These neighbors kept a poultry farm from moving in. In NC, they’re the exception.

Big Poultry: Part 2

Roughly 250,000 North Carolinians now live within a half mile of a poultry farm. If your family has lived on the same land for generations and one day a neighbor starts building big poultry barns, there is practically nothing you can do to protect yourself from the stink, buzzards and other nuisances that may soon float your way.

• With no power to fend off poultry farms, neighbors live with stench and nuisances

• North Carolina keeps poultry farm locations secret. Here’s how we mapped them anyway.

• Only NC says utilities must buy power fueled by poultry waste. Here’s the problem.

• These neighbors kept a poultry farm from moving in. In NC, they’re the exception.

Yank Road’s fight against a poultry farm started with a stray remark at the local Tractor Supply last fall.

A neighbor was standing in line when she heard some shopper mention that somebody had purchased what was known as the “Haywood tract.” That 105-acre parcel of land makes a horseshoe around the historic home where Lynne Holzapfel and her husband have lived for two decades.

The tract was set to become a poultry farm, they quickly learned. And they didn’t want it.

“I knew the smell was bad. I knew I didn’t want to live next to a bunch of chickens,” Holzapfel said.

Holzapfel and a group of neighbors quickly organized, putting aside economic and political differences to try to block the construction of a farm that they believed could impact their health and home values. They assumed local or state officials could help them.

To start, the neighbors wrote letters to the landowners — a brother and sister who are members of the same Haywood family that built the farmhouse Holzapfel lives in now.

The first letter, to the brother, said residents within a one-mile radius were getting their homes assessed with the expectation that a chicken farm would eventually result in lower home values.

Holzapfel wrote a separate letter on Dec. 10, making a personal plea to the sister, whose mother she had known. Holzapfel wrote of planting dozens of perennials in the front yard and maintaining the house’s original heart pine exterior.

“It would not be practical to invest in and maintain historic Haywood homes as their value decreases,” Holzapfel wrote.

Holzapfel also started a newsletter for neighbors, scattered up and down Yank Road. The top of the first newsletter makes the cause clear: “Stop the Chicken Farm.”

Holzapfel and 14 neighbors attended the Dec. 21 meeting of the Montgomery County Board of Commissioners. But they quickly learned that the commissioners wouldn’t be able to help them, with state law stating that “bona fide farming,” including raising tens of thousands of chickens, is exempt from county zoning.

The second newsletter called on neighbors to attend the county’s Jan. 18, 2022, Board of Health meeting. That effort, too, was fruitless.

“You get really depressed because nothing works out and you think these things are so reasonable,” Holzapfel said.

Still, the neighbors scrambled to find anything that could help.

They figured that Mountaire Farms had to be the company that would purchase the chickens raised on the rumored farm because it owned the only nearby poultry processing plant. Then a neighbor who knew someone at the company found out the name of a person who was in charge of sourcing its chickens.

And he happened to be from Montgomery County.

Opponents to the farm repeatedly called him and texted him, leaving voicemails and begging him to prevent the farm from being built. “We bombarded this poor man,” Holzapfel said.

At first contact he was polite but insisted he had no power over the agreement, she said.

Within two days, he’d stopped answering his phone.

Then, with no explanation, a new For Sale sign showed up by the property. Instead of raising chickens, the new buyer plans to log timber there.

That was a relief. But was their effort a road map for others wanting to stop chicken farms from setting up near homes? They can’t be sure. No one ever explained why the farm never materialized.

And new poultry farms continue to pop up elsewhere in Montgomery County.

This story was produced with financial support from 1Earth Fund, in partnership with Journalism Funding Partners, as part of an independent journalism fellowship program. The N&O maintains full editorial control of the work.

Read more stories from the “Big Poultry” project at newsobserver.com, charlotteobserver.com or heraldsun.com.