PIG STYMIED.

• Author: Gray, Tim
• Position: Brief Article

Wendell Murphy revolutionized Tar Heel agriculture by turning hog farming into big business -- one too big for its own good.

WE LOVE YOU BOSS HOG!!!!

The banner, 3-inch-high letters on white paper surrounded by scrawled signatures in blue, black and red ink, hangs on the door to the kitchenette off Wendell Murphy's office. It's a homemade birthday card from employees of Rose Hill-based Murphy Family Farms Inc. It's also an arch acknowledgement of just how badly battered North Carolina's prince of pork feels these days. After all, "Boss Hog" is the nickname given Murphy by his nemesis, The News & Observer, and in the newspaper's parlance, it's no term of endearment.

From afar, Murphy wouldn't seem the sort who'd need to be bucked up by anybody. Forbes magazine put him on its cover in 1997, saying he was worth an estimated $750 million. In January, he sold his company, the nation's biggest producer of hogs, to Virginia-based Smithfield Foods Inc. for about 10 million shares of stock, worth $211.9 million on Jan. 7, plus $170 million in assumed debt. That means he has lots of liquid assets and, for the first time since starting Murphy Family Farms in 1962, the time to do whatever he wants with them. He drives a shiny, white Cadillac Fleetwood, wears a gold Rolex watch and lives in a big house just a few miles outside the hometown where he's spent his entire life except for the four years he attended N.C. State.

At 61, Wendell Murphy should be happy, but he's worried and tense. Worried about his heart and his blood pressure. The last five years haven't helped those at all. Just check out the book sitting on the corner of his desk: Is It Worth Dying For? How to Make Stress Work for You -- Not Against You. Or that box of melatonin, a sleep aid, sitting atop the cabinet by the office door. The worries have him jogging a mile and a third every day on the dirt roads on his farm, then doing two more on his treadmill, dreading every footfall. "I don't care what people say. I really don't believe anybody enjoys running."

He's concerned, too, about his legacy. He wants to be remembered not as Boss Hog, but as the small-town boy who never forgot where he came from, brought a new livelihood to the tobacco-dependent counties of Eastern North Carolina and contributed millions to his alma mater and his community. He wants to be seen as a pioneer, not a villain, for creating the system of contract farming and mass production that has made North Carolina the nation's second-biggest hog producer, with 10.5 million swine in 1999, and his company the biggest producer. Revenues reached $602 million in 1997 before dropping to $492 million in 1998. Through three quarters of 1999, the company was 17% off its 1998 pace.

What he doesn't want to be is what the critics say he is --the man responsible for the proliferation of stinking, sometimes leaking hog-waste lagoons, who used his five terms as a state legislator to secure laws that benefited his business. "I'd be less than truthful if I didn't say the last five years have been hard," he says. "To think that every time you meet someone new, the first thought in their mind is, 'There's that polluter,' it is difficult." But press him on whether his lagoons actually do pollute, and he starts to bob and weave. The industry has contributed to water pollution, he concedes, but it isn't the sole cause. "We're not perfect. Name me one industry that is. But there's not a single study convicting us of polluting." What he means is, no study unequivocally ties pollutants in the state's rivers to hog farms. The pollutants, namely nitrogen, could have come from municipal sewage systems, other livestock operations or fertilizers applied to crops. This is the same sort of logic the cigaret te industry used for decades. The trouble is, it doesn't take a doctorate or a bunch of studies to figure out that waste lagoons sometimes burst, and that when they do, disgusting stuff comes coursing out.

Wendell Murphy has never been as bad as his critics have made him out to be, nor as good as his champions have pretended. He's just a man who was better at turning pigs into profits than anybody else, so good that it got him in deep doo-doo. In 1995, he caught the attention of the N&O, which has made Murphy-bashing one of its principal occupations the last five years. When the paper won a Pulitzer Prize in 1996 for a series on the hog industry, management relaxed the ban on booze on its premises to allow celebratory champagne to flow in the downtown Raleigh newsroom. Once the glasses were full, a top N&O manager lifted his, looked at the assembled staff and said, "To Wendell Murphy."

Murphy's proficiency with pigs made him cocky. In the mid-'90s, with a moratorium on new hog farms looming, he ramped up production, thinking he had outsmarted his competitors. But other producers had the same idea, and by then, they had adopted his methods and become nearly as efficient producing hogs. Together, they flooded the market. From there, it was simple economics: Supply went way up; prices, way down...