Cornucopia’s Take: As the conventional pork industry continues to consolidate and grow, fewer farmers are employed for less pay, property values are plummeting, the environment is increasingly polluted, and hogs are treated with a tragic lack of kindness or even humanity. Consumers can help by buying only certified organic pork, as many of these issues are mitigated by organic agriculture.

Cheap bacon and bigger barns turn Iowa inside out

Environmental Health News

by Brian Bienkowski

Big Ag moves into rural communities and upends the social and economic balance.

Chris Petersen has raised two children, thousands of hogs, a couple of rambunctious terriers and hell.

Lots of hell.

“The family farm is gone,” he says tapping his kitchen table with gnarled workingman’s hands, the fingernail on his index finger busted and purple. “And someone needs to know about it.”

He shows me a local newspaper with an above-the-fold photo of him rallying a crowd against a proposed mega-hog farm. “Top story of the year,” he says.

He speaks casually of driving presidential hopefuls around the state, offering reality. “We took John Kerry to a pile of dead hog stacked up on the side of the road, you know what he asked? ‘Why are they all dying?’ That’s when he got it,” Petersen says.

The “it”? A way of life that has industrialized over the past 30 years, undergoing a massive makeover. Hog raising has become faster, more efficient, more lucrative. Demand for pork is soaring worldwide: per capita consumption has shot up 7 pounds over the past 30 years.

To keep up, farmers raise hogs predominantly inside massive confinement barns and work for the handful of large corporations that dominate the market.

These changes have brought well-publicized pollution concerns. In Iowa, pig manure is so pervasive in waterways that the state has declared 750 of them impaired. And in North Carolina this year, researchers found pig poop bacteria on the homes of 14 out of 17 farm neighbors they tested.

But the most profound impact? Big Ag has upended rural communities, taking the fruits—meat and produce—from America’s breadbasket and leaving a host of social, economic and environmental injustices behind: Plummeting home values, pressure that drives small farmers into tight contracts or out of business, shrinking populations and a diminished political voice in small rural towns.

For Petersen, preserving the rural farm life he loves now means regularly driving 40 miles in a night to attend a rally, butting heads with industry titans, visiting DC to buck the corporate farming trend. And dealing with the occasional death threat.

The 62-year farmer still raises a couple hundred black Berkshire hogs a year at his home off a dirt road here. He rocks back in his chair with Kirby, his terrier-greyhound mix, along his side. Petersen had the chair made four inches wider so Kirby could sit with him.

He shrugs off the death threats. “Somebody has to stand up,” he says, tugging on his “America 1776” hat.

In every metric Iowa presents the poster child of hog farm consolidation and growth. Last year Iowa smashed a record—the state reached 22.4 million hogs, 7 percent higher than the year before and 30 percent higher than a decade ago, based on USDA data.

While the pork sales soar, an economic injustice plays out in Iowa communities.

Industry contraction means fewer farmers. That puts towns at an economic crossroads. The Iowa Economic Development Authority projects that due to consolidation, agriculture is the only major state industry that will lose jobs—approximately 1,850 over the next decade. Iowa, still overwhelmingly rural, had 6,321 new jobs in its 88 rural counties over the past five years, while the 11 metropolitan areas had 3 times that job growth, according to the Authority.

While small businesses in Iowa increased almost 30 percent over the past decade, the average number of non-farm small businesses per county declined about 25 percent in counties with large hog farms.

This runs counter to industry claims that consolidation and contract farming opens new markets and opportunities to farming communities.

“While ownership is much more concentrated, production is still spread out,” says David Miller, director of research at the Iowa Farm Bureau. “Do you get rich doing it? No. But hog finishing is coming back as point of entry for people that want to farm for a living.”

However, over the past four decades, the number of hog farms has plummeted by 90 percent. In 1977 the USDA counted more than a half million hog farm operations. Today the latest census reports 63,236. Our taste for cheap bacon and pork chops isn’t the only force driving this contraction. As developing countries’ economies grow, pork is one of the first indulgences of the newly empowered middle class.

Take China: Just four decades ago, meat was a rare luxury. As incomes grew, so did their taste for pork. In 20 years, from 1995 to 2015, China pork imports shot from nothing to more than 800 metric tons annually. Iowa sent more than $115 million worth of pork to China alone in 2016, a 23 percent jump from the year before.

Japan, Canada, Mexico and South Korea also love pork and represent the leading customers for Iowa, which, in 2016, exported about $1 billion of pork.

It’s hard to see all that as I drive past classic Iowa scenery—corn, and some soybeans, as far as the eye can see. Interspersed are the long hog barns. But I don’t see pigs.

In fact, you can drive for hours through farm country in the state that raises a third of the nation’s hogs and not see a single one. But they’re there—and there’s no denying their impact on the state economy.

The pork industry contributed $756 million in Iowa state taxes in 2015.

The industry provides about 550,000 jobs nationwide; 141,813 jobs in Iowa alone.

Nearly 1 in 12 Iowan’s have a job tied to pork; the industry provides more than $8 billion annually in labor income.

More broadly, about 6 percent of Iowa jobs come from livestock.

When a new barn with about 2,400 hogs goes up in Iowa, it generates roughly 14 jobs and $2.3 million in sales, part of which goes toward the approximately $1.56 billion in federal taxes the pork industry pays each year.

The industry’s “doing more with less, and years ago it became apparent to a lot of farmers, you had to grow or get out,” says Ron Birkenholz, communications director with the Iowa Pork Producers Association.

But there is backlash on the ground. People I visit—union organizers, retirees, farmers, truck stop cashiers, former teachers and a bunch of people that live at the end of the road for a reason—say these massive farms have eroded the communal aspect of rural life and push small-scale farmers out of business.

“All I ever wanted to do was farm,” Petersen says. “Then all this shit came up.”