The state's largest newspaper, the Clarion-Ledger, reports that factory hog farms were the most volatile issue facing the legislature in 1998. More than once Kennard found himself on a chartered bus with farmers, environmentalists from local Sierra Club groups, and others, headed for Jackson to lobby politicians. The Reverend Joe Bowen, whose own Oakland Missionary Baptist Church and surrounding community of Crawford is ringed by factory hog farms, was on several of these trips. An analysis of Mississippi CAFOs reveals that most are clustered around poor rural African-American communities like Crawford. "'Southern justice' is still a problem," says Rev. Bowen at his church one Sunday morning, after services in which he prayed for activists involved in the CAFO campaign. "Sometimes I feel like backing out of this fight," he adds. "I've had threats made against me; my wife's been threatened. But somebody has to stand up for our community."

The bus trips also included Jim Norman from Chickasaw County-which has more factory farms than any other county in the state. "It had come out in the farm papers about the lawsuits against these facilities," says Norman, who lives a half-mile from a Prestage Farms CAFO and who rotates soybeans and cotton on his 700 acres of farmland. "I got on the phone and tried several different names that was in the stories. I wound up talking to Boswell Kennard, and we just worked from there." It was a meeting of minds fueled by stink and anger.

When the stench comes up, these rural Mississippi residents say, they can't barbecue, sit on the porch swing, cut the grass, garden, or plow their fields. "I'm a fourth-generation farmer," says Jim Norman. "My son could be the fifth, but the way it is now he's not going to be able to do it. I've been on a tractor trying to farm and I'd get to gagging and carrying on. It ain't no joke out there." Norman is a signatory to the class-action lawsuit and continues to work with a group called Communities for Responsible Pork Production to stem the tide of CAFOs in Mississippi.

Michael Berk was also on the bus rides to Jackson. A professor of architecture at Mississippi State in Starkville, Berk is a 20-year member of the Sierra Club and a neighbor of the Kennards. The two families live in the tiny community of Oktoc-which can't really be called a town because families are so spread out. There is a gathering place, however. Since 1927, without missing a day, residents have come together the second Friday of each month at the Oktoc Community Club for a potluck dinner, community business, and gossip. At one Friday night barbecue several years back, Everett Kennard met the Berks-the first newcomers to Oktoc in 25 years. Michael Berk had been hired by the university and bought a house three miles from the Kennards. With his long ponytail and wire-rimmed glasses, Berk stood out. "He moved into an ultraconservative community," says Kennard, with a kind of half-smile. "I can just imagine what all those little old ladies were thinking when they saw him: 'Oh my, that must be the hippie who moved into the Gaston place.' "

At the barbecue, Berk remembers being more worried about Everett Kennard than he was about the biddies. "This good old boy with a crew cut comes up to me and starts counseling me on how to cut my field," says Berk, who admits that he'd had no idea how to tame the wild grasses that had taken over the acreage around his house. "We talked for a while, and then two weeks later I'm sitting on our front porch with my wife and two sons and I hear this tractor beside our house. Everett's out there cutting our field! He hadn't asked to; he was just doing what he knew how to do for his neighbor."

Early on in the hog fight, the Kennards got a rude awakening about who their real friends were. "This issue has done something I said could never be done," says Everett Kennard, "and that's split this community. But factory farms have a reputation for doing that wherever they go," he adds. "I almost think they have to tear communities up to get a foothold." The Berks, for instance, were worried about the environmental impact of factory farming and were on board from the start, while the Kennards' oldest family friends, the Oakleys, sided with Bill Cook. "Warren Oakley, who's a director of the Farm Bureau, got up at a club meeting and said a man could do what he wanted to do with his own property," says Kennard's 80-year-old mother, Margaret, clearly upset. They've known the Oakleys for more than 50 years; Margaret was a 4H leader with Oakley's wife. In the way long-married couples tend to do, Boswell finishes Margaret's thought as we sit together around their kitchen table: "I think he can, too, so long as he doesn't affect his neighbors." The elder Kennards produce three years' worth of calendars on which they've kept track of the stench. There are notes approximately every third day: "odor extreme here in the P.M."; "odor strong at Everett's house"; "Henry Sue [Everett's wife] nearly threw up"; "Margaret's garden club here and odor is stout."

CAFOs don't just produce odors and contaminants that make neighbors prisoners in their own homes; they also effectively expropriate adjoining land. According to Mississippi law, these facilities have to set the cesspools and barns back at least 300 feet from the property line. "They also have to be at least 1,000 feet from an occupied residence," says Michael Berk. "Think about it: They can use 700 feet of their neighbor's property as a buffer. If you were to go to a bank and try to get a mortgage for new construction in that buffer you wouldn't get it. They've essentially taken that property."

Nationwide since 1985, the number of commercially viable hog farms has dropped from 600,000 to 157,000, though the total number of hogs raised has risen. In 1998, more pork was produced (nearly 19 billion pounds) and more hogs slaughtered (more than 99 million) than ever before. Prior to 1998, Mississippi had mostly small hog operations with several hundred head per farm. Today, hog factories in the state supply the bulk of its pork. Prestage's Mississippi CAFOs produce approximately 300,000 hogs per year, and the corporation has plans to add 33 more facilities if the moratorium is lifted and the regulatory climate there remains favorable. Call it the Wal-Martization of farming. Just as Wal-Mart changed the face of Main Street, mostly by underpricing local merchants and forcing them out of business, so too have huge consolidated farming enterprises wiped out the family farmer and many well-established rural ways of life.

"All this high-tech farming is going to kill us," says Jim Norman. "Look at nature; it had all this figured out. You take a hog and you turn him out, let him run in the pasture, and he makes a little bitty pie. But when you get too many in one place, you are going to get a big old pile of manure that smells for miles and miles. We got to back up and go the old way."

Everett Kennard agrees, but adds that a lot of people need to take responsibility for doing in the family farm, including the government, farmers too willing to borrow money, and the Farm Bureau. "They all allowed corporations to come into agriculture. These corporations just look at the bottom line; they could care less about the environment. The first time they see red ink, they're gone; it doesn't matter what happens to the community."

As we sit outside in the late-morning shade, looking across rich farmland and forest, Kennard notes that the wind has changed four times in the last hour. Blessedly, it hasn't blown in from Bill Cook Swine. "As a farmer I have always looked at the weather," says Kennard. "But I was looking to see whether we'd have rain or sunshine. I never cared which way the wind blew. Now that's all I care about."