— Smithfield Foods plans to install lagoon covers at most of its hog farms in North Carolina, a potentially major change for an industry under fire over open pits of waste and water.

The company also said Thursday that it plans to reduce truck traffic around its farms, widen vegetation buffers and install new "low trajectory" tools to spread hog waste on nearby fields, replacing the large sprinklers that neighbors complain spray feces into the wind.

All have been issues in the ongoing nuisance lawsuits that have already yielded half a billion dollars in verdicts against the company and pushed it into mediation talks with farm neighbors. Smithfield's promises could bring a sea change in the way hog waste is handled in North Carolina, home to some 9 million pigs.

Company President and Chief Executive Kenneth M. Sullivan called the plan "audacious" in a news release that went out shortly after 5 p.m. Thursday. The Environmental Defense Fund praised the announcement as a commitment to reducing greenhouse gas emissions and to protecting lagoons from overruns caused by heavy rains.

Others, including attorneys for neighbors suing the company, were more cautious. They said the announcement certainly appeared to be a major one but that they were digesting the basics and seeking more detail. The company said it would install "manure to energy" projects to cover lagoons and capture methane at 90 percent of its "finishing spaces" in North Carolina and Utah, and at nearly all of them in Missouri, over the next 10 years.

The covers have been a key ask for hog industry critics, but it's unclear just how many of eastern North Carolina's thousands of lagoons will be covered.

Update: The Southern Environmental Law Center was unimpressed by the announcement, saying Friday that the plan doesn't solve "pollution problems from its massive hog waste lagoons" that effect poor, rural communities across eastern North Carolina and triggered the nuisance lawsuits

“The company could have invested in cleaner, more responsible technology that protects families, communities, and our air and waterways -- especially in the face of more intense storms," SELC attorney Blakely Hildebrand said in a release, without immediately identifying that technology. "Instead, Smithfield chose to further entrench the lagoon-and-sprayfield system, and its injustices."

Keira Lombardo, Smithfield's senior vice president of corporate affairs, said the majority of company-owned and contract farms are finishing spaces, as opposed to farms raising younger hogs.

"The 90 percent figure does not translate directly to lagoons or farms," Lombardo said in a text message. "It is accurate to say that on the majority of Smithfield’s company-owned and contract farms in North Carolina we will convert existing anaerobic treatment lagoons to covered digesters, or construct new covered digesters to capture biogas over the next 10 years."

The plan represents a massive expansion of the Optima KV concept, a pilot project capturing gas from five of Smithfield's contract farms. Pig waste emits methane, or natural gas, as it decomposes.

Environmental Defense Fund President Fred Krupp said Thursday that the commitment to turn that methane into renewable biogas will reduce greenhouse gas emissions and create economic opportunities in rural areas. Covering lagoons will protect them from overflowing during floods, he said.

It all "marks a welcome turning point for the industry,” Krupp said in the release.

Some of the changes Smithfield promised are the sort the company resisted at trial, where it argued that various changes wouldn’t be effective or would drive up costs. After losing three cases in a row against neighbors upset over the smell, the company went into mediation with attorneys for the other side.

The fourth case – of the 26 federal lawsuits filed – is still slated for trial next month. Verdicts in the three completed cases totaled nearly $550 million, including a single verdict of $473.5 million.

They were all reduced by the state's damages cap, though, to a total of $97.6 million.

Smithfield's announcement included supportive comments from a trio of top North Carolina Republicans: U.S. Sen. Thom Tillis, state House Speaker Tim Moore and Lt. Gov. Dan Forest.

"We are fortunate to have a responsible company like Smithfield that leverages evolving technologies to ensure the sustainability of its operations while providing more than 10,000 jobs to North Carolinians, further strengthening our economy," Forest said in the release.

The GOP majority in the General Assembly has passed legislation for two years running meant to make lawsuits against hog farms harder for plaintiffs to win, and industry supporters have said they feared losing Smithfield over the lawsuits. The world's largest pork producer has been cycling its hogs off farms in losing lawsuits, leaving the contract growers with an uncertain economic future.

Michelle Nowlin, the supervising attorney at the Duke Environmental Law and Policy Clinic, said Thursday evening that Smithfield's announcement seemed an important one. But she had questions about the details, including the logistics and effectiveness of methane collection, the way the company will split costs with contract growers and the ownership of potentially valuable renewable energy credits the program is likely to produce.