Excavation and land clearing across Sampson County, NC.

Sampson County is mostly farmland. The terrain is gently rolling inner coastal plain, the soils are a mix of sandy loams and clay-rich bottoms, and the working landscape across most of the county is row crops, timber tracts, and animal operations. Clinton is the only real population center, with the rest of the county spread across small communities and individual farms. The kind of excavation work that comes up here reflects the agricultural character: clearing field edges that have grown up in volunteer pine, regrading farm roads that wash out every few years, building or maintaining farm ponds, and ditching for field drainage.

Sampson is one of the highest-density hog-producing counties in the United States, and the operational infrastructure that supports hog farming is everywhere in the county. Concentrated animal feeding operations, lagoon systems for waste handling, feed and fuel access roads, and the truck routes that connect the operations to the processing plants form a layer of agricultural development that you do not find in most counties. We do not handle lagoon work directly — that is a regulated specialty that requires specific permits and oversight — but we do the surrounding work that hog operations generate: pad construction for new equipment buildings, access road repair, fence-line clearing, and earth moving for retention and runoff control.

Most of Sampson County drains into the Coharie River and its tributaries, which eventually feed into the Black River and then the Cape Fear. The drainage network across the agricultural land is a mix of natural creeks and decades-old ditched systems. A lot of the ditching work we get called for in Sampson is rebuilding ditches that were dug forty or fifty years ago and have silted in to the point that they no longer carry water away from the fields they were meant to drain. That is unglamorous work but it is what farmland needs and it is one of the services we offer.

Working in a hog-dense county means knowing where the boundaries are. Active CAFO premises require coordination with the operation before any outside crew can access them — that is the operator’s call to make, not ours, and we treat it as such. The work we do in Sampson stays outside those biosecurity-controlled zones: access road repair, pad construction for new equipment buildings, fence-line clearing, retention pond grading, and the surrounding earth-moving that keeps a working farm running. We treat the operations as the working businesses they are.