Many prices of a Tar Heel mainstay

Some industries, no matter how much we need or value their products, simply come with ethical strings attached.

Coal mining? It helps keep the lights on, but it can be brutal on streams and mountain tops, and the men who go down into the shafts and pits long have had to struggle for decent treatment.

Weapons manufacture? We need our national defense in a dangerous world, but over the years there's been a fine line between equipping the arsenal of democracy and profiteering from the indiscriminate sale of kill-toys.

North Carolina had to wrestle with such complexities during the decades when tobacco was king. It's been a crop that sustained many a family that otherwise would have been pushed off the land. As to tobacco's baleful effects on its users, there's no mystery.

Whether there was a connection or not, the slow decline of tobacco in Eastern North Carolina has coincided with the rise of hog farming. The hog industry caught on because of innovations in production methods -- it was the equivalent of the assembly line's impact on Detroit.

Hogs now are raised by the hundreds, or thousands, in crowded confinement barns where they can do little but eat and excrete. (And breed, if so assigned.) It is an existence so circumscribed, for animals that by most reckonings are intelligent and aware, that in some respects the thought of their being trucked off to the slaughterhouse and the brutally efficient death that awaits is cause for relief.

You don't have to be a vegetarian to have a few qualms over the way hogs are treated in the course of industrial farming. But then consider as well the conditions with which employees who turn live hogs into attractively packaged products for the meat counter must cope.

North Carolina happens to be the location of the world's largest pork slaughterhouse, in Bladen County to the southeast. It's a long way from Manhattan, but The New York Times has been a leader in describing what goes on in the plant operated by Smithfield Packing, a subsidiary of pork colossus Smithfield Foods.

Difficult, stressful, dangerous -- that's pretty much what you get in a place where 30,000-plus hogs are disassembled every day. And nobody is forced to work there. They come because the wages are decent in a part of the state where jobs are scarce, especially for people without a lot of education. But has the company played straight with them?

Yes, says the company. But as Times columnist Bob Herbert reminded us last week (we published his piece on Friday's op-ed page), the National Labor Relations Board has ripped Smithfield for suppressing attempts to organize a union. When the company appealed an adverse ruling, the U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia noted "intense and widespread coercion prevalent" at the facility.

To hear the company's side, you'd practically think this was SAS Institute in Cary, where employees are regarded as having it made in the software shade, rather than a place of slashing knives and bloody floors. But the news Thursday was that Smithfield will not appeal the circuit court's ruling, which compels it to ensure a fair vote when the next union election is called. That has to rate as progress.

There remains yet another problematic aspect of modern hog farming, North Carolina-style. It's a matter of industrial by-products, so to speak.

Hogs generate massive quantities of waste. Safe disposal is a problem that has vexed the state ever since it became apparent that flushing the stuff into open-air ponds, or lagoons, not only could produce the smell from hell but could be a pollution risk. The nasty liquid could escape if a lagoon dike ruptured, or it could trickle off the fields where it is sprayed if the soil were too wet.

With support from Smithfield Foods, the state undertook a lengthy research project to identify alternative methods of waste disposal that would be safer. Several have been cleared as acceptable, but the hang-up is cost. The industry basically doesn't want to bear additional expense to convert from lagoons.

Advocates of conversion think that if some of the "alternative technologies" could be put in place on actual farms, costs would come down as kinks were worked out and markets were developed.

To that end, they want the General Assembly to finance a cost-sharing program. A bill to kick in $10 million and to figure out which growers would qualify was recently introduced.

Since pork on the table isn't likely to go out of favor any time soon, why not at least make sure that hog-farming is environmentally friendly? It's not as difficult as making sure slaughterhouse workers get a fair shake -- and certainly not as difficult as looking out for the hogs.