by Ted Genoways
Becker described his hog operation outside Fairmont, Minnesota, a little more than an hour due west of Austin on Interstate 90, as a “good old-fashioned, American family farm”—and it might appear that way at first. Everything about the old homestead suggests its age, from the weathered, brick-red Dutch Gambrel barn emblazoned with the name, LB PORK, to the simple farmhouse that Becker’s grandfather built in the 1940s—the house where all big decisions are still made on Sundays around the dinner table. But in truth, Becker was already a major supplier, providing more than fifty thousand pigs to Hormel each year, and he was making a bid to double that number by bringing the whole supply chain, from seed to slaughter, under his control. He owned 1,500 acres of prime farmland, where he raised corn and soybeans, which he put up in a colossal grain bin and ground at his own feed mill and then trucked to more than a dozen sites in Minnesota and Iowa to feed to thousands of pregnant sows in his breeding barns and tens of thousands of weaned piglets at separate finishing facilities. The company was sprawling and complex, employing dozens of full-time and part-time workers, and it was only getting bigger. Still, Becker insists that he always personally monitored every phase of his business. And as the voice message claiming animal abuse started to sink in, his shock and disbelief quickly turned to indignation.
“Wait a second,” he remembered thinking. “Not on any farm I own.”
Then it dawned on him. The farm in question wasn’t LB Pork or even his breeding facility, Camalot, about ten miles away outside the town of Welcome. The farm that PETA had investigated was a large barn complex, housing some six thousand sows and tens of thousands of newborn piglets, that Becker had acquired less than a month before in Iowa, an operation he had purchased from Natural Pork Production II and renamed MowMar Farms but had only ever seen a few times. Becker phoned his day-to-day management company, Suidae Health & Production, based in Algona, Iowa, and asked them to reach out to Prescott and see if they could get their hands on this “damning evidence”; maybe the video they claimed to have in their possession had all been shot before the facility was under his ownership.
Meanwhile, Becker worked his connections. He was the president of the Minnesota Pork Board, and his wife, Julie, had been the Minnesota Pork Promoter of the Year in 2007. In fact, she was, at that very moment, on Capitol Hill with the Minnesota Pork Producers Association, the lobbying arm of the Pork Board, meeting with members of Congress. Becker called his wife so she could alert her fellow lobbyists. Then he placed another call to Cindy Cunningham, the assistant vice president for communications at the National Pork Board in Des Moines, Iowa.
Soon Becker heard back that PETA wanted to meet with him one-on-one and then stage a joint press conference. Everyone advised against it. Instead, with the assistance of Himle Horner, a public relations firm in the Twin Cities, he decided to issue a written statement, and Cunningham mobilized several agribusiness organizations to help answer press inquiries. But nothing could have prepared them for the onslaught of negative attention. The next day, when the Associated Press released the video online along with a wire report describing its contents, the story became worldwide news almost instantly. The video’s camerawork was shaky and low-definition, captured with recorders hidden in the hat brims of undercover workers, but it had been cut together into a concise and harrowing five minutes.
In one shot, a supervisor was shown beating a sow relentlessly on the back. In another, workers turned electric prods on a crippled sow and kicked pregnant sows repeatedly in the belly. A close-up showed a distressed sow knocked out, her face royal blue from the Prima Tech marking dye sprayed into her nostrils by a worker who said he was trying “to get her high.” In one of the most disturbing sequences, a worker demonstrated the method for euthanizing underweight piglets: taking them by the hind legs and smashing their skulls against the concrete floor. Fellow workers whooped and laughed as he tossed the bloodied and twitching bodies into a giant bin. The AP story revealed that PETA had already met with Tom Heater, the sheriff of Greene County, Iowa, and he had agreed to open a criminal investigation.
That night, Becker played the PETA video again and again on his iPad. He told me he felt numb as he watched his inbox fill with more than a thousand angry emails. He was starting to see what an ordeal the release of this video was going to be. But worse, he feared that Hormel would terminate its production contract with him—the contract he had used to secure a loan of more than $1 million to mortgage the breed barns in Iowa, with his family’s homestead in Minnesota as collateral. If Hormel decided that Becker had become a liability, he and his family could lose everything.
Before World War II, American meat production, especially in the Midwest, was necessarily seasonal. Cattle, hogs, and chickens were part of small, diversified farms that sustained livestock year-round, but farmers tended to fatten and bring animals to market only after harvest, when feed was plentiful and cheap. So northern meatpackers offered workers long hours during late summer and fall, then laid them off during the winter and early spring. But, after the industrialization of the war, major meat producers like Hormel were eager to keep increasing output (and sales) by turning packing into a year-round activity. To make this possible, the companies encouraged farmers to turn away from diversified, seasonal farming and to begin specializing and modifying their operations to produce market animals throughout the year.
During the 1950s, the midwestern stockmen who embraced this shift usually raised either cattle, which were hardy enough to withstand winter cold, or chickens, which could be easily cooped when temperatures plummeted. But hog farming on the icy, windswept plains was difficult in those days. Even in milder winters, farmers often suffered deaths among their herds, and periods of sustained bitter temperatures naturally suppressed sows’ fertility, which meant they could be bred only once a year. But, beginning in the 1960s, some enterprising hog farmers began building confinement barns large enough to house hundreds or even thousands of pigs throughout the winter. Such enclosures not only overcame mortality due to bad weather but, with even basic space-heating systems, also allowed farmers to successfully breed sows twice a year.
By the close of the decade, family farmers worried that hog confinement was so effective that the innovation would encourage highly capitalized meatpackers to begin building their own barns and buying up cheap cropland, establishing monopolies that would effectively squeeze out small operations. Between 1972 and 1982, various forms of the Family Farm Protection Act passed in North Dakota, South Dakota, Nebraska, Kansas, Oklahoma, Minnesota, Wisconsin, Iowa, and Missouri. A template law introduced with identical language in each state, the goal was to defend small farm operators against large packers. But almost from the moment those measures were passed, packers were looking for a way around them.
From a business perspective, their determination to control the supply chain made perfect sense. In a marketplace already at the mercy of weather, disease, feed and fuel prices, and the changing American appetite, Hormel, like most large meatpackers, was always searching for opportunities to curb and regularize input costs. If they could buy up enough cornfields to manipulate feed prices or invest in enough hog operations to depress the market price for pork, then all of the major packers stood to benefit from pushing out small farmers. So when the Midwest passed laws against vertical integration, a handful of the nation’s largest hog producers, with a shared focus not seen since the industry united against Upton Sinclair and Teddy Roosevelt’s efforts to break up the Meat Trust, financed a building boom in the unregulated American South, where they could erect larger and larger barns capable of holding thousands of animals without fear of interference from state officials.
The epicenter of the boom was in North Carolina. During the 1990s, the hog population of the Tar Heel State tripled to more than 8 million, and Smithfield Foods opened the world’s largest meat processing plant there. But the unbridled growth sparked intense debate about the environmental safety of the massive cesspools of manure, so-call
ed lagoons, produced by tens of thousands of hogs in small confines. Concern turned to outrage in 1999 after a containment dyke at Ocean View Farms ruptured and spilled 25 million gallons of waste into the New River, poisoning the water and killing thousands of fish. Then a few months later, floodwaters from Hurricane Irene overflowed lagoons all across the state. As the New York Times reported, “Feces and urine soaked the terrain and flowed into rivers.” The ensuing backlash pushed many southern politicians to start embracing tighter regulation, while midwestern governors and lawmakers, especially those in heavily Republican states, argued that industrialized meat production was a way of reviving farms that had never fully recovered from the farm crisis of the Reagan era. But first they needed to roll back bans against vertical integration.
In 2002, Smithfield, joined by livestock subsidiaries Murphy-Brown and Prestage-Stoecker Farms, filed suit against Iowa in federal court, arguing that the state’s packer ban violated their rights under the Commerce Clause of the U.S. Constitution by discriminating against out-of-state companies. In fact, the ban applied to corporate processors both in and out of Iowa, but—because the language of the Family Farm Protection Act provided an exception for small-town farmer co-ops—the federal district court nullified the law. The appellate court agreed to hear an appeal, but in September 2005, before the scheduled court date, Iowa attorney general Tom Miller made a devil’s bargain: consenting to an injunction prohibiting the enforcement of the packer ban with specific respect to Smithfield. Predictably, other out-of-state meatpackers immediately filed suits of their own.
By April 2006, both Hormel and Cargill had negotiated exemptions with the state of Iowa—and began buying up existing confinement barns and offering financing for the construction of new, large-scale facilities. Because the ban was still technically on the books, only hog producers under contract to Smithfield, Cargill, or Hormel had permission to own farmland and raise hogs. Faced with the looming threat of competing against these feed-to-market monopolies, many farmers sold off their hogs and hog operations. Many more agreed to risk everything by shouldering thirty-year mortgages on multimillion-dollar barn complexes, with only short-term contracts, and often their family land, as collateral to secure the loans. Packers were then free to dictate industrialized herd management techniques, requiring farmers to raise genetically engineered hogs, to artificially inseminate their sows, to hold them throughout pregnancy in gestation crates, to inject newborn piglets with high doses of preemptive antibiotics, and to raise weaned pigs on feed additives that promoted rapid growth and leaner animals.
As the sole limit on Hormel’s exemption from Iowa’s anti-vertical-integration law, the attorney general stipulated that the term of their agreement with the state would be ten years, at which point these few by-name exemptions would all be reviewed to assess whether they had created market monopolies. But rather than encouraging Hormel, Cargill, and Smithfield—and later Tyson, Christensen Family Farms, and a few other producers that obtained subsequent exemptions—to proceed with caution, the term agreement spurred these companies to build as many large-scale farms in Iowa as they could and as rapidly as they could, in order to grab as much market share as possible.
Hormel was especially eager to get a jump on increasing hog production. Their southern competitors had seen production grow by leaps and bounds during the 1990s, while Hormel’s Midwest-based operations had been limited by the number of hogs they could raise. With an agreement in place in Iowa, Hormel could finally take advantage of the sweetheart deal they had secured with the USDA in 2002 allowing them to run the lines at their processing plants at speeds higher than any other packinghouse in the country. This was their chance to gain ground on Smithfield. Even before the agreement with the state of Iowa was official, Hormel began providing loans to hog farmers, pushing them to build multimillion-dollar large-scale confinements in the northern counties, just south of the Quality Pork Processors plant in Austin, and in western Iowa, within trucking distance of the Hormel plant in Fremont, Nebraska. On the very day the exemption was publicly made known, Hormel issued a press release announcing that they would be increasing production at the Fremont plant from 9,000 hogs per day to more than 10,500.
In 1946, Hormel hosted the first National Barrow Show in Austin. Hog farmers from thirteen states brought truckloads of their best castrated boars to the plant to be slaughtered, weighed, and judged. Each cut was scored not just according to raw weight but by its lean-to-fat ratio. The top-scoring hog was 49.7 percent lean meat and 21.3 percent fat; the bottom-scoring hog was 44 percent lean and 23.6 percent fat. The difference was slim—and nearly undetectable on the hoof—but Hormel had discovered, at that early stage, that they could standardize production and dramatically improve margins if they were paying for hanging carcass weight and grade, instead of live weight. So they began offering premiums, as much as $2.50 per pound, for hogs that yielded above-average ratios of meat. As the annual show grew, Hormel instituted a rule that breeding animals would also be brought to the fairgrounds—and auctioned on the final day. Most of the farmers buying the boars and gilts were Hormel suppliers, thus improving the lean quality of the company’s stock. Soon, Hormel launched the Fort Dodge Market Hog Show in cooperation with the Agricultural Extension Service of Iowa State University to improve the company’s breeding stock in Iowa as well.
In 1957, Hormel persuaded the Minnesota legislature to go one step further—authorizing the establishment of the state’s first swine testing station in Austin. State-funded research scientists tested hogs of every breed for their overall size, lean-to-fat ratio, and yield of particular cuts. Then in a barn leased to Hormel by the state for $1 per year, the Minnesota Swine Breeders Association bred the most desirable members of each breed—and, eventually, crossbred them—in an effort to create a leaner market hog. But all that research had one serious limitation: even as custom-bred animals improved overall stock, Hormel couldn’t dictate feed or care to individual farmers, especially after the institution of the packer bans in the 1970s. What arrived at the grading station still varied tremendously, which made yield unpredictable.
After the rollback of the bans, however, pork producers, with Hormel at the forefront, began dreaming of having enough farm-level control to prescribe particular growing techniques, allowing their meat scientists to custom-design the perfect hog. If each and every pig could be optimized and standardized according to the particular needs of the processing plant where they would be slaughtered, then butchering at the plants could be sped up through further automation and market share could be grown by providing the steadiest supply to retailers. In the early 2000s, for example, when Hormel approached major retailers about stocking their prepackaged fresh cuts, Wal-Mart demanded identical, exact-weight pork chops, loins, and roasts. But if Hormel was going to provide 10-pound packages of pork chops, pre-portioned into identical cuts, and trimmed with no more than an eighth inch of fat as Wal-Mart required, then each hog would have to be raised to have the same amount of back muscle with the same amount of fat. And, ideally, the same would be true for hams, bacon, loins, roasts, and every other part of the animal.
Hormel was no longer willing to receive hogs of varied breeds and ages at their weigh stations, where they would then have to go through sorting according to size and leanness. Instead, the company’s systems engineers wanted trucks to arrive at Hormel’s loading docks each morning carrying thousands of hogs as nearly identical to one another as possible. And so the modern hog confinement became the test laboratory for a grand-scale experiment in reverse engineering.
Hormel developed a chart that measures carcass weight against body fat with an optimal “red box” at the center, offering their contract growers a sizable bonus for hitting the target and paying for the bonus by extracting a penalty from those growers whose animals fell too far outside the desired parameters. On average, hogs that hit the red box (yielding hot-weight carcasses of between 174 and 222 pounds, with less than 1.1 inches of backfat) earn ab
out 105 percent of base price, compared with 88 percent of market price for hogs outside the box. For contract growers, that can mean a price swing of as much as $25 per hog. Hitting the red box can increase the value of a single shipment by more than $4,000, which, in a typical year of roughly sixty truckloads from a single large-scale facility, can add up to the difference between a healthy profit and a crippling loss. So growers are constantly chasing promises of improved methods (antibiotics, growth enhancers, metabolism-altering beta-adrenergic agonists, acidifiers, enzymes, and other feed additives), but in pursuit of those improved profit margins, farmers are also steadily increasing their overhead.
Rigid standardization, however, has been nothing but beneficial for Hormel. Its sophisticated network of interrelated growers, each producing just the right number and age of hogs, keeps a steady stream of uniform carcasses moving from the kill room to the chain to be butchered each day. The system ensures there is never a scarcity of hogs that would drive up their input costs, and there is never a surplus that would force them to pay too much overtime at processing plants.
From a pure business standpoint, the project of industrializing hog production has been an unparalleled success—and a logistical wonder. Every working day, about 175 trailers in various parts of Iowa, eastern Nebraska, and southern Minnesota are loaded with 170 hogs each; they converge onto one of a dozen loading docks in Fremont and Austin, arriving within a one-hour window of each other, in order to deliver roughly 30,000 hogs for slaughter. That’s every day for 260 working days, every year—7.7 million hogs, herded through a tiny set of chutes, slaughtered, butchered, and sent out for additional value-added processing, at just those two plants. For the system to work, a four-month growing cycle must culminate with an exact-weight animal at just the right time. That precision must be carried out at hundreds of feeder sites, and the whole cycle, from insemination to slaughter, must be exactly replicated three times a year.
