by Ted Genoways
The trouble was—and is—that in order to get big, farmers had to acquire more of everything: more land, more row crops, more animals, more equipment, more loans, more overhead. All of which steadily put more of the business and the profit but also more of the risk and the fixed costs onto fewer producers. When Lynn Becker joined the family business in 1995, there were more than 10,000 hog farms in Minnesota; by 2007 that number had fallen to 4,700. But over the same period, Minnesota’s overall hog production went from just under 5 million head per year to nearly 8 million. In other words, half as many farms were producing nearly twice as many pigs. And no place was going bigger than Martin County—with LB Pork, both geographically and economically, at its very center. Already the state’s top hog-producing county, Martin went from turning out 240,000 hogs per year in 1990 to 790,000 in 2008—with a full 10 percent of those hogs coming from LB Pork.
When, in the mid-2000s, the big meatpackers filed their lawsuits and obtained their exemptions from vertical integration, the timing couldn’t have been better for the Beckers. They were continuing to expand their farming—from 900 acres of corn and soybeans to 1,500 acres—and had recently erected a new 150,000-bushel grain bin. When the sagging global economy drove up feed prices and drove down demand for meat, creating the worst hog market in history, the Beckers were insulated. They had raised enough corn, stored directly on the farm, to get them through. At the same time, LB Pork’s main customer, Hormel Foods, was experiencing a spike in demand for cheap meat, especially Spam. So Lynn Becker found himself in the enviable position of having a store of cheap feed and a buyer lined up to purchase as many hogs as he could bring to market.
And Becker recognized the opportunity. He shifted from looking for sites to build expanded facilities to searching for beleaguered companies in Iowa that he might be able to take over. “Calculated growth and modifications to our operation are how we’ve steadily maintained growth,” he told the Progressive Farmer. “We need to position ourselves so that when good opportunities arise, we can jump on them.” About that time, Becker met Gary Thome through their mutual veterinarian, Daryl Olsen, the president of the American Association of Swine Veterinarians and the CEO of the Audubon-Manning Veterinary Clinic. Thome, like Becker, had what Hormel itself describes as “a long-term agreement” with the company. “Because of this agreement,” according to Hormel’s own literature, Thome had access to “the capital required” to build a finishing facility.
Now Thome and Becker were both looking for another chance to expand, and Olsen had not only an opportunity but an urgent need. Natural Pork Production II—whose hog barns near Bayard, Iowa, were managed by AMVC—was on the verge of bankruptcy and, with twelve facilities to offload in a hurry, the company was offering bargain-basement prices. Becker visited two Natural Pork sow barns in May, where he told me he found a “sinking-ship feeling.” But he chalked it up to neglect by an unraveling company. “It’s kind of like when you know you’re going to sell your car,” he said. “Are you going to put new tires on it fifty miles before you sell it? Naw, you run them down to the wires.”
So Becker and Thome reached an agreement with NPPII on a complex of barns housing six thousand sows near Bayard, Iowa, renamed the operation MowMar Farms, and officially took possession on August 18. The facility was exactly what Becker’s company needed, but he acknowledged that the barns were not initially up to snuff. “The animal care had been slacking a little bit,” he told me. “I think the manager would see somebody at the coffee shop that morning and might ask them to help do some chores.” Becker said his management company, Suidae Health, had reinterviewed all of the employees—and many had quit rather than face retraining or termination. “That’s always made me feel good,” he said. “They could see there was a new sheriff in town.”
On July 23, 2008, about the same time that Lynn Becker was finalizing the purchase of the hog barns in Bayard, Michael Steinberg, the second PETA operative, arrived in Iowa and was hired for one of the new openings in the breed barn. On his first day, he watched training videos, then at lunch met with two representatives from Suidae Health & Production, who explained that the new ownership would be taking over the farm on August 18. Steinberg then began his on-the-job training with Richard Ralston, who had been made the temporary head of the breed barn until a permanent replacement could be found for Marvin Mauch. Ralston was in a foul mood that day; he had sustained a long cut that morning when he was bitten by a boar brought into the breed barn to detect which sows were in heat. He admitted to Steinberg that, knocked down and bleeding, he had wanted “to beat the hell” out of the boar.
Barely a week later, Steinberg was able to get Ralston on video, admitting to a series of abuses—including anally penetrating the sows with gate rods and herding canes. “When I get pissed or get hurt or the fucking bitch won’t move,” he says in a portion of the video, “I grab one of those rods and I jam it in her asshole.”
“You take the gate rods and shove it in their asshole?” Steinberg can be heard asking.
“Yeah, fuck ’em,” Ralston says.
When pressed, Ralston told Steinberg that he knew he could get in trouble. “Half the shit I do nobody else is supposed to do,” he said. But the very next day, when Steinberg was having trouble moving a frightened and balking gilt from isolation back to the breed barn, Ralston and another worker, Shawn Lyons, jumped in and started kicking the agitated hog. Finally, Ralston turned to Steinberg and said, “Stick your finger in her butt.” When Steinberg refused, he says Ralston replied, “Stick it in her pussy then. . . . Just whip your dick out and get some pleasure.” Later, in the break room, Ralston bragged about “giving it” to a sow with his cane. Steinberg, at first, understood him to mean that he had been beating her, but Ralston shushed him and told him to lower his voice. “I was shoving it in her pussy,” he said. Steinberg asked if this helped move the sows along, but Ralston shook his head. “Just fucking around,” he said. Weeks later, when the deputy sheriff was investigating the case, Ralston admitted to boasting he had penetrated sows with his cane but said he was just trying to act “macho” in front of his coworkers, particular his assistant manager, Alan Rettig.
Rettig was the one, Ralston said, who was always shouting to show the sows your dick. At sixty, Rettig was significantly older than twenty-seven-year-old Ralston and the other men, most of whom were in their late teens to early thirties. But he had more on his coworkers than just years; Rettig had cultivated a hard-ass mystique. He told everyone he had been a member of the Iowa Sons of Silence, a motorcycle gang that had been broken up in 2001 for trafficking drugs and firearms, and he was rumored to have served prison time. He certainly relished his image as a vicious, unpredictable presence in the barn, and he not only perpetrated violence but also frequently egged on his coworkers.
One day, after weaning a group of piglets, Steinberg, Rettig, and Lyons started returning sows to the breed barn. Rettig grew impatient at how long it was taking Lyons to move a particular sow. He took the gate rod out of Lyons’s hands and cracked it down on the sow’s back twice, each blow echoing through the barn. “Don’t be afraid to hurt ’em!” he shouted. Another time, Rettig exhorted Ralston, “Hit ’em hard! Show ’em your dick! Show ’em your penis!”
One afternoon, barely two weeks into his employment, Steinberg went around with Rettig to adjust the feed for the sows. Rettig wanted Steinberg to jab each one with a wooden handle until they stood up, so he could judge their weight. When Steinberg didn’t hit them hard enough, Rettig repeated his usual refrain—but with a new wrinkle. “Hurt ’em,” he said. “Nobody works for PETA out here!”
On the hidden camera video, there is a tense moment, as Rettig asks Steinberg, “You know who PETA is?”
Steinberg mutters a reply, apparently fearing that he has been discovered. But Rettig is too busy searching his memory to notice Steinberg’s hesitation.
“That’s Protection for the . . .” Rettig begins. He seems to be scanning his thoughts, sti
ll oblivious to Steinberg’s reaction. “Protection for the Environmental Treatment of the Animals. I hate them. These motherfuckers deserve to be hurt!” By now Rettig seems lost in reverie; he raises the handle and shouts, “Hurt I say! Hurt, hurt, hurt, hurt! If you’ve got to hurt ’em, hurt ’em!”
Steinberg says something about a mild tap on the head being enough to get the sows to their feet, but Rettig isn’t listening.
“Take out your frustrations on ’em!” he says. In a portion of the video not released to the public, Rettig concludes, “Just make believe that one of these motherfuckers scared off a seventeen-, eighteen-year-old voluptuous little fucking girl that’s hornier than a bitch! And it scared her off. Then you beat the fuck out of her.”
Soon after, the word went out to employees that the new owner, Lynn Becker, would be coming to the barn on August 18. There were going to be some changes, and Becker wanted to address the staff directly. The workers were nervous going into the meeting, but Becker’s low-key demeanor seemed to set them immediately at ease. He introduced himself and Pat Thome, one of the sons of his business partner. Then Becker explained that the biggest change under MowMar would be thumping more runts. With corn at $8 per bushel, it was just too expensive to stick with undersized piglets that weren’t putting on weight quickly. “Everything else will remain the same,” he said.
On the secret audio recording of the meeting made by Robert Ruderman, the first of the PETA investigators, an unidentified woman sounds quite concerned about how to know which piglets would now be deemed undesirable. She had seen Becker and Thome personally thump some two hundred piglets that morning.
“Did you guys get rid of the ones that you didn’t want me to ship tomorrow?” she asks. She was trying to understand, she said, what path they intended to pursue with regard to runts.
“There’s a trail of blood out there for you to follow,” Becker says.
From the back of the room, Al Rettig lets out a relieved holler: “And the boys are back in town!”
Looking back, it’s hard to understand how management and workers at any hog barn under Hormel control in 2008 could have been so blind to the possibility of infiltration by undercover animal rights activists. Even if workers like Al Rettig couldn’t conjure what the PETA acronym stood for, the upper management of Hormel was very aware of People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, as well as the Humane Society of the United States (HSUS). In fact, the company was actively involved in efforts to discredit the undercover investigations of these organizations—and hoped to garner support for the controversial step of criminalizing covert taping of animal abuse at factory farms. The reasons were simple: recent undercover operations had resulted in major recalls, costing the meat industry billions of dollars, and had even netted some criminal prosecutions.
In the fall of 2007, investigators from HSUS secretly videotaped workers at a Hallmark/Westland Meat Packing Company plant in Chino, California, kicking downer cattle and shocking them with electric prods, in an effort to get them back to their feet and into a slaughtering station. In February 2008, the video led to two employees being charged with felony counts of animal cruelty and the pen manager being charged with three misdemeanor counts of illegal movement of a nonambulatory animal. Under pressure from the USDA, Hallmark/Westland recalled more than 143 million pounds of beef, the largest meat recall in U.S. history. In little more than a year, the company was bankrupt and permanently out of business.
At the exact same time the HSUS operation was under way in California, a PETA investigator managed to get hired at a 3,500-sow breed barn owned by Murphy Family Ventures, a major supplier for Smithfield. Over the next two months, he covertly video recorded five different workers at the facility near Garland, North Carolina, dragging hogs by their ears, beating them with metal gate rods, and gouging their eyes—all in an effort to get stubborn sows to move from gestation crates to farrowing crates, where they would give birth and suckle their piglets. He even captured one worker bragging, after suffering an attack by one of the barn’s boars, that he had “cut the shit out of his goddamn nose with a fucking gate rod.” In June 2008, that man and another caught on the video were charged with multiple misdemeanor counts of animal cruelty.
Even before these most recent videos, Hormel had been aware of—and worried about—the prospect of being targeted by PETA and HSUS, raising the prospect that the whole factory-farming system could come under scrutiny. If anyone were to look too closely, there was the possibility that these crimes could be judged the result of a broken system, not the actions of a few cruel workers. If the government imposed industry-wide strictures, the massive expenses involved in retrofitting could dwarf the cost of even a major recall. So Hormel decided to take an active role in attempting to curb and even criminalize such undercover investigation. In 2006, CEO Jeffrey Ettinger had provided major backing for the production of a low-budget documentary film called Your Mommy Kills Animals, which made the case for prosecuting animal-rights activist groups, particularly PETA and HSUS, as homegrown terrorist organizations under a controversial piece of legislation then before Congress, known as the Animal Enterprise Terrorism Act (AETA).
Back in September 2003, the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) had issued an early version of the law as a piece of model legislation then called the Animal and Ecological Terrorism Act. Like so many bills drafted by the free-market think tank, AETA was handed over, ready-made, to legislators with the idea that it could be introduced with minimal modification. Under the measure, it would become a felony to “enter an animal or research facility to take pictures by photograph, video camera, or other means,” and, in a flush of Patriot Act–era overreaching, those convicted of making such recordings would also be placed on a permanent “terrorist registry.”
After several years on the shelf, the bill was overhauled—modifying the ban on shooting video to “damaging or interfering with the operations of an animal enterprise,” eliminating the section on terrorism, and only imposing prison terms if protest actions resulted in a person’s injury or death. This defanged version, renamed the Animal Enterprise Terrorism Act, was repackaged to congressional leaders as a needed revision of existing laws protecting medical research from unlawful interference. Though it wouldn’t become apparent until much later, it was the beginning of lobbyists and lawmakers conflating radical Animal Liberation Front–type incidents with the undercover work done by PETA and journalists.
In an effort to persuade lawmakers, the Center for Consumer Freedom, a nonprofit front for food industry über-lobbyist Richard Berman (immortalized by 60 Minutes as “Dr. Evil” for his efforts on behalf of the tobacco and gun industries), hatched the idea of producing Your Mommy Kills Animals. Nonprofits don’t have to reveal their donor lists, so ordinarily we would have no idea who exactly was financing Berman’s efforts. However, Berman later sued the filmmakers because, contrary to his wishes, they had made a movie that was too evenhanded. Court filings in the suit revealed that Hormel was the film’s principal backer. Berman, when confronted with a canceled check for $50,000, signed by Jeffrey Ettinger, conceded in testimony that the company was a “supporter.”
In the end, the film was unnecessary. The bill sailed through the Senate by unanimous consent, and in the House only encountered resistance from Representative Dennis Kucinich of Ohio. Kucinich warned it would “have a chilling effect on the exercise of the constitutional rights of protest”—then left the chamber, allowing the bill to be ushered through. And soon, just as Kucinich had warned, the FBI announced, “The No. 1 domestic terrorism threat is the eco-terrorism, animal-rights movement,” and legal cases began stretching the application of AETA in a way that nipped at the heels of First Amendment freedoms. Most notably, a small New Jersey–based activist group, which had been the central focus of Your Mommy Kills Animals, was found guilty of conspiracy for publishing the home addresses of researchers at Huntingdon Life Sciences, an animal test lab. The jury handed down convictions for seven membe
rs of the group.
Far from backing down in the face of such aggressive legal tactics, national organizations like PETA began stepping up their efforts across the country, focusing on more and more agricultural operations, especially those owned by large meatpackers. Hormel, as a matter of routine, required employees in every part of its operation to receive training on proper treatment of hogs. But the lack of knowledge about what was happening in barns before they were acquired by Hormel and its affiliates, as well as the lack of oversight once those barns were officially under contract to the company, is evidence of just how rapidly the hog industry was growing in Iowa at that time. Not even Lynn Becker really knew what was going on inside the barns near Bayard, and Hormel didn’t want to know—so long as MowMar Farms, and hundreds of other facilities like it, kept raising more and more hogs and shipping them out on trucks in time to arrive in Austin and Fremont each morning, fully loaded and ready for slaughter.
On September 3, Jeff Kayser, the production manager at Suidae Health, called a lunchtime staff meeting and distributed the MowMar Employee Handbook. After running briefly through standard guidelines, he asked everyone to turn first to the page marked “Animal Rights Statement” and then to one marked “Mistreatment of Animals Statement.” Kayser read both statements aloud. The second warned that any employee caught abusing an animal would be fired on the spot, and any worker “observing mistreatment of animals by another employee is also subject to termination unless he/she reports the mistreatment to MowMar, LLP during that current working day.” Kayser told everyone to sign the statements, right then and there, and hand them in to him as they left the meeting.
