'It’s wrong to stink up other people’s lives': fighting the manure lagoons of North Carolina

Pigs outstripped people in Duplin county long ago - but now the residents are fighting back

Two poles that once hoisted a clothes line stand rusting and unused in Elsie Herring's back garden in eastern North Carolina. Herring lives next door to a field where pig manure is sprayed and the drifting faecal matter wasn't kind to her drying clothes.

"The clothes would stink so you'd wash them again and again until they fell apart," said Herring, whose family has lived in Wallace since her grandfather, a freed slave, purchased land in the 1890s.