Matthew. Michael. Florence. Now Helene.

With each hurricane that has hit North Carolina and neighboring states in the last decade, huge livestock farms have been damaged or destroyed, killing millions of animals, sending incalculable amounts of effluent into waterways and polluting the environment where people live and work. 

Hurricane Helene, which blasted the region in late September, is just the latest event to underscore the perils of raising tens of thousands of animals in industrial-scale facilities as weather patterns grow more extreme. Helene came two weeks after the remnants of Hurricane Debby dumped massive rains across the Southeast.

“We’re seeing way more rain in shorter amounts of time, and there’s simply not enough time for the ground or waterways to absorb this much water,” said Sarah Graddy, a spokesperson for the Environmental Working Group (EWG), which has long tracked the climate and environmental impacts of large-scale farms. “It’s inundating operations that are rife with contaminants and effluents that are toxic to people, and the waste is getting into our streams, rivers and private wells.”

But the American livestock industry as a whole continues to grow, generating more manure and more greenhouse gas emissions—and, at the same time, increasingly falling victim to disasters stoked by climate change. 

“Matthew, Florence, Helene—these are all climate change-fueled events,” said Krissy Kasserman, who organizes factory farm advocacy at Food & Water Watch. “And all of them are resulting in factory farms being destroyed.”

In Georgia, the country’s biggest chicken-producing state, 107 poultry facilities, as well as 15 dairy farms, were damaged or destroyed by Helene, which raked the state with high winds and heavy rains. The final tally of dead animals will likely end up in the millions: The six states most affected by the storm—Georgia, North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee, Florida and Virginia— produce roughly half of the country’s 9 billion chickens every year.

In South Carolina, at least two big poultry farms had to stop operations because of power outages. 

North Carolina is the country’s third-largest hog producer. While most of the state’s hog facilities are clustered in the eastern part of the state—where repeated hurricanes have washed out farms and killed millions of animals—the central and western parts, where Helene’s damage was most severe, is home to thousands of dairy cattle and poultry. As of Wednesday, the state reported the storm destroyed one dairy farm, including the farm’s manure storage facility, killing 77 cows. Another dairy farm lost 22 cows.

It’s too soon to say how many farms were destroyed or how many animals have died overall, but in North Carolina that figure may never be clear.

Poultry farms in the state are exempt from public records disclosure rules, meaning state regulators don’t reveal their locations. So the public has no idea where these facilities are or how many animals are being raised in them.

“There’s so little oversight of this industry,” Graddy said. “Residents of North Carolina don’t know what’s happening in their communities, on a daily basis or when they’re flooded.”

Last month, EWG released a study based on an analysis of aerial images of North Carolina poultry barns, conducted with machine learning techniques. The group found the state was home to nearly 357 million chickens and turkeys, being raised in about 16,400 barns.

That represents a roughly 43 percent increase over 2007, when there were 250 million birds, based on the group’s estimate that year. 

The study notes this is just a snapshot of a point in time. Many facilities raise multiple flocks a year. The U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) says the state raises 940 million birds annually.

The rising animal numbers in North Carolina mirror an uptick across the country as industrial-scale facilities grow and confine more animals.  

Earlier this year, the USDA released its Census of Agriculture, which is published every five years and considered the most comprehensive picture of American farming. It showed the overall number of farms shrinking, but larger, factory farms—the kind that generate significant greenhouse gas emissions—growing.

Agriculture is a major source of climate-harming emissions, responsible for about 11 percent of what the U.S. produces. Much of that comes from the methane in cow burps, which over the past three decades have overtaken natural gas systems as the country’s biggest source of methane, an especially potent greenhouse gas. 

But the fastest growing source of methane has been manure management systems. Cows produce the most, followed by swine with poultry in a distant third.  

Last month, Food & Water Watch released an analysis of the recent census, finding that large farms are raising more animals—and generating more manure—than ever before.  

In the past five years, the group found, the number of animals raised in concentrated animal feeding operations (CAFOs) rose by 97 million, or about 6 percent. Overall, confined animals in the U.S. produce 941 billion pounds of manure, twice the weight of human sewage produced by the entire population of the country.  

With stronger and more frequent rainfall, environmental groups and researchers say, all that manure—containing pollutants and prompting spikes in pathogens—threatens to overwhelm waterways, landscapes and the communities where farms are located. As with energy and chemical plants, these giant farms are often located in poor, minority communities, where people have fewer resources to cope with the outcomes.

In the wake of Hurricane Florence in 2018, Kasserman noted that private wells in North Carolina became polluted with fecal contaminants from factory farms and experienced spikes in E. coli.  

Like many states, North Carolina does not regulate water quality in private wells. A 2008 state law requires local health departments to inspect and test new wells drilled after 2008 within 30 days of their construction. But most private well owners are responsible for remediating any contamination.

“Owners of private drinking water wells are entirely on the hook for the costs associated with treating drinking water,” Kasserman said. “And these are usually people who don’t have a couple hundred or a couple thousand dollars in their pockets.”

Kasserman noted a lack of state oversight that allows CAFOs to be built in flood and hurricane-prone areas, giving communities little to no control over where or how they’re built. She also blamed the “stranglehold” that major agriculture players, including Smithfield and Tyson, have over state legislatures. 

“Factory farms are going to continue being constructed in high-risk areas,” Kasserman said. “For decades factory farms have had a free pass to pollute our waters and our climate. Helene is just the latest storm to bring that into sharp relief.”

Lisa Sorg contributed to this report.