Lesser Beasts: A Snout-to-Tail History of the Humble Pig (18 page)

Slatted floors made the farmer’s life easier, eliminating what one industry publication called the “tedious and disagreeable” task of scraping manure from stalls. Once a solid that needed to be shoveled, manure became a liquid that could be sluiced away.
The “comfort and convenience” of the farmer, an industrial manual reported, “may well be the most important” reason to move hogs into confinement. The comfort and convenience of the pigs was left unmentioned.

B
y the 1980s the most advanced farms practiced “life-cycle housing,” which meant pigs never felt mud beneath their hooves.
In a celebratory cover story in
Scientific American
, a university expert explained that the modern pig “lives indoors for its entire brief life: born and suckled in a farrowing unit and raised to slaughter weight in a nursery and later in
a growing-feeding unit. It is fed a computer-formulated diet based on cornmeal and soybean meal with supplements of protein, minerals and vitamins. . . . It is sent to market at five or six months of age, having reached the slaughter weight of 220 pounds or more from its birth weight of two pounds.”

The hog confinement building had become standardized by the 1990s. Roughly three hundred feet long, sixty feet wide, and made of metal, it sat on concrete foundations. The slatted floors, usually made of cast concrete but occasionally of metal or plastic, were kept bare, with no straw or other bedding. Waste fell to gutters below that drained into adjacent ponds, known as “manure lagoons.” The buildings had no windows, instead relying on ventilation systems that operated automatically in response to temperature and humidity levels. Lights were kept off to save on electricity, except on the rare occasions when a worker was in the barn. Video systems allowed remote monitoring of the facilities.

Breeding became tightly controlled.
By 2000, three-quarters of sows in the United States became pregnant through artificial insemination. The companies that sold boar semen—and the university researchers who collaborated with them—relied on advanced population genetics and performance testing of offspring.
Breeding stock tended to be purebreds—primarily Berkshire, Chester White, Duroc, Hampshire, Poland China, Spot, and Yorkshire—that were interbred to create fast-growing hybrids.

Sows, rather than being kept together in group pens, spent their lives in “gestation crates,” metal pens about seven feet long and two feet wide. This, the industry said, prevented them from fighting each other and kept dominant sows from monopolizing the food supply. When the four-month gestation period was nearly over, the sows were moved to “farrowing crates,” about
the same size but with a “creep rail”: the lowest bar on one or both sides of the crate was missing so that piglets could enter the mother’s pen to nurse but could also escape into a narrow area alongside that the sow couldn’t enter. This alleviated a problem called “overlaying,” in which the sow accidentally crushed her piglets. In a farrowing crate, the mother could stand up and lie down, but she couldn’t turn around or roll over, lessening the chances of crushing.
“If a sow has a litter of twelve and rolls on three, right there you’ve lost about a hundred dollars,” one farmer explained in the 1980s. The piglets were weaned after two to four weeks, and the sow returned to the gestation barn to receive a fresh tube of semen. Some sows produced five litters in two years.

Most piglets had the tips of their daggerlike “needle teeth,” or incisors, clipped to prevent injuries to the sow or to other piglets. They got an injection of iron and had their ears notched for identification. Their tails were docked because confinement hogs had a tendency to chew the tails of other pigs, perhaps out of boredom or anxiety. Male pigs were castrated during the first couple of weeks of life to prevent “boar taint,” an off-flavor, caused in part by a pheromone, that sometimes appears in the meat of male pigs that reach sexual maturity before slaughter.

After weaning, the piglets started eating a carefully formulated feed. In the 1930s, pigs gained a pound of weight for every four pounds of feed they ate. In the 1980s, that pound of gain required three and a half pounds of feed.
Today, it takes less than three pounds.
As one animal scientist explained, “The wonders of genetic selection, improvements in animal health products, a better understanding of nutrition, and use of environmentally controlled barns has allowed animal scientists, veterinarians, and engineers to create these improvements.”

S
cientists and farmers had created “the other white meat.” Although the phrase originated in a marketing slogan, in one sense it was literally true.
Scientists from Texas A&M University showed that a factory-farmed pork loin’s levels of myoglobin—the protein responsible for redness—were much lower than those of beef and comparable to those in chicken or fish. That pale color owed much to the new farming methods. Myoglobin carries oxygen to working muscles: the less a muscle works, the paler its color. Chicken breasts are white because those muscles are never used for flying. Crated veal is pale because the calf had no room to walk. Pigs raised on pasture had meat of a darker hue. By the 1980s pork had become a white meat because confinement pigs, packed into small pens, rarely used their muscles.

Whether customers preferred meat from these new pigs was a different question.
After an initial boost spurred by the campaign, pork sales leveled off. People started thinking of pork as white meat, but they didn’t start buying much more of it: per capita pork consumption stayed level at just under fifty pounds from the 1980s through the 2000s.
Meanwhile, consumption of chicken—the original white meat—kept climbing, from fifty-four to sixty-nine pounds per capita.

In all of this innovation, one aspect of pork production was ignored: flavor.
At an industry conference in the 1960s, an animal scientist at Oklahoma State University observed that in the rush to create lean pigs, “pork quality has been completely ignored by swine breeders.”
In 2000, industry experts writing in
National Hog Farmer
came to the same conclusion: “Currently, industry breeding schemes create pigs that grow fast and efficiently but lack the superior meat and eating quality consumers prefer.”

One quality problem, identified in the 1960s and still unsolved, is “pale, soft, and exudative” pork, which is gray, mushy,
and tasteless. This meat, it turned out, came from skinny, neurotic pigs.
“Their personalities are completely different,” the animal scientist Temple Grandin wrote of the lean pigs. “They’re super-nervous and high-strung,” and the stress appeared to be damaging their meat. Such pigs also had a tendency to drop dead of shock.
As a group of veterinarians explained, such pigs “show an increase in carcass lean but much greater susceptibility to sudden death.”

In creating lean pigs, American pork producers had created a new set of problems, of which meat quality was only the most obvious. Modern pig farming, many critics charged, destroyed small farms, fouled land and water, and threatened public health. Most of all, the critics said, the new farms made pigs miserable—a charge that, by the turn of the twenty-first century, was becoming harder to refute.

SEVENTEEN

Vices

W
hile examining a group of hogs at a confinement facility around 1990, a veterinarian noticed a pregnant sow that appeared to be in pain. He asked about her and learned that she had broken her leg the day before and that her piglets were due in a week. “We’ll let her farrow in here,” the plant manager said, “and then we’ll shoot her and foster off her pigs.” The vet offered to splint her leg for free, but the manager turned him down. With 5,000 sows and just three full-time employees, he didn’t have the manpower to care for a sow with a leg splint.

The vet was appalled. He had grown up on a hog farm. His father would have either treated the sow or euthanized her immediately, not allowed her to suffer for a week and then give birth.
“If it is not feasible to do this in a confinement operation,” the vet concluded, then “there is something wrong with confinement operations.”

As the twentieth century wound to a close, many people were coming to that same conclusion.
The
New York Times
printed its first analysis of modern pig farming in 1980, headlined “Hog Production Swept by Agricultural Revolution,” which pointed to the many smaller farmers being forced out of the business. A few years later writer Orville Schell published
Modern Meat
, raising concerns that feeding antibiotics to pigs might create drug-resistant pathogens.
In 1996 the
Raleigh News and Observer
earned a Pulitzer Prize for its five-part series investigating how North Carolina’s state government, captive to hog barons, had allowed the industry to pollute with impunity.

Then, in the late 1990s, the public learned about “mad cow disease.” The infection, new to science, was contracted by cows that ate parts of other cows in their feed, and it could be passed along to humans who ate infected beef. The horror of a brain-destroying disease, caught from fast-food hamburgers, called attention to the appalling details of livestock production. Critiques of factory farms became a staple of investigative journalism and a category of books unto itself, from Eric Schlosser’s
Fast Food Nation
(2001) to Michael Pollan’s
Omnivore’s Dilemma
(2006) and beyond.

People began looking at meat in new ways. For decades, America’s food system had operated on the principle of opacity: steaks and chops magically appeared in supermarkets, and consumers didn’t ask many questions.
As one industry insider explained, “For modern agriculture, the less the consumer knows about what’s happening before the meat hits the plate, the better.” But scandal threw open a window. When consumers began tracing their pork back to its source, many discovered that they didn’t like what modern farming was doing to family farms, the environment, public health, and the welfare of pigs.

B
efore World War II nearly every Corn Belt farmer practiced mixed farming, raising not only hogs and cattle but also corn and soy to feed them.
By the late 1960s, however, a livestock expert had already noted “the disappearance of the diversified general Midwestern farm.” Farming in the industrial style—with high-priced machinery, hybrid seed corn, and chemical fertilizers, herbicides, and pesticides—expanded crop yields and increased the acreage that one farmer could handle. Many farms disappeared, and those that remained were larger and more specialized.
Secretary of Agriculture Ezra Taft Benson infamously offered this advice to farmers: “Get big or get out.”

And that’s exactly what happened. According to the US Department of Agriculture, there were 3 million farms in the United States raising hogs in 1950. By 2002, that number had dropped to 79,000, a loss of more than 97 percent.
In 1950, the average hog farm had 19 animals; a half century later, the average was 766. Much of the consolidation has happened in the last three decades. In 1992 farms with more than 2,000 animals accounted for just 30 percent of the total hog population in the United States.
By 2004, 80 percent of hogs lived at these enormous facilities.
In 2010, the top four hog producers had captured two-thirds of the market, and the largest—Smithfield Foods—controlled nearly a third of it.

The big producers now control every aspect of that market, from the moment a sow becomes pregnant to the sale of pork chops at the grocery store. Under the traditional system, farmers bred and raised pigs and sold them to pork packers at buying stations or auction barns. Under the new system, many farmers never own the pigs at all but instead act as agricultural foster parents. Much of the work of modern hog raising is done by independent farmers who operate under contract to big corporations, raising pigs according to contractual specifications. The
corporation owns the boars that produce the semen, the sows impregnated by that semen, and the piglets born as a result. The company creates proprietary blends of feed and stipulates how the pigs must be fed, watered, and dosed with drugs.
The company owns the slaughtering plants, and many times it owns the trucks that deliver packaged meat to retailers.
“Vertical integration gives you high-quality, consistent products with consistent genetics,” Joseph W. Luter III, chairman of Smithfield, said in 2000. “And the only way to do that is to control the process from the farm to the packing plant.”

Consolidation led to geographic shifts. Since the 1820s, most hogs had come from corn-raising states. But starting in the 1980s the industry shifted east. North Carolina, desperate to replace a devastated tobacco sector, welcomed hog farming with open arms.
The number of hogs raised there doubled from 1987 to 1992, then doubled again by 1998. It was expensive to ship corn and soy from the Midwest, but overall costs came down thanks to cheap labor, lax environmental regulation, warmer weather (which reduced the need to heat barns), and proximity to eastern markets.
Wendell Murphy, founder of a large hog producer, held a seat in the state legislature and unapologetically backed laws friendly to his industry.

Packing plants grew larger as well.
By 2006, 95 percent of hogs in the United States were slaughtered at plants that handled more than 1 million hogs a year, and one plant in North Carolina killed 8 million annually. The kill and cut lines moved at lightning speed—
1,300 hogs per hour in some cases—and became highly automated. Previously, meatpacking had required expensive skilled labor because there was no way to automate the disassembly of hogs. Tight control of breeding produced not just lean hogs but almost perfectly uniform ones, which allowed machines to do more of the work. The packers hired low-skill,
low-wage workers, often immigrants recruited from Mexico and Central America.
These laborers had little bargaining power, and their working conditions suffered accordingly: meatpacking soon had one of the highest injury and illness rates of any US industry.
It was no accident that the hog industry—like the broiler hen industry—grew most quickly in the South, the region least welcoming to organized labor.

As the hog farms and slaughterhouses grew larger, so did the retailers. In 1997, the four largest grocery retailers held a modest 19 percent of the market. In 2009, the four largest controlled more than half of the market. These large retailers—led by Walmart—demanded meat of uniform quality, in huge quantities, at low prices. To satisfy the grocery chains while maintaining profits, the big pork companies squeezed the least powerful player in the supply chain: the farmers who raised pigs on contract.
For every dollar spent on pork, farmers received an ever smaller portion—from fifty cents in the 1980s to less than a quarter by 2009.

Consumers didn’t know what percentage of their dollar was making its way to farmers. They only knew they could buy very cheap pork.
In constant dollars, the price of pork was 30 percent lower in the 2000s than it had been in the 1950s. In this sense, modern confinement hog farming had been a spectacular success. But cheap meat proved costly, for pigs as well as for people.

A
fter a week of heavy rain in June 1995, the dike failed on an eight-acre manure pond in eastern North Carolina. About 25 million gallons of “red, soupy waste”—a slurry of hog feces and urine—spilled out of the pond, across tobacco and soybean fields, and into the New River, where it killed millions of fish.
“It came through the woods,” a neighbor said. “You could see the dark stuff. It made me sick.”

The spill exposed a big problem in North Carolina’s new hog country.
A 250-pound hog excretes 7.8 pounds of feces and 2.65 gallons of urine per day, about four times as much as a human being of equivalent weight. The 60 million pigs in the United States in 1995 produced almost as much waste as the country’s 266 million people.
Strict rules governed the disposal of human waste; not so the pig waste.

Slatted floors freed farmers from the chore of shoveling manure, but the waste did not disappear. It was flushed into open cesspools thirty feet deep and acres wide. The contents sometimes seeped into groundwater, fouling nearby wells and streams. Assuming the dam didn’t break, some of the liquid in the lagoon evaporated, and bacteria partially broke down the waste. What remained was sprayed onto nearby fields. Theoretically it served as fertilizer, but it was applied in concentrations far higher than the ground could absorb and therefore washed into streams. The ponds themselves emitted ammonia, methane, carbon dioxide, hydrogen sulfide, and other noxious chemicals, making life unbearable and sometimes dangerous for those downwind.
As one man who lived near a manure lagoon explained, “We are used to farm odors. These are not farm odors.”

In 2007 farmers discovered a new problem: for mysterious reasons, manure started foaming and bubbling up through the slatted floors. The bubbles contained gases including methane, a highly flammable by-product of decomposing waste.
In 2011, at a farm in northern Iowa, the manure foam exploded, killing 1,500 pigs and seriously injuring one worker.

The problems of waste disposal shaped where hog facilities could be located. In 1997, North Carolina placed a moratorium—it later became a ban—on the construction of new hog lagoons
and spray fields.
As a result, the industry shifted to the high plains of Texas, Oklahoma, Kansas, and Colorado, where producers found looser environmental regulations and fewer neighbors to complain of the stench.

A
merican taxpayers might not like the sights and smells of confinement operations, but they have been underwriting those operations all the same. For many years, the federal government subsidized the price of corn and soy. A corporation that bought hog feed on the market enjoyed the benefits of that price cut, but a small hog farmer who grew his own corn and soy did not. According to one estimate, federal crop subsidies saved hog producers $8.5 billion between 1997 and 2005. Similarly, the lack of environmental regulations meant that a facility’s neighbors and society as a whole absorbed the costs of waste disposal.
All told, experts suggested that American taxpayers gave hog producers a subsidy of about $24 on every hog.

And those estimates didn’t include other externalities—costs that aren’t reflected in the price of a pork chop. Livestock production plays a major role in climate change. Sources of greenhouse gases include forest clearance to grow corn and soy (which releases the carbon stored in trees), feed crop cultivation (which relies on petroleum-intensive fertilizers), and the biological processes of the animals (such as methane in belches and manure).
Depending on whose estimate you believe, the global livestock industry generates between 15 and 50 percent of the gases that cause climate change.

Feeding antibiotics to pigs can also lead to drug-resistant bacteria that threaten human health.
More than three-quarters of the antibiotics used in the United States go to livestock farms, and
according to the FDA, the majority of those drugs
are “medically important” within the health-care system. But feeding those antibiotics to pigs plays a role in diminishing their effectiveness in people. When such drugs are used as a feed supplement, antibiotic-resistant bacteria can evolve in animals and then spread to humans, increasing the risk of illnesses that cannot be cured.
In response to such dangers, Denmark, a leading pork exporter, banned the use of antibiotics to promote growth, and its pork industry has continued to thrive.
Pork producers in the United States have resisted such change, insisting that the agricultural use of antibiotics is safe. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), however, offered an alarming assessment in a 2013 report:
“Antibiotic use in food animals can result in resistant Campylobacter bacteria”—a nasty bug that can cause bloody diarrhea and temporary paralysis—“that can spread to humans.” The report also warned that drug-resistant salmonella followed a similar path from animals to humans. The CDC concluded, “The use of antibiotics for promoting growth is not necessary, and the practice should be phased out.”
The FDA in 2013 issued a new policy with precisely that aim, but critics suggested that loopholes would allow current practices to continue.

P
igs have shouldered the most direct costs of modern hog farming. The pork industry, not surprisingly, claims that confinement barns are perfect for the animals.
“They love it,” the president of one pork corporation has said. “The conditions that we keep these animals in are much more humane than when they were out in the field.” The evidence suggests otherwise.

Hogs in confinement endure a litany of horrors. They spend their lives standing over septic pits, and ventilation systems are often used sparingly to keep heating and electricity costs down.
Workers who enter the barns sometimes don respirators, a convenience not available to the thousands of pigs who breathe the air constantly.
“Acute and chronic infections of the respiratory tract in pigs are common,” according to
Biology of the Domestic
Pig
, a standard reference work. “Most are related to . . . inadequate ventilation, improper temperature and humidity, poor nutrition, and high levels of irritant gases such as ammonia.”

Hogs also develop behavioral problems that the industry refers to as “vices.” One vice is a tendency to bite the tails of other pigs, which can lead to infection. Market pigs are juveniles, just five or six months old when slaughtered, and are as intelligent, playful, and curious as puppies. On pasture or in barns, they spend much of their time exploring with their mouths and snouts—rooting, chewing, poking, exploring.
But in a confinement facility with metal bars and concrete floors, such instincts find an outlet on the only soft surfaces around—other pigs.
“Without malleable substrates to chew, pigs direct what appears to be inquisitive or exploratory behaviors toward other pigs and are rewarded by movement of the tail and perhaps the taste of blood,” according to a team of university livestock experts. The industry’s solution to this problem is to cut off the tail, leaving only a one- or two-inch stub so sensitive that a pig would attack any other pig that dared nip it.