 In June of that year, the state attorney general accepted an out-of-court settlement that included a $25,000 payment.In 1985, a federal judge in Richmond fined a Smithfield subsidiary about $1.2 million in a Clean Water Act suit filed by the Chesapeake Bay Foundation and the Natural Resources Defense Council.The Smithfield Packing plant in Tar Heel, North Carolina, was the site of a 15-year dispute between the company and the United Food and Commercial Workers Union, which had tried since the early 1990s to organize the plant's roughly 5,000 hourly workers.