Pigs in the Supreme Court

The New York Times reports (here) on Monday's Supreme Court decision that unanimously struck down a California law that prevented the slaughter of non-ambulatory animals. Justice Elena Kagan wrote the opinion, which held that the Federal Meat Inspection Act (a result, in part, of Upton Sinclair's The Jungle back at the start of the twentieth century) preempted the state law. Kagan's opinion focused on pigs, with the justice calculating that between 100,000 and one million pigs annually become unable to walk after being delivered to slaughterhouses. Under the California law--one prompted by a Humane Society of the United States undercover investigation of animals being kicked, dragged, and prodded to slaughter--these "downer animals" would have to be immediately euthanized and not killed for consumption. The Supreme Court's decision puts paid to the idea, put forth by U.S. Court of Appeals, Ninth Circuit, Chief Judge Alex Kozinski, in support of the California law, that "States are free to decide which animals may be turned into meat." The current system, in which federal meat inspectors decide what is done with "downers," remains in place. By the way, the USDA estimates that over 28 million hogs will be slaughtered in the first quarter of 2012 in the United States.

Smithfield, NAFTA, and Mexico

David Bacon has a long investigative piece (here) in the January 23rd issue of The Nation that shows the implications of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) for farmers in Veracruz, Mexico. Although you wouldn't know it from the title--"How U.S. Policies Fueled Mexico's Great Migration"--the entire essay focuses on transformations in the North American pork industry. In short, when NAFTA opened up Mexican markets to pork imports from U.S. companies like Smithfield, Mexican pork prices dropped 56 percent and approximately 4,000 Mexican pig farms had to shut down, displacing workers and devastating local economies. This in turn fueled migration to the U.S., both illegal and legal through the H2-A visa program that allowed U.S. agricultural employers to bring workers into the country on employment contracts. Ironically, many of these Veracruzano pig farmers and slaughterhouse workers wound up in North Carolina, where they got jobs in Smithfield's Tar Heel slaughterhouse.

Bacon's well-researched article looks at efforts to unionize the Tar Heel plant and the anti-immigrant climate and crackdowns by agents of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) that have subsequently driven many of these Mexican workers from North Carolina. The photo above, one that accompanies the on-line version of Bacon's article, is of a market in North Carolina named for and catering to these Mexican migrants, although many of these businesses have lost customers as they have fled the state.

Although it is less central to the article, Bacon also examines the environmental and economic effects of large scale pig farming operations in Mexico, especially those at the plant known as Granjas Carroll de Mexico in Veracruz's Perote valley, one now owned and operated by Smithfield. Throughout he is interested in activism on both sides of the border dedicated to improving people's living and working conditions, activism that has to be transnational because it is responding to global trade and transnational corporations. Overall, this is a great read and contains material I wish I'd been able to include in PIG, although I do tell similar stories about the implications of the expansion of industrial-scale pig farming for local communities and traditions in North America and throughout the globe.

“I always had brains on my arms”: A Medical Mystery in Minnesota

The New York Times ran an incredibly interesting (and disgusting) story about a mysterious illness striking workers at Quality Pork Processors in Minnesota. Denise Grady's piece "A Medical Mystery Unfolds In Minnesota" (here) describes an illness that ultimately struck 12 workers. A bit of epidemiological detective work led to the tentative conclusion that the thing all these workers had in common was "blowing brains," the process at the "head table" where hogs' brains are blasted out of their skulls with compressed air so that they can be barreled and sold overseas. As Dr. Ruth Lynfield, the Minnesota State Epidemiologist noted, this produces "aerosolization of brain tissue" which then created an immune system response in the workers exposed to it. The Times article is well worth reading in full. As it turns out, most of the workers are getting better now that steps have been taken to reduce the exposure to "aerosolized pig brains" and a course of treatment for the neurological symptoms has been discovered.

Image of Quality Pork Processors by Nate Howard for The New York Times.

The $800 Holiday Ham

The Newport News (Virginia) Daily Press ran an excellent article (here) the other day about the arrival of Jamon Iberico in time for Christmas. After years of bureaucratic wrangling, Don Harris, proprietor of LaTienda, a Spanish food importer, managed to finally get USDA regulators to sign off on the importation of these legendary hams made from free-range, black-footed Iberico hogs that are fattened on acorns.

I first heard about these pigs (and hams) in Peter Kaminsky's book Pig Perfect (2005). At $87 per pound, I guess I won't be sampling any Jamon Iberico anytime soon, although Harris notes that they are hoping to eventually sell packaged slices of this ham for regular folks. According to the article. about 100 people have put down deposits on these hams, with 300 on the list for an even better version, the "Jamon Iberico de Bellota," which should arrive next year and sell for $1500 each.

To promote Spanish artisanal pork, Harris' company has set up a website, jamon.com, which is "dedicated to the fine art of the ham." The photo above is by Philippe Desmazes, AFP/Getty Images. The caption reads "A man checks Iberian hams hanging in a drying room at the Embutidos y Jamones Fermin farm in La Alberca near Salamanca. The Spanish Jamon Iberico (Iberian ham) is the name which is given exclusively to hams from the Iberian pig breed. The secret of the tase of Iberian ham is down to the pigs diet of acorns which they live on all year round."

Blue Ear Disease (PRRS) Outbreak in Asia

There was a great article (here) in the Seattle Times last week about another outbreak of Blue Ear Disease among pigs in China. It begins with the story of Lo Jinyuan (pictured left), who told the reporter regarding his pigs that "before we knew something was wrong, they were all dead." Blue Ear Disease, also known as Porcine Reproductive and Respiratory Syndrome (PRRS), has apparently infected at least 290,000 pigs, with a still as yet unknown number of deaths. An outbreak that began in May 2006 killed an estimated one million pigs, pushing pork prices up 87 percent and contributing to rising inflation throughout China.

Most media coverage notes the difficulty of getting accurate information about this epidemic in China. It seems that the Chinese authorities have only been really forthcoming when it was alleged that they were responsible for the spread of Blue Ear Disease to Vietnam and Myanmar. According to a recent article in Reuters, China denies being the source of the outbreak in these other nations, noting that the strain of PRRS they've discovered is 93% similar to the strain that has caused problems in the U.S. since the 1980s. Indeed, PRRS has been a major problem for the American pork industry. The National Pork Board estimates that PRRS costs a whopping $560 million annually in the U.S. alone. You can learn more about this porcine virus here at The Pig Site and at the Pork Board's PRRS website.

Anxieties About Hog-Farming Odors

Concern with the odor and filth that can surround hog farming operations is not limited to our own times, obviously. While you can find all sorts of ongoing conflict over concentrated animal feeding operations (CAFOs), such as a debate this week over a permit for a 4,800 hog operation in Missouri (see the article here in the Marshall Democrat-News), it's nice to take a historical view too. The fine folks at Crooked Timber Books in Digby, Nova Scotia sent me a review of what looks like a wonderful book by Emily Cockayne entitled Hubbub: Filth, Noise and Stench in England (Yale University Press, 2007) that made a brief reference to Lewis Smart's piggery on Tottenham Court Road, whose noxious fumes "dirtied newly laundered linen and tarnished plate."

While pigs were ubiquitous in both urban and rural settings in early modern Europe, it is the scale and intensity of modern industrialized agriculture that bothers people these days. After all, more pigs means more waste and greater potential environmental impacts from hog-farming. For an overview of this conflict in one U.S. state, see Carolyn Johnsen's Raising a Stink: The Struggle over Factory Hog Farms in Nebraska (Bison Books, 2003).

What's Organic About Organic Pork?

The Ask Umbra column at grist.org took on the vexed issue of what constitutes organic pork last week. You can find the full discussion, with lots of comments, some interesting, some asinine, here. She points out that just because pork might be produced under organic guidelines, these rules "do not guarantee that a pig has experienced any piggy fun such as snorfelling merrily through the grass, making its own bed from straw, biting its farmer, or staying far from its own excrement. It is possible to meet the organic guidelines, and pass the yearly inspection, but still run a variant of a confinement operation."

The column mentions other possible standards, including those devised by the Food Alliance and the Animal Welfare Institute. I'd add that it's worth looking at the niche pork site (a project of the National Pork Board) and the Niman Ranch pork page as well. I like her recommendation about visiting a farm to check on the way they treat the animals that become the meat you eat, but that's something awfully difficult to do for the vast majority of us. Besides, there's not that much one is allowed to see in an era of concentrated operations with full biosecurity.

June 2007 Hogs & Pigs Report

Here's a link to the June 2007 USDA Hogs and Pigs Report. In brief, there were 62.8 million hogs and pigs in the U.S. on June 1st, up 2% from the prior year. 6.12 million head are considered breeding inventory; market hog inventory was 56.6 million head. Analysis and commentary on the report, including a few news media pieces, can be found via The Pig Site (here). The above graph, perhaps the least sexy image I've ever posted on this blog, shows the last nine years of data about the size of the American swine herd. Note both the seasonality and increasing productivity of the industry, of course.

The Pet-Food Scandal & Pork

At least some of the pet food contaminated with melamine that has been in the news lately was salvaged and sent to hog farms, according to articles in a number of papers. According to the article in the Guardian (here), some pigs here in California were fed the contaminated products. When asked if any of the pork from these hogs had entered the human food supply, Stephen Sundlof, the chief veterinarian of the FDA, responded "At this point, I don't have a definitive answer other than to say that the issue is being addressed." For a good overview of the entire issue, including what's known and what has been done thus far in the pork industry, see the Pork Checkoff's summary here at the pork.org website.

Challenges Facing U.S. Pork Producers

Dale Miller, editor of National Hog Farmer, posts a monthly editorial on his journal's website. In his first installment for 2007 he outlined five major challenges he thought pork producers would face in 2007. To read his full article, click here, but, in brief, here are what he sees as the key issues, with a few of my comments (and a sixth issue) worked in as well:

1. Ethanol -- The national push for energy independence is increasingly coming into conflict with pork producers' need to feed their animals. New ethanol plants keep coming on line in the midwest, driving up the price of corn, making it harder for pork producers to break even.

2. Immigration -- A 2005 Pew Research Center study estimated that over one-fourth of the meat cutters and food-processing workers are illegal immigrants. Recent Immigration and Naturalization Service raids on meat packing plants have produced panic in communities surrounding packing plants and led the meat industry to demand immigration reforms. There's a good NPR story here from December 2006 about the raids on Swift. You can find a Reuters article about Hormel's drive to get Congress to pass long-term immigration policy changes here.

3. Alternative Energy for Swine Diets -- This is related to the ethanol issue, as producers and researchers look to find alternative feed sources for their animals.

4. Integration -- The pork business continues to consolidate, with two companies (Triumph Foods and Smithfield Foods) seemingly destined to control about a quarter of U.S. hog production.

5. Circovirus -- Porcine circovirus-associated diseases (PCVAD) have caused lots of problems in the U.S. and Canada, on top of a persistent problem with PRRS (porcine reproductive and respiratory syndrome).

The only issue missing from Miller's report, in my opinion, is animal welfare. Proposition 204 in Arizona, which requires that pigs and calves used for veal on factory farms be given enough room to turn around and fully extend their limbs, passed with 62% support in November 2006. In January 2007, Smithfield Foods announced that it would phase out gestation stalls in their company-owned sow farms over the next 10 years, a market-based decision that will undoubtedly have ripple effects throughout the industry. At the National Pork Industry Forum in Anaheim in March this issue in particular was front and center, as the industry rolled-out a new animal welfare assurance program called PQA Plus. You can find my earlier post about the Pork Industry Forum here.

Try to Imagine Millions of Pigs

I've been in and out of town lately and am headed off yet again, so I likely won't be posting much until next week. For today, though, comes news of the USDA's Quarterly Hogs and Pigs report (you can find it in various formats here). As of March 1, 2007, there were 61.1 million hogs and pigs on American farms. This number was up 1% from the same period last year. 6.08 million breeding sows and 55 million market hogs make up this total. Nothing in the study indicates how these millions of pigs are raised, but I'm willing to bet that very few of them resemble the sow and piglets to the right from Sheepdrove Organic Farm in the UK.

Change at Burger King

Andrew Martin had an article in yesterday's New York Times about Burger King's decision to begin buying eggs and pork from producers that do not confine their animals. The immediate goal is for 10% of the fast food chain's pork to come from hog farmers who don't use gestation crates (2% of its eggs will come from "cage free" hens). The company expects these percentages to rise over time; in fact, they hope to have 20% of their pork sourced in this manner by the end of 2007. The lack of a greater supply of meat and eggs produced without confinement testifies to how much of the industry is dedicated to an industrial model of food production.

Apparently these changes were made after consultations with the Humane Society of the United States (HSUS) and People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA), although the company notes that it was ultimately an internal decision. You can find the HSUS and PETA reactions here and here. Burger King's announcement follows that of Wolfgang Puck a week or so ago, although the former is expected to have much more of an impact on producers' practices. Perhaps the most interesting aspect of this story involves the contrast between Burger King's current marketing (think of their tv commercials linking manhood and meat consumption, for example) and this animal welfare initiative. As a corporate spokesman noted, it is not likely that the company will trumpet this decision: “I don’t think it’s something that goes to our core business.” I agree: I'd imagine that Burger King's customers generally don't think much about animal welfare as they are chomping into their "Enormous Omelet Sandwich" (above), which contains two slices of cheese, two eggs, three strips of bacon, and a sausage patty.

National Pork Industry Forum

Two weeks ago (March 1-3, 2007) I attended the National Pork Industry Forum, the annual business meeting of American pork producers, as it was held nearby at the Anaheim Hilton. Pork Act Delegates are producers or importers that are nominated by their state associations then appointed by the Secretary of Agriculture. 154 producers and 8 importers were appointed for 2006; these delegates, representing the 70,000 U.S. pork producers, in turn make nominations for the National Pork Board, make decisions about the Pork Checkoff program, and adopt resolutions that provide direction to the National Pork Board. As you might imagine, the meeting looked like one of Congress, with delegates apportioned by states depending upon the amount of checkoff dollars collected from the state they represent. The biggest delegation came from Iowa, for example, which produces more pork than any other state.

I found the meeting incredibly interesting. It began with a series of presentations to the producers about the industry's failure to defeat Proposition 204 in Arizona and the rise of public concern about corporate responsibility (or, more exactly, the perception of a lack thereof) in agriculture. Much discussion took place around the question of sow housing in the wake of Smithfield's decision to phase out its use of gestation crates, as there were presentations about various European models and an experiment with group sow housing at one large production facility in the U.S. While there were other industry issues addressed, especially the question of corn prices with the recent push for more ethanol production, animal welfare issues were at the fore. Friday's presentations centered around the meeting's theme: "Accountability, Trust, and Social Responsibility: Defining Pork Production in the 21st Century." To make a long series of provocative presentations and discussions short, the delegates ultimately decided to encourage all producers to participate in PQA Plus, a certification program that includes an animal well-being component. You can find information about PQA Plus here via the National Pork Board site.

As part of the discussions about the breakdown in trust between the industry and its customers, Steve Murphy, CEO of the National Pork Board, noted that the industry traditionally falls back to scientific rationales when customers express concern about whether they are doing the right thing. By the end of the weekend's deliberations, 87% of the delegates supported the addition of "doing the right thing" to their science-based standards for animal welfare. While the main showpiece of the meeting was the approval of PQA Plus, there were some other resolutions adopted, including a call for more research on porcine circovirus and feed costs and swine diets, and support for the pork racing program.

I met some great people and learned a lot at the National Pork Industry Forum. I left feeling sympathetic towards today's pork producers, who are increasingly caught between a popular fantasy that pigs are raised on a slightly larger yet still idyllic version of Old McDonald's farm and the modern reality of intensive, confinement-based production systems. The NPB is doing a lot of work to convince the public of producers' concern for their animals--an interest in their pigs' well-being that is quite genuine, by the way--but the public is increasingly demanding a different version of the human-pig relationship. All you need to do is refer to yesterday's post about the op-ed in the New York Times, where Nicolette Niman notes that more and more Americans want livestock to be treated in ways similar to their dogs and cats. It doesn't take a rocket scientist to realize that these broader changes in Americans' ideas about their companion animals will increasingly cause problems for the meat industry.

New York Times Op-Ed on Pig Confinement Systems

Today's New York Times contained an op-ed piece critical of confinement systems called "Pig Out" by Nicolette Hahn Niman. As you might have guessed from her last name, she's married to Bill Niman of Niman Ranch fame, a fact she doesn't try to hide in her editorial. While there isn't really any new information in her piece--she makes all the usual arguments against confinement systems and gestation crates, including the resulting use of antibiotics, environmental issues related to animal waste, and animal welfare concerns--her essay may mark the emergence of this issue on the national political stage. As Niman writes:

Such sentiment ["that Americans believe all animals, including those raised for food, deserve humane treatment"] was behind the widely supported Humane Slaughter Act of 1958, which sought to improve treatment of cattle and hogs at slaughterhouses. But it's clear that Americans expect more--they want animals to be humanely treated throughout their lives, not just at slaughter. To ensure this, Congress should ban gestation crates altogether and mandate that animal-cruelty laws be applied to farm animals.

I have yet to blog about my weekend at the National Pork Industry Forum in Anaheim, but in brief, speakers and industry officials were clearly worried about further legislation at the state and federal level concerning confinement systems in the wake of recent legislative defeats in Florida and Arizona. I'll post more later about that meeting and about the Pork Quality Assurance Plus program unveiled at Anaheim, partly in an attempt to be proactive and forestall legislative action.

By the way, today's illustration by Jonathon Rosen accompanied the NYT op-ed.