In February and March, when pork-processing plants around the country were operating at full capacity — such as JBS in Worthington, MN, and Smithfield, in Sioux Falls, SD — each could process upwards of 20,000 hogs per day and 100,000 to 110,000 per week. However, because employees work in close quarters, the coronavirus swept through both facilities. As a result, they were forced to reduce their operating hours and then shut down entirely from mid-April until early May, which closed the market that most farmers relied on when their hogs were ready to ship and sell. Without this usual buyer for hundreds of thousands of pigs, farmers who, during the previous four months, had farrowed or bought feeder pigs and then treated, cared for, and fed them to get them to selling weight had few alternatives, all of them financially bad.
During normal times and under ideal conditions, a farmer loads a semi with about 165 fat hogs, each weighing 265 to 300 pounds — the weight that gets the premium price and the best return on the farmer’s investment — and hauls them directly to one of these plants. However, if one or more hogs weigh over 300 pounds, the plant pays the farmer less — anywhere from $.50 per hundred weight less for a pig slightly heavier than 300 pounds but as much as $10 to $15 less per hundred weight for one weighing in excess of 360 pounds. This means, of course, that even though that 360-pound pig ate more feed, which cost the farmer more, and produces more saleable meat when processed, which is good for the plant’s bottom line, the plant pays the farmer significantly less — $35 to $55 less per head — for a heavy hog than for one under 300 pounds. In the midst of the coronavirus pandemic in the U.S., which has forced farmers to keep and feed pigs longer than usual and then get paid less because they’re heavier, this was and is a serious economic problem, one that can lead to disaster for hog producers trying to stay in business.
With processing plants accepting fewer market-ready hogs, farmers have limited options for cutting their losses and surviving financially. Some feed their pigs less or change their rations so they gain weight more slowly and then hope that the processing plants reopen and reach full capacity before their hogs are heavier than the preferred market weight. Others, rather than spending more money on feed for pigs that they won’t be able to sell and that will quickly get too heavy and be worth even less, simply kill and dispose of them.
For example, this spring for about three straight weeks, Christiansen Farms, based near Sleepy Eye, MN, destroyed their entire production of 65,000 pigs, each weighing 50-120 pounds. In two months this one large hog operation killed and composted about 350,000 pigs.
Other hog producers, rather than just destroying and disposing of hogs, tried to find alternative places to sell those ready for market. One southern Minnesota farmer hauled 200 pigs to a butcher shop in Wisconsin, then brought the meat back to Minnesota, and sold it to grocery stores in small towns outside the Twin Cities. Another producer from Northfield, MN, advertised on Facebook, which helped him sell 25-40 pigs per week for a couple of months. While this is clearly better than simply destroying them, trying to sell 480-500 pigs per week in small lots of 20-25 is extremely inefficient, time-consuming, and more expensive than selling several semi loads of 165 hogs each to a processing plant.
This was the economic environment in the upper Midwest at the end of June when I relocated from Pennsylvania to Walnut Grove, Minnesota, where my brother Ken and his wife Paulette live. Having worked in agriculture in the southern half of the state for over forty years, Ken knows the hog industry inside and out, and during that time he’s seen production methods change significantly and grain, cattle, and hog prices fluctuate wildly. Their close friends, Brian and Sue Johnson and their son Ben, farm several hundred acres northwest of town and raise hogs. So when the opportunity arose to use rather than simply dispose of one of Brian’s pigs that had zero market value, Ken, his son Michael, his grandson Carsyn, and I met Ben and Brian out at the farm one recent Wednesday afternoon.
Inside one of Brian’s long hog barns, they sorted out a pig, drove him down the alleyway to an enclosure just outside, where Michael used a wooden panel to push him tight against one wall, and Ken shot the pig in the head with a .22. Michael then took one end of the log chain that was attached to the loader of Brian’s 3020 John Deere tractor and looped it around a hind leg. With the loader raised so the dead pig hung head-down above the ground, Ken bled him by making a deep cut in the pig’s throat and then cut down the length of the belly and removed the entrails. With the carcass still hanging from the loader, Brian drove the tractor to the machine shed, where there were knives, fresh water, a table, and a concrete floor on which to work.
This is where Ken, Michael, Carsyn, and Ben skinned the pig, removed the head and feet, and disassembled the carcass into various cuts: ribs, hams, shoulders, and loins. After washing all the pieces and separating them into different black garbage bags, they laid them in the back of Ben’s pickup so that he could take them to his farmhouse and put them in the freezer in his basement.
This was the second hog in a week they had butchered in Brian’s shed, and while the financial benefits for Brian are negligible (he typically has about 2,500 pigs in his barns at any given time) and the act of killing, skinning, and cutting apart a living animal might strike some people as brutal and inhumane, the pig was killed quickly and did not suffer. Plus, rather than just destroying healthy pigs, grinding their bodies into compost, and burying them, they now serve the precise purpose for which Brian and all farmers raise them: as food for people.
Still, the death of this one pig should make a couple things clear. First, this country’s food production, processing, and distribution system is far too dependent on a few large corporations. As a result, a rapidly spreading virus can disrupt the food chain and leave many consumers staring at bare shelves in grocery stores. But even more worrying is how recent events have exposed the inability of many Americans, who pride themselves on being independent and self-reliant, to provide for themselves the bare necessities of life, particularly food and shelter, because they lack either the means or the know-how — something that those living in rural areas, particularly ranchers and farmers, can do even when money is tight, markets are unreliable, and government is incompetent.
