Chris Hollis is among the truck drivers involved in organizing a union at Valley Proteins' animal waste rendering operations in North Carolina. (Photo courtesy of Chris Hollis.) Herman Purvis starts work each day a little before 8 in the morning, driving the first of what will likely total several hundred miles over the course of his 11-hour shift from his home in Windsor, a small town in northeastern North Carolina's Bertie County, to the Valley Proteins plant in the nearby town of Lewiston Woodville. There, he hops into the cab of a company truck, hitches up a trailer, and sets off. Sometimes he drives to another North Carolina city like Kinston or Fayetteville. Other times he'll cross the state line to Linville, Virginia, home to another of the roughly 30 plants Valley Proteins has dotted mostly around the Southeast. Purvis's loads vary, too: Some days his trailer is filled with feathers or bones, and on others it's topped with a tanker full of animal blood. On occasion it's a ground up, sludgy combination.