The Swift Pork Plant in Louisville's Butchertown neighborhood.(Satchel Walton / LPM)Reminders of Butchertown’s meat processing history dot the neighborhood just east of downtown Louisville. A crossfit gym has an image of two crossed meat cleavers on its door. The neighborhood association’s log o features a pig inside a lightbulb. Signs on electrical poles around Washington Street brand the area as “Butcher Block.”The smell that often emanates from the lone slaughterhouse that remains, however, is not so beloved.Louisville’s Air Pollution Control District recorded 530 complaints related to the Swift Pork Company slaughterhouse and packing plant in the first half of 2026, more than in all of 2025. APCD compliance officers categorized odors in the area as “strong” on 23 different days from January through June – nearly four times as many compared with all of last year. While odors were concentrated near the plant, APCD also recorded them this year nearly three miles away in the Belknap and Saint Joseph neighborhoods.APCD regulation 1.13 prohibits creating significant nuisance or annoying odors. But despite the uptick in complaints and the prevalence of strong odors, city officials have not notified the plant of any violations of air quality rules since 2021. That year, APCD officials cited Swift for eight strong odors and “over 100” resident complaints from September 2020 to April 2021.Asked why the roughly two dozen strong odors documented this year did not warrant a penalty, a spokesperson for APCD did not answer directly. He explained the agency’s processes, saying they could use compliance work to determine if a plant’s machinery is operated properly.“APCD uses community observations and our community compliance team’s observations to look for trends and patterns of strong, lingering, odors in the same general area for determining if compliance with the criteria in Regulation 1.13 are met,” Sam Dehring wrote, in part, in an email. “Odors are not uncommon in urban environments but tend to wax and wane.”Swift built its Butchertown plant in the 1960s. It processes about 10,000 pigs per day and is now the last such business in the neighborhood – and among the last in any American urban core.Two main sources of odors are live pigs and rendering, where otherwise unused parts are ground, heated and pressed until they can be used in products like fertilizer, cat food, and cosmetics. The slaughterhouse’s stench is a longstanding problem for Butchertown residents and businesses.In 2023, Swift Pork Company and APCD settled a string of alleged odor-related violations. As part of the mediation agreement, APCD changed regulation 1.13, which now requires emissions to cause “substantial” nuisance to a “considerable number” of people to qualify as violations, though it does not define either of those terms.Dehring confirmed that it “appears the facility’s odors have become more frequent” based on the agency’s observations, and wrote that APCD has been working to figure out why.JBS USA, which has operated Swift Pork Company since 2007, did not respond to a request for comment. The plant’s human resources director told WHAS11 in 2024 that it employs 1,200 people, with about 40% having Cuban roots and many others are immigrants from Africa.Two weeks ago, a judge approved a class action settlement in which Swift agreed to pay about $500 to each claimant who lived near the plant and replace a machine for breaking down hog hair which was installed in 1991.According to the preliminary settlement from December, the previous hydrolyzer was prone to failure, so excess hog hair would sometimes be thrown in the dumpsters. APCD said the new hydrolyzer was installed as of January.Rachel Edenfield is the president of the Butchertown Neighborhood Association. In text messages, she wrote that it is terrible to live and work with the area’s air, and was pessimistic about the chance of solving the issue.“There needs to either be an investment in relocation or an investment in technology that entirely eliminates the air and water contamination,” Edenfield wrote. “Of all the other economic development priorities we have as a stale city that fails to grow and supply other jobs, I imagine this isn’t an issue that’s going to be solved in the next couple of years.”Asked whether she thought Swift should face more penalties, she responded with a question: “To what end?”‘Hot and stinky’Nuisance odors are not always a high priority for regulators because they’re not known to directly harm human health like regulated air pollutants, said Ted Smith, a professor of environmental medicine at the University of Louisville.“APCD’s primary mission is around air pollutants, and their permitting, and their control and their surveillance,” Smith said. “And so the nuisance work, I think, is – I don't want to call it a second-class kind of a thing – but it’s really not in their primary mission under the Clean Air Act.”In 2018, Smith helped introduce the Smell My City app to Louisville, which residents can use to record odors and report them to Metro government. They can also call APCD, use the agency’s online form, or report an odor through Metro311.Jonathan Toogood has worked at Copper Kings, a craft distillery a block from the Swift plant, for five and a half years. He said he usually smells the odor from when he arrives around 7am until noon, and then again after 2:30pm.“S-h-i-t, that’s what it smells like,” Toogood said. “It’s bad out here, especially in the summertime. It gets real hot and stinky.”Toogood said customers sometimes complain about the smell on the rooftop bar.Linette Huelsman lives in the Irish Hill neighborhood, which is just across Beargrass Creek from the plant. She wrote in an email that while it previously smelled bad three or four times a year, bad odors are now an almost weekly occurrence, and sometimes linger for days.“The stench is so strong in Irish Hill that I can’t enjoy this nice evening on the back porch outside because of the smell,” Huelsman wrote. “I have lived in this area for over 20 years it has never been this bad frequent.”However bad the smells are in surrounding neighborhoods, they are much worse for the roughly 1,200 workers inside the plant.David Olmos Herrera worked for eight years in rendering, where he said the smell was indescribable. He said that even when it was hard to breathe, they could not open windows, since that could prompt odor complaints and fines.As a supervisor in rendering until about three years ago, he said he made $30 an hour. Now, working in security at the airport, he makes an average of $21 per hour, but said he is glad to take that pay cut now that his four children are grown up and can support themselves.Olmos Herrera has documented on his Instagram huge messes he says happened when pieces of equipment broke and pig parts started to pile up.“They never stop the killing, and they always said, ‘Oh, take a video or take a picture, send it to me, and we’re gonna talk to the plant engineer to help you out,’” Olmos Herrera said. “That never happened. We spent days broken, and they keep killing and killing.”Ezra Butcher studies the economics of the livestock industry at the University of Southern Indiana. He said that the process must work continuously and quickly once the pigs arrive, even if machine or weather conditions could lead to difficult work or poor odors. Otherwise, pigs could be stuck in inhumane conditions or food safety could be jeopardized.“We’re talking a couple days to get the live animal to the plant, and then we’re talking a matter of hours at that point for slaughter, processing, packaging, etc.,” Butcher said. “So if you have a day where you have really bad wind and really high heat and all of these factors, you're kind of stuck with the conditions.”A history of animal processingButchertown quickly became a center for livestock and associated industries as German immigrants started moving there in the 1820s and 30s.For much of the 19th and 20th centuries, animal processing was a centralized urban industry. Before the Civil War, Cincinnati led the country in pork production. Then, with railways and refrigeration, the massive Union Stockyards in Chicago became the “hog-butcher for the world,” as Carl Sandburg’s 1914 poem goes. But now, the typical American pig dies on the outskirts of a small town in Iowa or a neighboring state.Per a 2017 industry analysis, Los Angeles and Louisville were the largest cities with major pig slaughterhouses – Des Moines, Iowa and Sioux Falls, South Dakota were the next largest. Smithfield Foods closed the Los Angeles plant in 2023 and relocated operations to the Midwest, affecting nearly 2,500 workers.Butchertown has changed, too, with redevelopment of NuLu on one side and Waterfront Park on the other. Now, the slaughterhouse and packing plant sits blocks from professional soccer teams, independent shops, bars and breweries. ...read more read less