Bill opens farms to skeet shooting, aids hog lagoon changes, hides records from public

The measure raised alarms Thursday from neighbors worried noise and bullets will spill onto their land.

The wide-ranging farm bill also provides the next battle in an ongoing fight between hog farmers and environmentalists who disagree, widely, over just what key sections of the legislation would do.

The bill would add hunting, fishing and shooting sports to that definition.

The Senate committee considering the bill Thursday heard from several people worried about the change, including a woman who said she bought her home because of horse riding trails she can't use anymore. She said her horses are afraid of the the gunfire from a neighboring farm that became a commercial shooting range.

The committee did not vote on the bill Thursday, and sponsoring Sen. Brent Jackson, R-Sampson, said the measure will probably morph before it's final. Among other things, Jackson said his intent is to allow skeet and clay shooting but not rifle ranges.

The plan is to vote the bill through committee next Wednesday before sending it to the Senate floor and, eventually, the House and Gov. Roy Cooper.

Attorneys for the Southern Environmental Law Center said the language is broader than that, potentially allowing farms to expand, despite a long-standing state moratorium on new or enlarged hog waste lagoons in North Carolina.

"This (language) must get them something else, or why else would they be doing it," Brooks Rainey Pearson, an SELC attorney, said after the meeting.

Pork Council spokesman Robert Brown said the state Department of Environmental Quality has issued more than 20 permits since 2011 to cover lagoons or install methane digesters to capture biogas, but some have questioned whether existing law allows these permits. He called this section of the farm bill a clarifying effort.

"To be clear: the proposal will not allow farms to expand or increase the number of animals on their farms," Brown said in an email. "It only clarifies that existing farms can make changes to waste management systems as long as permitted capacity does not increase."

There's also language in the Senate's proposed budget to delay a new set of state regulations on hog lagoons. The North Carolina Farm Bureau has appealed those rules, and the Senate budget would delay them until October 2020.

Senate Bill 315 also has a section exempting biogas facilities on farms from the state's odor rules. The SELC said Thursday this language also isn't specific enough to be benign and that it would make it difficult for the state to enforce any odor rules.

Regulators would have to figure out whether odors were coming from exempt or non-exempt operations on the same farm, the SELC said.

The DEQ doesn't have a position on the bill. Its staff has suggested changes, though, that have already been incorporated into the bill.

The bill has a number of other sections, too, including language meant to: