HOGGING THE PROFITS - Foodopoly: The Battle Over the Future of Food and Farming in America - page 102

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HOGGING THE PROFITS
There is a sufficiency in the world for man's need but not for man's greed .
—Mahatma Gandhi
Industrial hog operations are a very nasty business. Thousands of pigs are packed together tightly in giant
warehouses, where they generate tons of liquid and solid waste, posing health hazards to the surround-
ing community and degrading the environment. The feces and urine produced in hog factories—containing
ammonia, methane, hydrogen sulfide, cyanide, phosphorus, nitrates, heavy metals, antibiotics, and other
drugs—fall through slatted floors and into a catchment pit under the pens. Giant exhaust fans pump the toxic
fumes out of the warehouse-like buildings, twenty-four hours a day, to prevent the hogs from dying. The
accumulated waste is then pumped into enormous lagoons that can cover six to seven and a half acres and
hold as much as 45 million gallons of wastewater. Leaking and flooding lagoons pollute local waterways,
and the fumes from the waste spread on neighboring fields choke and sicken the local community.
Raising pigs, which are social animals with high cognitive abilities and excellent memories, under these
harsh conditions is cruel. In his landmark Rolling Stone article “Boss Hog,” Jeff Tietz describes the heart-
breaking life of the factory-farmed hog: “Smithfield's pigs live by the hundreds of thousands in warehouse-
like barns, in rows of wall-to-wall pens. Sows are artificially inseminated and fed and delivered of their
piglets in cages so small they cannot turn around. Forty full-grown 250-pound male hogs often occupy a
pen the size of a tiny apartment. They trample each other to death. There is no sunlight, straw, fresh air or
earth.” 1
Pigs have not always been raised this way. One of the unusual factors about the rise of the factory hog
farm is that it happened very quickly. In 1992 less than a third of U.S. hogs were raised on farms with more
than two thousand animals, but by 2004 four out of five hogs came from one of these giant operations,
and by 2007, 95 percent were. 2 An analysis by Food & Water Watch found that between 1997 and 2007,
4,600 hogs were added to a factory farm every single day, increasing the total to more than 62 million. As
with most industrialized animal production, the industry has selected certain parts of the country to host hog
factories, with Iowa, North Carolina, Minnesota, Illinois, and Indiana producing two thirds.
This transformation was facilitated by federal policy changes pushed by the pork packers and other ag-
ribusinesses. Chief among these was the overproduction of corn, soybeans, and other crops used for hog
feed that made the feed price artificially low—below the cost it took to raise the crops. Permitting these crop
prices to fall below their cost of production and then paying farmers some of the difference with taxpayer
dollars subsidized the growth of hog factories.
These artificially low feed prices also encouraged livestock producers to buy feed rather than pasture their
livestock or grow their own. Since producers no longer needed land for these purposes, it became econom-