardian investigation on the same issue) are among the few who resiliently stand their ground and continue to fight back. They do so despite police harassment, intimidation and other insidious attempts to silence them in a state where many citizens are employed by the same industry.
