Elsie Herring said she is thrilled by a federal appeals court ruling last month that rejected most of the arguments presented by Smithfield Foods in a case that has pitted the world’s largest hog producer against its mostly low-income Black neighbors. Herring, 72, said she has been fighting how Smithfield raises its hogs since the 1990s. She said she has watched farmers spray fecal matter onto her mother’s home in Wallace to the extent that “it rained down on us just like it was raining, and the smell was like nothing I have ever experienced.” Over the years, Herring said, she wrote letters to everyone she could think of — state and federal regulators, the governor, the attorney general, state lawmakers, the county health department. Anyone who might be able to stop the spraying, the awful smells, the flies and the potential health hazards coming from the industrial hog farm next door.