In my visits to modern pig factories, I keep thinking about pigs I have met, social critters much like Albert Schweitzer’s Josephine, very capable of warm relationships with people. I remember their friendly grunts and their enjoyment of human contact. This is why I have such a hard time accepting the advice of contemporary pork producers:
“Forget the pig is an animal. Treat him just like a machine in a factory. Schedule treatments like you would lubrication. Breeding season like the first step in an assembly line. And marketing like the delivery of finished goods.”
Modern pig farmers, who like to be called “pork production engineers,” pride themselves on having a clear purpose. The trade journal Hog Farm Management put it concisely:
“What we are really trying to do is modify the animal’s environment for maximum profit.”
Even if an individual pig raiser feels an empathy with the animals in his charge and has a desire to do things in a more natural way, he is today practically forced to go along with the agribusiness momentum. The trend is set. Trade journals like Hog Farm Management, National Hog Farmer, Successful Farming, and Farm Journal are constantly telling farmers to “Raise Pork the Modern Way.”
The trade journals tend to be downright hostile to anything but the most mechanized agribusiness ways of producing pork. Recently, National Hog Farmer became irate at the USDA, and editorialized, “Why don’t we just turn the Department of Agriculture over to the do-gooders?” What on earth had the USDA done to provoke such a terrifying thought? It had proposed spending two hundredths of one percent of its budget for two small projects that would have encouraged small-scale, local production of food, such as roadside markets and community gardens in urban areas.
The trade magazines, it must be remembered, derive their income from advertisers, and these are just the people who profit from the swing to total confinement systems of pork production—the huge commercial interests who sell equipment and drugs to the farmers. They’re the ones who take out full page ads and pay for space in the journals which tell the farmers “How To Make $12,000 Sitting Down!” That’s quite a way to catch the attention of an exhausted farmer, who is only too glad to sit down at all after laboring on his feet all day.
So he reads on. And what does he find? The way to success in today’s pork production world is through buying a “Bacon Bin.” This wonderful new doorway to success, he is told, “is not just a confinement house . . . It is a profit producing pork production system.”’’
Actually, the Bacon Bin is a completely automated system whose designers clearly have overcome any vestiges of the anachronistic idea that pigs are sentient beings. In a typical Bacon Bin setup, 500 pigs are crammed into individual cages, each getting seven square feet of living space. It’s difficult for us to conceive how confined this is. Every pig spends his entire life cramped into a space less than one-third the size of a twin bed.
The Bacon Bin system comes complete with slatted floors and automated feeding systems, so that it takes only one person to run the whole show. Another advantage of the system is that, with no room to move about, the pigs can’t burn up calories doing “useless” things like walking, and that means faster and cheaper weight gain, and so more profit.
A typical example of Bacon Bin farming was happily described in The Farm Journal beneath the title: “Pork Factory Swings Into Production.” The article begins proudly:
“Hogs never see daylight in this half-million dollar fan-owing-to- finish complex near Worthington, Minnesota.”
This is something to brag about?