By Karen Dillon and Matt Campbell
The Kansas City Star, Mo.

On a snowy night in February, about 1,500 people packed a school gymnasium in northern Missouri to sound off about the owner of factory hog farms.

Their message was clear:

Leave Premium Standard Farms alone.

That's a very different message from the one a jury delivered Thursday when it awarded $11 million to some farmers in the same area who complained of odors from a Premium Standard hog operation.

In northern Missouri, you are for Premium Standard or against it.

Some people say they can't smell anything. Others say it's so bad it makes them sick.

The division can be traced back to when Premium Standard came to northern Missouri in the 1990s and opened huge farms that confined thousands of hogs in barns. Now 1.8 million hogs are produced annually.

Those who sold their land to the company or went to work for it loved it. Those whose property was next door generally did not.

"Somehow, that healed over," said Rolf Christen of Green City, a farmer who lives within a few miles of more than half a million hogs a year. "Now that wedge is being driven right back into that old wound."

Many now fear Premium Standard's threat that it might pull up stakes and move to another state. The predominant employer in the area wants the state of Missouri to give it more time to address hog smells.

Premium Standard has had 11 years to do that but says it still hasn't found the solution.

And on the heels of the $11 million verdict, just about everyone is bracing for a showdown this summer with Attorney General Chris Koster.

Will Koster agree to extend the July deadline to allow Premium Standard to find an answer? If he doesn't, will Premium Standard leave?

Growing fears

The fear that jobs will leave and the economies of several counties will collapse has been rattling around for months.

"There's no way we can absorb that kind of loss in northern Missouri," said Rep. Casey Guernsey, a Republican who represents seven counties in the heart of hog-factory farming country.

Last month, Bill Homann, president of Premium Standard, issued a memo to employees explaining that the company still hasn't found the right "Next Generation Technology" odor solution required by the state.

Homann's memo carried a warning: "Of course, it is our desire to keep all our farms open, to retain our valued employees and our jobs, but our ability to do so is threatened due to the situation we find ourselves in."

In addition, in light of Thursday's verdict, Premium Standard wants legislators to change state laws to limit people from suing the company.

In 1999, after several lawsuits were filed because of the odors and the hog waste that polluted streams, rivers and groundwater, Jay Nixon, then attorney general and now governor, sued the company.

Premium Standard threatened to leave the state, but eventually the company agreed to fix the way it applies hog waste as fertilizer to farmland; to fix its leaking cesspits, which store hog waste; and to plug the odors from the barns.

The company said it believed installing biofilters would remove the odors before air was released from the barns.

In 2004, when the problems weren't solved, Nixon extended the consent decree to July 2010.

But it wasn't until last November that the company said it wanted to try a new technology called scrapers.

Now it is up to Koster to determine what to do.

"There are jobs at stake up there," Koster said. "My job is to balance interests of the consent decree and the economic impact on the communities. But as the attorney for the state, we feel the consent decree is a contract that was signed with the state and must be fulfilled."

Koster said the consent decree does not stipulate penalties and left it up to the state to sue the company if it does not fulfill the requirements.

Remedies could include monetary penalties, reducing the number of hogs on certain farms or putting "next-generation technology" on the barns, he said.

The company thinks it has found that technology in the scraper but needs time to work with it, said Jean Paul Bradshaw, a Kansas City attorney for Premium Standard.

In addition, Bradshaw said, Premium Standard does not believe there is a serious problem or even a nuisance.

"All our testing shows there is not an odor from the barns," Bradshaw said. "The company believes we are solving a problem that doesn't exist, but we are working on it."

Koster questioned whether the company was proceeding with "urgency."

Premium Standard has, however, fulfilled certain requirements in the consent decree, Koster said. The company has addressed groundwater runoff, and a number of lagoons have been covered, he said.

"It's important to give credit where credit is due," Koster said.

But those fighting Premium Standard question whether the company is needlessly scaring its employees and others and whether it really has plans to pull up stakes.

"We feel for these people and their jobs," said Terry Spence, whose beef cattle farm is about two miles from a Premium Standard operation near Unionville. But he thinks the corporation has too much invested in Missouri to simply pull up and leave.

Bradshaw said it was no empty threat.

"The hog business isn't good right now," he said. "A lot of states would like to have those jobs."

Fixing an area

When Premium Standard started buying up land in northern Missouri in the early 1990s, the region was racked with a broken economy. Many farmers had filed for bankruptcy in the 1980s, and many had sold their farms.

Premium Standard brought a promise of new money, an infusion of economic stability.

The company's taxes help pay for schools and roads. Its 2,500 employees' wages in at least seven counties helped bring in new businesses and stabilize old ones.

But with Premium Standard threatening to leave, residents are galvanized by fear.

A recently established Facebook page, "Support Premium Standard Farms," already has more than 2,400 fans and notes that the company has been the area's largest single employer for 20 years.

Rumors abounded Friday on the page about what was going to happen because of the $11 million verdict. Some worried that certain farms were about to be shut down. Others worried about livelihood.

One worried that their communities would become ghost towns.

At the February meeting in Princeton, almost all of the 1,500 who attended supported Premium Standard, and many wore company T-shirts as they heard Koster tell them about the situation.

"We're playing with a lot of people's lives," said Lawrence Allen, mayor of tiny Browning, Mo.

Supporters accuse opponents of jeopardizing everyone's livelihood by filing frivolous lawsuits.

"Animals smell," said Guernsey, himself a dairy farmer. "There are times that it smells worse than others, but it isn't as bad as people say it is."

Opponents say they don't want Premium Standard to leave, but to abide by the consent decree it willingly entered.

Spence and others, including hundreds of plaintiffs in lawsuits, think the company must be held accountable for the trespass it has inflicted on its neighboring property owners through its noxious odors.

"You wake up at 3 in the morning and your house stinks," Christen said. "It just hits you. You get sick from the smell. Your 7-year-old says, 'Dad, I don't want to play outside anymore.' "

Finding a fix

The future of the debate depends to a large degree on technology.

Premium Standard suggested a decade ago that the company might fix its problems with equipment called biofilters.

Biofilters have been used in other industries and have been shown to be effective on traditional hog barns with deep pits for waste, experts said. A three-person panel overseeing the company's cleanup has approved them.

With biofilters, air from the pits in barns is pulled into a covered bed of wet wood chips. The wood chips contain microorganisms that remove the odor. The air is then released outdoors.

But about 700 of Premium Standard's more than 900 barns are "tunnel ventilated," which makes it difficult to control the amount of air sent into the wood chip beds, several experts said.

In 10 years, Premium Standard has installed biofilters at only one barn. When problems developed, the company installed a second biofilter using a different design late last year, according to the state. That biofilter is still being tested.

It wasn't until November that Premium Standard presented the scraper technology system to the panel for approval.

The mechanical scrapers are placed in the pit beneath the barn and act like a "squeegee" to push manure and urine into a piping system to be removed.

Bradshaw said the company has been studying many solutions, but Koster questions the company's motives in waiting until the consent decree deadline was near to request using the new technology.

"Obviously that makes it next to impossible to have complied with the consent decree by 2010," Koster said. "It's a problem. It puts the state and the company behind the eight ball."

For the technology to be considered a serious alternative, it must be addressed by the expert panel. The panel will be in Trenton, Mo., on March 16 for a public meeting at North Central Missouri College.

Koster added that if the expert panel approves the technology, he could agree to extend the consent decree, but it would include an aggressive implementation schedule and penalties for failing to meet the schedule.