by Ted Genoways
The industry despises the term “factory farm,” but the fact is that modern hog farming is designed on a factory model, carried out with the exactitude of a factory, and built around serving the needs of other factories—the packinghouses, the packagers, shipping warehouses—farther along the supply chain. Each step can be replicated and repeated countless times in identical or near-identical facilities almost anywhere that residents of nearby communities will allow it.
In the first years following the unofficial repeal of the vertical integration ban in Iowa, the factory model also convinced business developers, many of whom had extensive experience in logistics but no knowledge of agriculture, that raising hogs was no different than managing any other factory. To them, building hog confinements looked like easy money. After all, major meatpackers were effectively cosigning on loans worth millions of dollars by guaranteeing a constant market for years to come. It seemed like a sure thing—that is, until the whole system, under the strain of its own runaway success, threatened to fall apart.
A couple of miles north of Bayard, Iowa, at the crossroads of two wide gravel tracks, there are three enormous sow barns: the site of Lynn Becker’s MowMar Farms. It’s now operated under the name Fair Creek, though you’d never know it; there are no company signs, no indication at all of what’s going on inside. The barns gleam white in the sun and seem, by all appearances, to be well ventilated, well supplied with water from giant external holding tanks, and generally well turned-out, right down to their square corners and tightly tacked aluminum siding. Gary Weihs (pronounced WISE), the site’s original developer, saw to it that the facility was clean, inconspicuous, and odor-free. It took him two years of disputes and disagreements to get a permit recommendation from the board of supervisors for Greene County, so he wanted to be sure there were no complaints once the facility was built.
After spending years working with large corporations like Pepsi, Procter & Gamble, and Monsanto in operational management, Weihs had decided to return to his native Iowa. He planned to combine the experience he had gained growing up on his father’s hog farm outside of Harlan with the statistical analysis of three decades of corn pricing and hog yields he had performed to complete his MBA at Harvard Business School. “We flat price everything,” Weihs told the National Hog Farmer, “so that we make a little bit per head and base our profits on quantity.” Under the name Natural Pork Production II (NPPII), he lined up investors and, when he had the start-up money in place, began building facilities, about one per year. The three-barn complex in Bayard was the fifth unit—a 6,000-sow farrow-to-wean operation, where returns would be generated for investors by selling roughly 130,000 weaned pigs each year to finishing operations at $36 apiece. All told, NPPII facilities were supplying about fifteen different hog farmers with close to 800,000 weaned pigs, for gross annual earnings of nearly $29 million—but all while carrying precarious overhead, including roughly $5 million in construction costs per site and millions more invested in the breeding sows housed inside.
To make the ambitious plan possible, Weihs enlisted Daryl Olsen, president and CEO of the Audubon-Manning Veterinary Clinic (AMVC) in Audubon, Iowa, to oversee building and operations. AMVC’s name makes it sound like a small mom-and-pop animal hospital, but it is, in reality, one of the ten largest pork producers in the United States, with more sows in the mid-2000s than Tyson or Hormel and already in well-established relationships with, by Weihs’s estimate, more than a dozen finishing operations. If Weihs could scrape together the start-up capital for a facility, Olsen could staff it quickly and provide guaranteed buyers.
But by 2003, when the facility was first proposed in Bayard, many Iowans had grown suspicious of factory farming. Though Weihs was the first hog developer to come into Greene County, many builders—particularly Smithfield’s Prestage Farms from North Carolina—had been erecting mega-barns in other parts of northern Iowa. Bayard residents had observed the problems there and wanted to see NPPII’s plans to mitigate environmental impact from waste and to hear how the animals would be cared for. Weihs pledged that NPPII could “raise 800,000 hogs a year and pollute less than my dad used to” and that the hogs would be “treated like royalty.” In describing the facility to the Midwest Ag Journal, Weihs made it sound like a paradise for hogs: “We put them in separate crates, so they have their own water and feed and they can’t fight. That way, even the weaker ones are productive.” When some countered that Weihs seemed to be describing factory farming, he went on the offensive. “We are a factory,” he said, “and there’s nothing wrong with that. Would you want your car to not be made in a factory? There’s quality control in a factory. There’s good treatment of people and animals in a factory.” He argued that the meat from factory farms, thanks to hormones and antibiotics, was leaner and, because of high-volume, could be produced at a lower cost. “So the consumer gets cheap pork loins, and lots of them, and they’re high quality,” he said. “I think it’s the American way.”
But in 2006, everything changed. The rollback of Iowa’s vertical-integration ban created an instantaneous boom in the building of hog confinements, which signaled an influx of start-up capital but also attracted dramatically more competitors. In 2000, there had been thirty-eight applications statewide to build confinements large enough to require permitting through the Iowa Department of Natural Resources. In 2005, the year Smithfield was given an exemption to the law, that number vaulted to 203 applications. The following year, with Cargill and Hormel now granted the same exemption, the number jumped again to 318. In under two years, Iowa went from having an outright ban on corporate involvement in hog farming to having more than half of its 17 million hogs in confinements owned by or under exclusive contract to three large meatpackers.
In the midst of this period of sudden competition from corporations, the per-bushel price of corn shot up from $2 to more than $3. New supports encouraging the production of ethanol had instantly increased the demand for corn. Meanwhile, in late 2006, the USDA revised its harvest estimate downward by 200 million bushels because of weather. These factors, combined with the smallest on-hand corn reserve since the drought years in the Clinton era, sparked a run in commodities speculation, driving the price to heights it hadn’t seen in more than a decade—and defying the downward trajectory of prices seen since the early 1970s. Depending on whether you were a corn grower or a livestock producer counting on that feed, the New York Times wrote, “you have daydreams—or nightmares—of that $5 mark.”
“When corn started going from two dollars to four dollars, it was pretty clear that it wasn’t going to be profitable,” Weihs told me. He sold out his personal interest in NPPII and moved on to developing other industries. Meanwhile, feed prices continued to soar on climbing energy costs, reaching as much as $8 per bushel of corn, and suddenly the model Weihs had sold to investors as a can’t-miss business opportunity proved utterly unable to withstand the market shift. Investors started pulling out—and, soon, NPPII was in a position of needing to sell its facilities quickly, just to keep its backers from ruin. “Eight-dollar corn has a way of doing that,” Weihs told me, but he defended his original business plan. “The economic models weren’t built for even four-dollar corn, much less eight-dollar corn. And unfortunately, we got it wrong. As a developer, I was looking back and corn was two and three dollars for thirty years. I just didn’t see it coming. That was my mistake.”
By May 2008, rumors were flying among the workers at the sow barns that NPPII was on the brink of bankruptcy. According to at least one person who toured the facility during this time, the “quality of the husbandry” had begun to decline, and, according to another source, things had finally gotten so bad that a group of workers went to the farm manager, Jordan Anderson, with their concerns. Anderson initially claimed not to know what they were talking about, then laughed them off, saying there was nothing to worry about “as long as PETA don’t find out.” When one worker, identified by others only as Dave, finally threatened to report his concer
ns directly to Daryl Olsen at AMVC, he was terminated. Soon after, PETA received a message from the fired worker, describing the conditions at NPPII in stark detail. Overmatched and undertrained, workers were often kicking sows and beating them with herding boards or gate rods just to move them from one part of the facility to another. But, more than that, in the void left by a lack of management, some workers seemed to be finding a sadistic joy in taking out their frustrations on the hogs.
“This is cruel treatment of the animals,” Dave wrote to PETA, “and I thought you should know.”
Chapter 8
DON’T BE AFRAID TO HURT THEM
When Robert Ruderman showed up at Natural Pork Production II’s sow barns to apply for a job in June 2008, he didn’t know anything about the history of the facility or even who they were supplying. He was an undercover investigator, working for PETA, and knew only that a whistle-blower had alleged that animal abuses were occurring at the threadbare operation. Ruderman’s cover story was thin—a vague account of meeting a girl online, coming to Iowa to be with her, but then things not working out. He was hired immediately, no questions asked.
Ruderman spent the morning of June 10, his first day, watching training videos, but by the afternoon he was assigned to shadow Shelly Mauch, a senior employee who worked in the farrowing facility: a single barn accommodating 15 rooms with 68 stalls per room—and each stall housing a sow that was either close to birthing or had recently given birth. Mauch explained that about 15 litters were born each day, with an average of 11 piglets per litter. Roughly 20 percent of those were classified under one of four headings: abortions, mummies, runts, or deformed. An abortion is a piglet that has developed fully but is born dead. A mummy has died earlier in the pregnancy and is born still wrapped in its embryonic sac. These dead deliveries along with birthing waste—placentas, umbilical cords—were deposited in the dead room at the end of each day and collected for composting. Runts and piglets born with deformities—displaced hips, spraddled legs, tumors—were more problematic. They had to be thumped, the euphemism for killing a piglet by smashing its skull against the concrete floor.
Of the remaining three-quarters of each litter, all had their tails docked—the males were also castrated with the same metal clippers—and sprayed with an iodine solution to prevent infection. According to Ruderman’s daily logs, the piglets’ screeching during those procedures was so loud that workers wore earplugs to protect their hearing. “Never do I hear the piglets cry and screech like that at any other time during their stay on the farm,” he wrote, not even when they are weaned from their mothers after twenty days and loaded up in trucks to go to finishing operations.
In the weeks that followed, Ruderman managed to shoot undercover video of piglets as they were castrated, including some with unrecognized scrotal hernias, dubbed “ruptures,” whose intestines would fully protrude when snipped. He got close-ups of bloody piglets after being thumped—skull-crushed, paddling their legs and twitching, gasping for air, as others were piled on top of them in giant bins. He secretly made detailed transcripts of AMVC’s own records: the thousands of piglets tail-docked, the two hundred thumped each week. But none of what he captured was illegal—or even frowned upon. The industry insists that tails and testicles are clipped to prevent them from being bitten off by littermates and becoming infected. And thumping is not only legal but also an industry-sanctioned method of “humane euthanasia.” In fact, what legal protection does exist is a law requiring that piglets euthanized by blunt-force trauma must receive only one blow. And, again and again, Ruderman noted: “I did not see any piglets thumped more than once.”
But then, on June 27, Ruderman was helping to take sows out of their farrowing stalls for herding back to the breed barn. One of the sows was moving out of her stall and into the sheltered hallway between the two buildings when Marvin Mauch, the manager of the breed barn and Shelly Mauch’s father, reared back and struck the sow hard across the back with his herding cane. Ruderman was shocked; according to his notes, Mauch had raised the cane “like a tennis serve” and then brought it down “like an ax.” The sow squealed and rushed ahead into the hallway.
But Marvin’s real anger, it appears, was directed at an intern who had seen him smoking in the breed barn—a violation of Iowa law—and reported him to Jordan Anderson. In the lunchroom, Marvin confronted the intern. According to Ruderman, Marvin shouted that he hated snitches and made physical threats. The intern shouted, “I can’t handle this!” and stormed out, never returning. The next day workers learned that Marvin had been suspended, pending an investigation both by AMVC and the Department of Health. Not long after, Marvin was fired “for harassment and intimidation of an employee,” and the intern was persuaded to return to work at another farm. “This is a small victory for the animals,” Ruderman wrote in his log, “as Marvin was likely the cruelest, most abusive member of the staff.”
But by then, Ruderman had noticed that many sows arriving in the farrowing barn from the breed barn bore the signs of abuse—red welts across their backs from the herding canes and unexplained bloody gouges in their rumps. Even with Marvin gone, the breed barn was little improved with Richard Ralston now in temporary command. He wasn’t cruel like Marvin, but one of his fellow workers told me, bluntly, “Richard was a moron.” He was nervous around the five-hundred-pound sows and often indecisive in ways that endangered coworkers and harmed the hogs.
On one day, for example, Ruderman watched Ralston attempt to put down two seriously ill sows by using a captive-bolt gun (CBG). According to Ruderman’s log, “He retrieved the CBG and loaded a small metal shell into the device. The first CBG shot, administered into the middle of her forehead, did not kill the sow. The sow was still very much alive, on the ground, moving her head and torso and kicking her limbs. She appeared to be writhing in pain as a result of the first shot. She grunted and wailed. The second shot further debilitated her and she died about a minute later.” The second killing went much the same.
PETA made the unusual decision to dispatch a second investigator, in hopes of getting him hired on in the breed barn where Ralston could be monitored more easily. But PETA would need to work fast. By then, Jordan Anderson had called a meeting to confirm the rumors: Natural Pork Production II was trying to sell out. Prospective buyers would be coming to inspect the place, so everyone was instructed to keep the blood from thumping and docking cleaned up. And they should be aware that new ownership might mean new management; everyone’s job was potentially on the line. In late July, Ruderman recorded that a buyer had been found. In his notes, the name is entered first as “Momeyer,” then “Momar,” and finally the correct name: MowMar Farms.
The history of the Becker family farm in Minnesota could double as a microcosm of what has occurred in the hog industry as a whole in the last half century. Lynn’s grandfather, Walter, was just six years old when he moved with his parents to the farm west of Northrop in 1920—and he never left, building a second home for his own family a stone’s throw from the original farmhouse. When Walter took over in the 1950s, the operation was still an old-fashioned diversified farm, raising cattle, hogs, and chickens, along with a variety of crops. But in 1966, he decided to build a hog confinement, maybe the first in Martin County, with slotted floors and a pit below to catch manure.
By today’s standards, Walter’s farm was still quite small when he passed it on to his son, Larry, in the 1980s: just two hundred sows, which were only confined during nursing. But Larry named the operation LB Pork and began expanding capacity enough to make room for his sons Lynn and Lonny as partners. Larry built a gestation barn, bringing the sows permanently indoors, and added a two-ton on-farm gristmill, so that the family could grind its own feed. In 1995, Lynn returned from the University of Minnesota with his new wife, Julie, both with degrees in agriculture business management; they took over daily operations for the family, bringing the latest in ag science with them.
Lynn quickly revamped their whole system. The family
had been using three “continuous-flow” nursery barns—a simple method of maximizing barn space by moving pigs from one pen to the next as they grew. But diseases that once were held in check when pigs were exposed to Minnesota winters now flourished in temperature-controlled confinement barns. When a spate of Methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) tore through the barns in the winter of 1996–97, Becker decided to switch to a two-step process: gestation to weaning in one set of barns, finishing in another.
He also set about aggressively expanding. Within five years, LB Pork was a full-scale, farrow-to-finish operation with 1,500 sows housed at two sites and more than 32,000 weaned piglets at 37 finishing barns spanning 12 sites. LB Pork was also part owner in Camalot, a 2,200 sow unit, and annually bought 15,000 heads of “isoweans”—piglets that are medicated and weaned early to prevent them from being exposed to adult illnesses. Between their own facilities and facilities they managed as contract growers, LB Pork had roughly 24,000 pigs on inventory at any one time. They even launched Granja Becker, a 500-sow farrow-to-finish operation in Minas Gerais, Brazil. As dramatic as the expansion of LB Pork seems, it is reflective of a larger trend in the pork industry—one where hog producers either had to choose to keep their operations small and make only small profits or get big and do their best to compete amid (and sometimes against) the forces of industrialized agriculture.