Factory vs. Sustainable Pork Production: Two Videos, One Case for Transparency

Not many people would actually choose to get near a concentrated animal feeding operation (CAFO).  In fact, lots of people spend lots of time trying to prevent such outfits from being built in their communities.  But last fall, I jumped at the opportunity to visit a hog confinement in Iowa, as did several dozen other food activists, because such a glimpse into the secretive world of factory farming is rarer than a heritage breed pork chop in your average supermarket (which is to say, quite rare).

So I shot a few moments of my glimpse behind the plastic “curtain,” which you can watch in the video on the (top) left.

We were not alone in our curiosity.  Organizations like the Humane Society have long used undercover animal rights activists to document inhumane practices in CAFOs, author Jonathon Safran Foer sneaked into one for his book, Eating Animals, and in his oft-cited bestseller, The Omnivore’s Dilemma, Michael Pollan suggests that if windows were installed in feedlots and slaughterhouses, the problems with contemporary meat production would be largely solved.  Famed animal behaviorist  Dr. Temple Grandin, too, made the case last spring for transparency in the form of on-site video cameras.

Even Blake Hurst, the infamous agribusiness cheerleader, commodity farmer and vice president of the Missouri Farm Bureau, suggested in a NY Times Room for Debate essay on localized meat production that a “slaughterhouse in every village” would lead to greater public understanding of industrial food production, although I can only assume his intention here was quite different than Pollan’s or Grandin’s. On the other hand, Shauna Ahern of Pork, Knife and Spoon, a mouth-watering blog sponsored by The National Pork Board, wrote a very sympathetic post last month about her visit to a “pig farm” that she only later supposedly realized was a “CAFO,” the owner of which refused to allow her to document any of the animals or their dwellings.

I agree with Pollan and Grandin — in livestock agriculture, as in most anything, transparency is the order of the day.  If I’m going to eat something — especially an animal product — I want to know as much as I can about where it came from, what it ate, how it was treated, whether its waste was dealt with in an environmentally responsible manner, etc.

That said, because of the controversial nature of industrial livestock production and out of respect for a CAFO owner open enough to show it, I’ll keep the identifying details of the operation I visited close.  Basically though, it fit the EPA’s definition of a large CAFO, but at 16,000 hogs (housed in four different buildings — about the same size as the one Ahern saw) it was on the quite small side of large. This PDF shows the EPA’s definition of CAFOs by species, but note that sizes are “floors” as opposed to “ceilings,” and that some of the nation’s largest CAFOs move over a million animals a year.

This confinement was part of a larger corn and soy operation.  The owner did not tell us how many acres he was cultivating, but I got the impression that it was in the tens of thousands.  He used some of the waste created by his hogs to fertilize his fields, which made sense back in the day when the amounts of waste created by a herd of animals corresponded to the number of acres to which it was applied, but given the vast quantities produced by large scale confinements, the waste is unmanageable and as such a major liability,  one that operators like the one I talked to are left to shoulder on their own while the companies they contract out to reap the lion’s share of the profits (see page 6 of the Pew Charitable Trusts’ and Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health’s 2008 report [large PDF]).

Speaking of waste, I’d heard a lot about the stench raised by CAFOs, and I must say that although it definitely didn’t smell good, neither did it blow me over the way I expected.  But stink is the least of the problems with the massive quantities of waste created at such facilities, most of which feature manure “lagoons” (this one was hidden beneath the building, which likely helped mask the smell — the fact that it was snowing that day also probably helped — I would imagine that it could get pretty ugly under the Midwest sun this time of year).  Neighbors of CAFOs — and workers, too — have long reported adverse health effects like increased respiratory ailments (PDF) from air pollution, and mismanagement of waste was suspected to have been the cause of H1N1 virus.

Just as the stench didn’t knock me down, neither did the sight of so many hogs housed so tightly together devastate me emotionally, even though I adore pigs and know how smart they are and I would never, ever allow my dog to be in a situation like that.

A few months after I visited the CAFO, I watched the film Our Daily Bread, a commentary-free film that documents several modern food production facilities.  Thinking myself relatively hardened by years of looking at food issues, I turned it on while I ate dinner.  I was sort of half-watching when it got to the part where the baby chicks were being de-beaked — so I’d been watching and eating for awhile before I realized what was going on, at which point I nearly choked on my (veggie) taco.  Visiting the CAFO was like that — at first blush, not the most pleasant place to be but also not shockingly horrible, unless you know what you’re looking at (I must also note that there are much worse CAFOs — there are many videos that document them — and it makes sense that the guy who would let us in to see would rate among the better owners).

All the same, the farm in the second video is another animal completely, one with husbandry methods that are selling points, not liabilities. Note that the little piggies in that video still had tails and ran free in the pasture.  Pasture-raising is not only a more humane method of animal husbandry, but a healthier one, too – tightly confined animals often get each other sick and so, many CAFO operators feed them regular doses of antibiotics, a practice that has been linked to the flailing efficacy of antibiotics and a steady increase in MRSA infections and as a result, has come under scrutiny from Congress.

Meat, how it’s produced and whether or not a person eats it is, at least in this society, a vastly touchy subject, one that has divided families in CAFO country and I suspect, spoiled many a holiday. Back when I was vegetarian, Thanksgiving (and all the other meat-centric holidays, which most of them, if you think about it, are) was a stress-inducing event for me as well as for my mother, who did her best to accommodate but flat out didn’t know how to cook without meat.  I always felt like she thought I was judging her, and that my reluctance to indulge in the main dish hovered over the room like a foul smell, souring my family’s enjoyment by forcing them, however briefly, to consider why I chose to abstain.

And so, I mostly bit my tongue unless a relative asked about my vegetarian diet, just as I didn’t volunteer my opinions to the CAFO owner when I met him, which got me to thinking: Why is it so hard to have these conversations?  Does it spring from an old-time politeness, where a guest doesn’t ask critical questions of the hosts’ food?  Or is it that industry public relations campaigns have lulled most of us into believing what we want to — that all of our meat is still of the video #2 variety,  and that people believe that because they just don’t want to know?

Questions about industry wool-pulling and willful ignorance aside — because in the end, it doesn’t matter much — my colleague Chris Hunt points out that ultimate transparency is not even necessarily the point, if government agencies do their jobs and enact meaningful regulations on the meat industry.  But I would argue that greater transparency is the only thing that will get consumers to demand such toothy regulations.

If the rise in popularity of books like Pollan’s and Safran Foer’s is any indication, perhaps we are, as a society, heading in the direction of at least speaking frankly about our food and the consequences of its production, demanding products that don’t have such grievous impacts on our public and environmental health, supporting farmers as they transition back to more traditional, sustainable and humane methods and perhaps most importantly, turning the critical eye inward and asking ourselves the hard questions about what we are comfortable about putting in our bodies and allowing to happen in our communities.

Go on, then, have a look.

Learn more about: factory farms, hogs