Edition: U.S. / Global

Growth of Factory-Like Hog Farms Divides Rural Areas of the Midwest

Published: June 24, 1998

Clouds the color of gunmetal billowed across the South Dakota sky as Merlyn Steever slouched in a metal chair in a now-empty barn, his arms folded in weary resignation.

''I give up,'' Mr. Steever, a 50-year-old farmer, said as he waited for the trucks to load the last of his pigs and take them to slaughter, ending his career as a hog producer. ''I just can't compete with the big corporates. I don't see how any farmer can.''

The rapid growth of big hog factories, which are more akin to the corporate efficiency of General Motors than the bibbed-overall ethos of American Gothic, has emerged as perhaps the most contentious issue in the nation's farm country.

While some big-scale corporate hog farming has existed for years, it is now starting to dominate this sector of agriculture, with companies increasingly owning the hog plants, the slaughterhouses and the distribution centers.

The desperation of smaller farmers, along with anger among townspeople in rural areas offended by the foul smell of the huge hog barns, has stirred debate in a dozen states that are now considering plans to curb such plants, which can threaten underground water supplies. A ballot initiative in South Dakota, to be voted on in November, would effectively outlaw corporate livestock production. And Gov. Frank Keating of Oklahoma recently signed a bill restricting big hog operations.

On the Federal level, the Environmental Protection Agency is preparing to work with the states to impose strict pollution-discharge permits on all large farms by 2005. The agency said in March that it would propose regulations that could range from the installation of equipment to capture methane fumes to changing the composition of animal feed to control certain nutrients in the waste.

''It's nasty,'' said Barbara Dunham, 37, whose house, about a half mile from a big hog plant in central Illinois, saw its assessed property value drop 30 percent recently because of the smell. ''It gets so bad you can't go outside. And you have to scrub down your inside walls.''

Defenders of the big hog plants, where thousands of hogs are confined in small pens, say the producers can scarcely be blamed for delivering the kind of lean, low-cost pork that American consumers demand. The hog companies say they take every precaution to insure health and safety. And they say they contribute mightily to state tax coffers and rural regions that are starving for jobs.

''This issue has divided communities and turned neighbor against neighbor,'' said John Bixler, a spokesman for Dakota Rural Action, an advocacy group for small farmers in South Dakota.

Premium Standard Farms, which is owned by the Continental Grain Company and is the nation's third largest pork producer, pays about $200 million in income to about 3,000 workers in Missouri, according to a study by the University of Missouri.

Randy Mahoney, a 31-year-old supervisor for the hog company, said that when he was a teen-ager in the early 1980's, he watched the pain on his father's face when the family farm was foreclosed.

''It's a story you could hear from a lot of people around here,'' said Mr. Mahoney, who makes nearly $40,000 a year and never has to worry about prices on the hog markets. ''I never dreamed I could stay close to home, continue doing the kind of work I'm doing and make a good living.''

Before leaving work, Mr. Mahoney must shower and change clothes. Pig manure, he concedes, stinks.

That is the smell of money, say the hog plants' defenders, echoing a refrain that has been used for generations to defend steel mills, oil refineries and rubber incinerators.

To people whose image of raising pigs evokes Old McDonald's farm, the sight of big confinement operations would conjure something more from George Orwell. For example, every steel building at a Premium Standard plant near Harris, Mo., houses 1,150 hogs -- 48 pens 20 feet long and 9 feet wide, each holding about 25 pigs. The pigs are genetically designed to produce an identical cut of meat. They are inseminated artificially, and their hooves never leave concrete.

Many of the independent farmers also use this confinement method, reducing labor and saving space. The bottoms of the pens are slatted, so that waste drops and collects in a lagoon. The water, which is full of hog waste, is then spread over cropland as fertilizer.

Craig Hoogestraat, who farms his family's century-old hog operation near Lennox, a city of about 1,700 people in southeastern South Dakota, moves through the hog pens to check on the newborn piglets suckling sows in the small pens.

Mr. Hoogestraat, a former teacher who said he returned to farming after realizing that pigs were better behaved than junior high school students, leaves an oldies rock music station playing on a radio in the hog pen. Asked why he selected a music station for the pigs, he deadpanned: ''Because they get upset if they hear the broadcasts of the hog reports.''

Despite his upbeat ways, Mr. Hoogestraat worried aloud that if hog prices reached much lower than $35 per hundredweight -- the cost per 100 pounds of a live hog -- he did not know how he could stay in business.