Corporate Hog Farms expose

A Saint Louis Missouri station, KSDK, aired a piece on corporate hog farms on the Tuesday, July 12, 10pm news. For those who missed it and those of us not in Missouri, it is available to watch on line at:
http://ksdk.com/news/news_article.aspx?storyid=81786

I will paste, below, the written web story. But the video piece concentrates more on the cruelty aspects, including footage of sow gestation crates (individual cages so small that the pigs can hardly move), horrible overcrowding in communal enclosures, and dying pigs. Watch the story on line if you can. Most importantly, please thank the station.

KSDK takes comments at: comments [at] ksdk.com

If you are in Missouri and part of KSDK's potential audience, include your address in your email to make that clear. But since the story is posted on line, appreciative comments from elsewhere are definitely useful. Please write.

For those who cannot watch on line, here is the web text version, which to some extent tells the same story:
Corporate Hog Farms
created: 7/12/2005 10:08:22 PM

By Mike Owens
Investigative Reporter

(KSDK) - Tens of thousands of corporate hogs are being bred and fed in Missouri, with thousands more expected, as one of the nation's biggest hog producers plans an expansion.

But detractors say the booming hog business has a downside: it hurts the environment and the family farm.

Until the mid-1980s, hogs were raised by small farmers. Then corporations stepped in and started vertically integrating the pig industry.

The first big pig farmers were grain companies. They would grow the grain to feed to the pigs and would peddle the final product. The experts say that's pretty much how it is today, with Cargill Pork and Premium Standard Farms weighing in as the two biggest operators in Missouri.

However, Missouri has a law which prevents corporate farming in all but three counties. Those three counties, all near the Iowa border, are home to tens of thousands of hogs. Iowa is home to the meat packing plants where the hogs are slaughtered.

But the hog companies are able to get around the law against corporate ownership of farm land, by hiring farmers to raise their hogs. In fact, on those so-called contract farms, there are prominent signs: the swine on these premises are owned by Cargill Pork.

The farmers are reduced to caring for the hogs, breeding them, feeding them and cleaning up after them. One critic of the system says contract farmers have been reduced to being hog house janitors.

Rhonda Perry of Columbia runs the Missouri Rural Crisis Center. Perry says the big hog farms are hurting Missouri's family farmers by locking them out of the pig markets.

Perry says the only people benefiting from the big hog operations are the companies themselves and retailers. She says being hurt are farmers, end consumers and the environment.

Perry says to help farmers, her group has set up Patchwork Family Farms, which sells its own brand of farm raised pork. She says its pork tastes better than that which is raised in a covered, enclosed hog barn.

While Perry fights on that front, there's the environmental issue. Terry Spence is a farmer in northeast Missouri, near Clarence. One of his nearest neighbors is a Premium Standard Farms hog farm. He's been fighting with the company for years over spills from the farm.

Spence says at least two spills happen a month from the liquid waste generated at the farm. However, state officials with the Department of Natural Resources, say the spills are contained on the property in holding basins, and the sludge never makes it into the waterways.

The liquid waste is a mix of urine and feces from the hogs. The waste is kept in huge lagoons until they are full. Then, the waste is spread on nearby farm fields as fertilizer. However, critics say that's too much waste for too little land, and the runoff can cause problems in nearby creeks and streams.

Spence says he reviews every report issued by the state about his neighbors, and plans to fight any efforts by the companies to expand.

During the production of this story, we wanted to tour several of the big hog operations, but we were denied access. The companies declined, citing health concerns for their pigs. A spokesman for Cargill Pork declined an interview, saying a television story is not the best way for the company to tell its story.

To get pictures of the inside of hog farms, we turned to the Humane Farming Association, a group which tries to change farming practices to make it better for the animals.

The chief investigator for the association is Bob Baker, who lives in St. Louis. He shared with us video tapes that his organization shows to supporters. The video, according to Baker, was shot in Nebraska and South Dakota.

The images show hogs falling into cracks and holes in the floors of their hog barns. It shows animals with tumors. It shows baby pigs which have fallen into waste pits, drowning in waste.

Baker says the images from the other states reflect what is happening in Missouri today, including the practice of "thumping." In that practice, sickly pigs are picked up by their rear legs, and their heads "thumped" onto the concrete floors of the holding barns. Baker, of the Humane Farming Association, says the practice is improper, and should be repudiated by the pork producers.

The Missouri Pork Association is an affiliation of pork producers in the state. The spokesman for the group took three days to return our telephone calls. When he did, he advised us that it would be unlikely he could help us in our story.

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