American Farms, American Food by Hudson John C.;Laingen Christopher R.; & Christopher R. Laingen

Author:Hudson, John C.;Laingen, Christopher R.; & Christopher R. Laingen
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Lexington Books/Fortress Academic

Figure 6.3 Hogs in a present-day confinement barn. Source: Photograph courtesy of author.

As the production of meat came under the increasing influence of grocery-store chains packers began to focus on several principles that retailers demanded:

•the product must be uniform in quality, color, flavor, and texture.

•it must pass the highest possible standards of healthfulness.

•it must be available over the entire year.

•its presence on a given store’s shelves on a given day has to be assured.

Imposition of these standards by one meat producer obviously led to the adoption of similar standards by all others as well.

Once the drive toward product standardization and safety was under way the inherent economies of scale in hog raising became evident. The way was clear to create hog feeding operations of colossal size, surpassing anything that had been known before. In the 1960s, Wendell Murphy, a hog farmer in eastern North Carolina, began to organize his hog production along these lines (Hart 2003). Murphy concentrated more than twenty times as many animals in a single operation than had been the practice in times past. He constructed a grain elevator to store feed grain imported by rail from the Midwest, and built what became the model of the CAFO hog farm. Murphy was also a North Carolina state legislator and he helped influence changes in state laws that would shelter CAFOs from the force of anti-pollution rules that were increasingly being enforced by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. Murphy became a lightning rod attracting anti-CAFO criticism.

A flurry of other changes accompanied the rise of the new style of feeding operations. Since the early days of hog farming, animals had been owned by the farmer who fed them until they were sold to a stock buyer or on the open market. Major meat packers wished to control their sources of animals more completely than that, however, and they began using a variation of the production contract arrangement that had originally been applied in the poultry industry.

Today nearly all hogs processed by the major packers are owned by the company from embryo to birth to slaughter (Harper 2009). The hogs are the product of controlled genetics, they are born in specialized swine breeding facilities, and they are delivered to individual farmer-feeders who will raise them. The intermediary role is performed by a contractor or integrator who delivers the young pigs, provides their feed, and extends various production services to the farmers. The animals are sold at a predetermined weight that the meat processor desires.

Hogs still are raised on family-owned and -operated farms, but the farmer who feeds the animals to market weight typically no longer owns them. Vertical integration, which had long been regarded as impractical in American agriculture, took over the production of hogs in the 1990s. Product standardization can again be identified as the driving force behind the change. Producing a consistently high-quality product demands a high degree of conformity when many hands are doing the work. Accountability is necessary in such a system as well, such as when a health issue is raised and a product recall is instituted.

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