tLET T E R FRO M o W A

SWINE OF THE TWIESThe making of the modem pig

By Nathanael Johnson

My interest in pig sex beganover drinks at a bar in Burley, Idaho.My friend Becky was telling me thatshe couldn't stand her job at a big hogfarm outside of town. Each day shefaced an unending line of sows filinginto the room where she worked. Oc-casionally one of the ZOO-poundpigsbroke ranks, knocking Becky down.

"Sometimes they get nervous whenyou stimulate them," she said.

I set down my beer."Stimulate?""Yeah, for artificial insemination.

Usually if you bring a boar around

Nathanael lohnson is a freelance writer lill-ingin San Francisco.

Illustration by John Ritter

they'll get in the mood. But if not youjust have to get in there and start rub-bing away."

At my urging, my friend obliginglylaid out the intricacies of coaxing sowsto conceive, along with equally pi-quant methods of harvesting boar se-men. It all seemed like an awful lot oftrouble for something creatures nor-mally do without encouragement.

I love my prosciutto,my bacon in themorning, and although I'm not usual-ly squeamish about the realities of agri-culture, I'm not sure I had ever thoughtof my food as something that depend-ed upon artificial insemination. It be-gan to make perfect sense, of course,when Istarted to gather the facts. The

science of pork production has mademajor strides in the last twenty years,and one wouldn't expect to find pigsmating the old-fashioned wayat state-of-the-art hog facilities. But, as I was tofind, artificial insemination ("AI," inthe industry) is more than a sign ofmodernization. It has served as the en-abling technology for a process thathas transformed pigs from affable, pot-bellied forest dwellers to panicky,torpedo-shaped clones that cannot sur-vive outdoors but nonetheless producemonstrous, lean hams.

Previously, any concerns I mighthave had about hog farming alwaysvanished right about lunchtime. Butwhen I discovered the ubiquity of this

LEITER FROMIOWA 47

breeding technique I became curious:If it takes human-aided swine mas-turbation to bring the Christmas hamto the family feast, what else is in-volved in producing America's pork?Although artificial insemination is byno means the worst indignity inflict-ed on the modem pig in the courseof this transformation, it is a fair sym-bol for all the other indignities wehave visited on it.

THE MODERN FAMILY HOG FARM

To witness the modem fertility rit-ual Becky had described, and to betterunderstand the industry that has cometo depend on it, I visited the SleezerFertility Clinic in Aurelia, Iowa.

The Sleezer family keeps two redmetal barns full of pigs, spaced threemiles apart, off a county road. I passedthe first bam and, following DerrickSleezer's instructions, drove on be-tween barren winter fields of plowedearth. Then I turned down a dirt roadand drove toward the second bam andthe little cluster of buildings behindit. These hog houses are long, low af-fairs,built in a simplebarracks style, de-signed to house as many porcine bod-ies as possible while conservingmaterials. But as I drove closer I couldsee the bam design had evolved be-yond a devotion to simplicity. Whitefans dotted one wall like jet engines,making the barns look like a cross be-tween a barracks and a power plant. Iparked under a copse of trees betweena little prefab officeand the farmhousewhere Derrick's parents still live.

Derrick Sleezer welcomed me withan earnest handshake. He showedme into the office's brand-new con-ference room and offered me a soda.He sat down and, looking at methrough wire-rimmed glasses, toldme his primary goal was to maintainthe family's reputation for integrity.He spoke with such sincerity that Ibelieved him without question.Then Sleezer sat back and asked howhe could help me. He'd be happy totell me anything I wanted to knowabout the farm.

"So, the Sleezer Fertility Center,"I asked, "what is it?"

"We're a boar stud," Sleezer saidmatter-of-factly.

"Oh, right." I scribbled "boar stud"

48 . HARPER'S MAGAZINE I MAY 2006

in my notebook, then paused a beatas I reread the words.

"Urn, what exactly do you do?""We keep the boars here and

make fresh semen deliveries."In the early 1990s, Derrick said,

farmers started asking his father,Butch Sleezer, to artificially insemi-nate their young sows. Then theyasked him to hold on to their boars.At that time, big streamlined hogfarms were moving into the Midwestand pork producers were shiftingfrom being generalists, crop farmerswho kept a few pigs on the side, tobeing specialists. Tending to theboars, which had once been a singletask in a busy day, became a businessof its own.

In 1990 artificial insemination ac-counted for only 7 percent of Ameri-ca's swine breeding. At that timelarge confinement operations werejust emerging as industry leaders.These big operations aimed to maxi-mize their efficiency by producingstandardized pigs, which grew at pre-dictable rates and produced pre-dictably uniform meat. To make astandardized pig, these companiesneeded standardized genetics, whichthey could most easily distribute inthe form of semen. According to themost recent count, more than 90percent of large hog farms used artifi-cial insemination. And with the riseof AI, boar-stud operations, theSleezers' among them, began tosprout up across the country.

The Sleezers' boars live in the firstbam I had passed on the way in. It'slocated. three miles from the otherbam, which contains only sows, inorder to reduce the risk of the windblowing pathogens between the twoherds. A chain-link fence, toppedwith razor wire, keeps away peopleand animals, which are also poten-tial disease vectors. Nothing meantfor human consumption comes out ofthe building; it produces only semen,delivered to a nearby lab via an un-derground pneumatic tube. The tubecarries the fluid in containers thatlook very much like those at drive-through bank-teller windows.

In the old days, a prize boar mightprovide natural service to sows onall the local farms. Today, thiswould be economic suicide for large

producers and a literal death sen-tence for the pigs. The modem pigis so susceptible to disease that pro-ducers must take extreme measuresto transform their barns intopathogen-free bubbles. The pigs arevulnerable because they live in closequarters; and because they are ge-netically uniform, a bug thatbreaches the defenses of one pig'simmune system can hop to the next.A bacterium stowing away betweena traveling boar's toes could wipeout half a herd. Producers exposetheir hogs to fewer germs when theybring only the semen from outsiderather than the whole boar.

Sleezer's protective measures arenot limited to fencing and pneu-matic tubes; he keeps new boars inquarantine for sixty days and teststheir blood three times before mov-ing them in with the rest of theherd. The Sleezers run the farm as afamily, but to avoid transportinggerms, only Derrick ever enters theboar bam. The swine also receive asmall amount of antibiotics in theirfeed, which helps them fend offsickness. It's a controversial prac-tice because pathogens will eventu-ally evolve resistance to the drugs.But almost all modern farms uselow-level antibiotics in feed: besidesblocking diseases, antibiotics boostanimal growth rates.

Other operations often maintaineven more stringent measures than theSleezers do. One company required afather and son who worked in differentbarns to eat their dinners apart in or-der to avoid exchanging germs. Themost high-tech facilities start theirherds with piglets fresh from the womb,delivered by cesarean section, scrubbed

clean and nursed by a me-

B chanical sow.

efore I even had a chance toask, Sleezer told me there was no wayI was getting in the boar barn. I was alittle relieved by the temporary re-prieve from my rendezvous with theboars but also disappointed, because Ihad hoped to witness in full theprocess my friend Beckyhad described.I could see I wasn't going to changeDerrick's mind, so I asked if I couldlook inside the other bam, where theykeep some 800 sows.That would be up

to his father, Derrick said. Butch Sleez-er, a tall, square-jawed man, agreed, onone condition:

He looked me in the eyesand asked,"Now, you've got to be honest withme here. You haven't been around anyother pigs recently, have you?"

Since I had not, Butch took me tothe house to dress. He gave me a bluejumpsuit, an orange hooded sweatshirt,and a pair ofplastic booties. We pausedjust outside the bam while I, feeling abit awkward in my makeshift biohaz-ard suit, pulled the thick plastic slippersover my shoes. This, I thought, iswhatit must have been like to call on the ag-ing Howard Hughes. As Butch ex-plained, the coverings would protectboth the pigsfrom germson my clothesand my clothes from the ammoniafumes in the bam.

"I'd pull that hood up if you don'twant it to get in your hair," he said,before we entered the barn. Westepped into a narrow hallway, welllit, with white plastic walls. Machin-ery hummed softly. The concretefloor was spotless. It might havebeen a hospital. Around a cornerstood a row of doors, each with acontrol panel. Butch opened oneand I put my head inside. The at-mosphere was as I'd imagined itwould be on Venus: thick, warm,and caustic. But Butch was pleased.

"We spend more money onpropane for heating so we can keepthe ventilation going," he said. "Yougo into some of these places, youcan't hardly breathe."

There were about twenty-five sowsinside, each confined by a metalcrate to an area about two and a halfby seven feet. The sows filled theircages. They had a foot or two inwhich to move forward or back, andenough room to lie down but notenough to tum around. Each had alitter of suckling pigs. The Sleezerssell the piglets to other farmers, whoraise them for meat.

Butch swung the door closed andpointed to a panel on the hallway wall.

"Everything is controlled righthere," he said.

The machinery sets the angle of thelouvers that draw freshair from outside;it monitors the ventilation fans, ad-justs the heat, and tums on the lights.Should the room fall six degrees below

LETTER FROM IOWA 49

the optimum temperature, the controlpanel calls all the Sleezers' telephones.I grinned at Butch. There was some-thing appealing in the thought of thisever-vigilant mechanical farmer mak-ing minute adjustments in the atmos-pheric composition and heat.

Keeping pigs at just the right tem-perature allows them to devote everyounce of energy to one purpose:growth. Well, growth and survival.The modem pig is bred too lean tosurvive Iowa's winters. The blanket offat that insulates pigs against the colddoes not fetch the price of muscle-that is to say, meat. But producing alayer of back fat takes energy, and en-ergy means feed, which in tum meansmoney. So geneticists have bred mostof the lard out of the hog in the lastfifty years. Now many of these pigscannot survive outside the womb ofthe humming, computerized bam.

Butch led me down the hall, andwe peered into two other rooms.

"Look at the uniformity of these lit-ters," he said with pride, counting."Two, four, six-ten in that one."

The piglets looked like they had allbeen cast in the same mold; they mostprobably did have the same father.Mearpackers want identical pigs, thebetter to give customers identicalhams. Artificial insemination makesthis possible, because breeders can dis-tribute semen from a single exemplaryboar all across the country.

This cookie-cutter perfection, how-ever, becomes a liability when a piggets sick. (If one hog lacks immunityto a disease, it's likely the others withthe same AI father will as well.) Butthe demand for uniformity outweighsthis risk. The more similar the swines,the more easily they fit into the mech-anized system, increasing efficiency.For instance, as swine carcasses movedown the conveyor belt, at Harmel'sAustin, Minnesota, packing plant, theyhit a curved knife, which slices thecylindrical loin from the inside of thebody cavity. If the animals aren't justthe right proportions, the knife willhit the wrong spot, wasting meat orcutting into bone.

The meatpacking plant is the mod-el for the efficiencies we associate withfactories. After paying a visit to a dis-assemblyline at a slaughterhouse, Hen-ry Fordwent back to his Highland Park

50 HARPER'S MAGAZINE / MAY 2006

auto plant and designed something hecalled an "assembly line."

Before leaving the barn, ButchSleezer showed me the gestationroom, a much larger space, whichhouses about 700 clean, white sows.The hogs stood in tight formation,row upon row stretching off to theend of the building under dusty, yel-lowish lights. Crates held the pigs inline with their noses next to a watertrough and their tails over a slattedfloor. The pigs had scattered the re-mains of their seed-meal breakfastacross the floor.The animals eat wherethey stand and deposit their dung atthe other end of the crate. The pig'sown feet, or a shot with a hose, sends

the waste through therr' cracks in the floor.

~he Sleezers' facility is typical of aclean, well-functioning hog operation.The Iowa Pork Board had guided me tothe Sleezer Fertility Center as an ex-ample of a good, up-to-date facility. Itwas as close as I would come to one ofthe megafarms. But as far as I couldtell from videos and reports about thelarger facilities, the conditions in aswine-confinement operation dependlesson its sizethan on the predilectionsof the producers who run it, on theirsense of personal investment, pride,and responsibility. .

Producers sometimes keep sows ingroup pens, which allow them to walkaround and socialize. But in confine-ment, pigs sometimes go a little crazy.They often attack one another, some-times killing and eating their penmates. Group pens do not provideenough room for a bullied sow to es-cape her tormentors.

As we walked down the narrowpath between two rows of pigs, thebam filled with the crash of metal andunholy screaming. The sowsbellowed,squealed, and recoiled. Others lungedagainst the bars as we passed.

"They can tell when a strangercomes in," Butch said.

I could see how such cramped quar-tets might facilitate the spread of dis-ease. In 2000 the U.S. Department ofAgriculture tracked the number oftimes diseases flared up on 895 hogfarms, comparing operations of lessthan 2,000 animals with those of morethan 10,000.Pigshoused in large barns

are more likely to catch respiratorydiseases from their neighbors. The gi-ant producers reported three times thenumber of mycoplasma pneumoniacases, more than six times the cases ofswine influenza, and twenty-nine timesthe cases of a new flu strain than didthe smaller farms.

Yet I couldn't argue with the logicof the system. The Sleezers had takenon the cost of this bam with the hopethat they could use it to make a littlemore money. Every square foot of bamspace added to the debt. Every squarefoot not occupied by a pig decreasedtheir ability to pay it off. And if thecompetition uses such methods to pro-duce more pigs for less money, howcan you not?

The Sleezers have dealt with dis-ease in the past, Derrick had told me,but when I saw them, the animalslooked healthy. Partway down theaisle, Butch stopped and pointed tothe ceiling.

"Feel the air? It comes down fromthere and hits there-right across theshoulders." He made a slicing motiondown the line of pigs. "That way everyone of them has fresh air."

Fresh air is especially important ina room suspended above an open sep-tic system. The feces fall through theslatted floors into a cellar. Water pe-riodically flushes it out of this base-ment ·into an open reservoir behindthe bam.

When we stepped outside, we cameinto view of this lagoon, a bowl-shapeddepression. But beyond this pond theSleezers have a more modem sewageunit under construction: a 'concreteswimmingpool, bristling with rebar. Atthe far end, a backhoe muscled loadsof mud out of a drainage trench.

A soil study had shown that theearthen lagoon might leak, Sleezersaid,hence the concrete tank. The Depart-ment of Agriculture's EnvironmentalQuality Incentives Program had paidfor almost half of the $150,000' tank,but not for the unforeseen cost of thebackhoe after a rainstorm clogged thedrainage pipes with mud.

The Sleezers also grow crops, sothey can apply manure to the fieldsas a fertilizerbefore planting. But whenpork producers reach a certain size,this tidy cycle-manure to com to pigto manure-breaks down. Biggerpro-

ducers must use other methods to dis-pose of waste, because thereis simplynot enough nearby land to absorb it.One of the biggest producers, CircleFour Farms in Utah (owned by aSmithfield subsidiary), uses the simplemiracle of evaporation to spirit awaythe equivalent of almost 200 Olympic-size swimming pools full of liquefiedmanure annually. The fecal matterbreaks down into volatile organic com-pounds, like ammonia, which the windcan carry away.

By combining crops, sows, and se-men, the Sleezers have retooled thefamily farm to survive in this era of gi-ant pork producers. But the future ofeven such modem operations is indoubt. A 1997 paper published by theFederal Reserve Bank of Chicago cool-ly observed, "The standards set by thelargest hog producers now suggest thatsome 50 producers could account forall the hogs needed in the U.S." Thestandards of efficiency set by industri-al agriculture have decimated Mid-western farms. As I drove away fromthe Sleezers',along back roads, I passedone empty house after another-relicsof the old rural economy. Outside ofthe town of Manson I saw a small,hand-painted sign. WE APPRECIATEYOUR BUSINESS, it read, in faded script.It was such a pathetic and ineffectualplea for salvation, probably the workof some local economic-developmentcommittee. This is what the smallfarming towns of the Midwest havecome to.

Before I left the Sleezer farm, I'dasked Butch if taking on the debtto build his high-tech barns madehim nervous.

He nodded grimly. The industrytechnology evolves so quickly it's im-possible to keep up, he said. Yet it'salso impossible not to try. "That's thething about being in the hog businessand building these buildings," he said."They're tombstones."

A DATE WITH THE INSEMINATOR

Rain was falling hard on the walnutgroves that surround WD Swine Farmin Modesto, California, when I arrivedto meet the inseminator. I had comebecause Ryan Watje had agreed to letme observe the way the modem porkchop begins. I knew I was in the right

place when I saw the Ford F250 with avanity plate reading WDSF and alicense-plate frame proclaiming, "Ismell $ Money $."

Money, on a hog farm at least, hasa sharp fecal odor, which bums a bit asit slides past the palate. But the scentwas not overpowering, and after a fewminutes it faded into the background.The fact that the stench intrudes onconsciousness only for a brief period offamiliarization is testament to the sizeof Ryan Watje's farm; with just 200hogs, it's tiny by modem standards.

I found Watje behind his bam; hiscurly brown hair was wet and his jeanswere spattered with mud. For the lastfew years Watje, who is thirty-five butseems younger, has been breeding pigsthat routinely win top honors in hisstate, and recently his pigs placed asgrand champion and reserve champi-on at the National Barrow Show.

"I'm the guyeverybody'safter,"Wat-je said, ending the sentence with ashort, sardonic laugh, embarrassed tohave said something so prideful.

Watje manages to make a livingselling his prize pigs and semen from.the boars that sired them. Although heis good at what he does, Watje is asmall-timer. He sends most of hissemen to people raising show pigs for4-H or county fairs.He getshis businessby word of mouth, whereas big genet-icscompanies, like Lean Value Sires, is-sue catalogues full of boars. These cat-alogues display the top studs-eachshaved, oiled, and photographed todisplay bulging muscles and massivescrotums. The captions beside the pic-tures are filled with warlike language:"With a head and neck made to causepanic and a butt that exceeds all thelimits of man and nature," reads the,blurb next to a pig named Hung Jury,"he's a cold blooded killer out to elim-inate the competition."

Sometimes Watje will buy semenfrom these boars to bring in "extremetraits." But mostly he uses semen fromhis own boars to breed "a good func-tional, all-around pig." His hogs livein open-air, steel-barred pens with anawning to keep the rain off.Becausethepigs live outside, they need immunesystemsstrong enough to block the oc-casional disease. For this reason, Wat-je uses vaccines and antibiotics onlyin emergencies. He prefers to let dis-

LEITER FROMIOWA 51

eases pass through the herd, allowingthe animals to develop immunities andweeding out the weakest pigs.

Show-pig breeders, who select forattributes like disease resistance andaesthetic appeal, maintain a small butcrucial well of genetic diversity. JohnMabry, director of the Iowa Pork In-dustry Center, saysthat since big farmsstarted taking over, the number of in-dependent breeders has plummetedand people like Watje now play animportant role as stewardsof rare genes.Whereas industry geneticists strive foruniformity and move in roughly thesame direction, chasing the market,show-pig breeders make decisionsbased on their personal judgment, in-tuition, and, sometimes, whimsy. Inthe past, when large companies foundthey had overbred their swine, theyhave dipped into this well ofgenetic di-versity to revitalize their herds.

"The impact of the independentshas been invaluable," Mabry said. "Wewould never have gotten to where weare without them."

Without genetics from these inde-pendents, the industry could not havedeveloped such highly efficient, leanpigs. Unlike plant seeds, animal ge-netics cannot simply be put in thefreezer-it's too iffyto freezeand reviveeggs and embryos. The only sure wayto maintain diversity in pigs is to main-tain diversity in farmers.

On the day I visited WD SwineFarm, Watje had decided to mate aYorkshire sow with one of his newestboars-s-an experimental and somewhatrandom pairing, he said.

The boars were as big and as furry asbears. Each had its own pen-but inthe last stall, in place of a pig, waswhat looked like a blue plastic saddle ,standing a few feet off the ground.Watje opened this gate and led a whiteboar into the corral.

"I've been training this one," Wat-je said. "We'll see how he does."

The boar walked straight to thedummy and mounted without hesita-tion. Now, to be fair, this is a posi-tion fewmammals are able to maintainwith grace. But this boar, no doubtdue to his lack of experience, made 'the pose look particularly awkward.One foreleg bent under his body. Hisback arched and his head lolled onthe saddle.

52 HARPER'S MAGAZINE / MAY 1006

Watje reached under the pig's bellywith one latex-gloved hand andsqueezed a stream of clear liquid ontothe ground.

"You want to get all the urine outof there," he said. "Then you just holdon to the penis, which can be difficultbecause it's slimy."

He saw the look on my face andlaughed. "Sometimes it's so slippery Ihave to take the glove off to hold on."

The tip of a boar's penis is shapedlike a corkscrew,which givesthe semenharvester something to grip. The hogdoesn't need friction, just pressure.

The boar, meanwhile, was shift-ing, working his way around thedummy. Perhaps he had realized thatthings were not quite going accord-ing to plan and had hit on the ideathat he had picked the wrong side.Watje rolled his eyes and hung on.When the moment came, he sig-naled me and I handed him thecup-an insulated coffee mug linedwith a plastic bag and covered incheesecloth. Watje pulled the pe-nis-two feet long and pencil-thin-to the' cup's mouth and held it forthree long minutes as the boar ejacu-lated. Then Watje took the cup in-side. It held about half a pint.

"Usually I'd dilute it, but I'm out ofdistilled water," he said, breaking whathad become an uncomfortable silence.

"Do you ever stop in the middle ofthat and think, 'I'm holding a boar'spenis'?" I blurted.

Watje laughed. "Sometimes myfriends give me a hard time about it.But no, I've been doing this since Iwas a kid."

He poured some of the liquid intoa squeeze bottle and affixed the bottleto a long straw with a sponge on theend. The remaining semen went in arefrigerator-he sends it overnight tobuyers at fifrydollars a dose. Depend-ing on the boar, each ejaculate con-tains enough sperm to fertilize be-tween ten and forty sows.

The sow was easy. Housed close tothe boars, she needed no foreplay,noneof the haunch and belly rubbing thatBecky had described. Watje just saton her back, facing her tail, and slid thesemen straw inside. The sow leanedher heavy head against my shin whilehe slowly squeezed the bottle empty.Then it was over.

THE CHICKENIFICATION OF THEAMERICAN PIG,

American hog farmers have exper-imented with artificial inseminationsince the 1930s,but it became standardpractice only after vertically integrat-ed megafarms began to dominate thebusiness. Although the pork-packingindustry can claim the honor of show-ing Henry Ford the way to mecha-nization, it has only recently embracedthe principle of vertical integration,which when combined with the as-sembly line brought Ford and otherautomobile manufacturers such splen-did success. It wasn't until 1991 thatanyone in the pig world succeeded inexpandingFord's principles beyondthe slaughterhouse, back down thefood chain, to hog farms. The inno-vator was Joseph Luter III, who tookover Smithfield Foods in 1975. He sawthat poultry companies were alreadyturning big profits by building massivechicken farms and controlling everystage of production. If vertical inte-gration could work for chickens, Luterreasoned, it could work for pigs.

Luter wanted to give customerssomething not often found in nature:uniformity. He wanted shoppers toknow exactly what a ham with theSmithfield label would taste like beforethey bought it.

"And the only way to do that," Lutertold a newspaper reporter in 2000, "isto control the process from the farm tothe packing plant."

With AI, Luter could distribute a'single line of genetics across a thou-sand farms. Smithfield provided everyfarmer .with the same pigs, the samefeed, and the same detailed instruc-tions. Producers only had to build up-to-spec barns and follow orders. Thissystem lifted the burden, and the ben-efits, of innovation from the produc-er's shoulders. Some farmers resentedbeing forced into the role of de,factoassembly-line workers, but they didnot have much choice. They couldnot compete with the efficiencies ofvertical integration. Megafarmssprouted up around Smithfield's pack-ing plant in North Carolina, and inthe mid-Nineties other vertical inte-grators, such as Premium StandardFarms and Seaboard, began movinginto the Midwest, the traditional

American hog belt. NowSmithfieidturns about 20 million hogs into porkevery year, making it the world'slargest pork producer.

Farmers who wanted to stay in busi-ness converted. Many quit. The moststubborn' went bankrupt. Between1979 and 2004, as pork productionincreased by 6 billion pounds, thenumber of hog farms in America de-creased from more than 650,000 toless than 70,000.

"Farmers with know-how and pridegot eliminated," one pork producer whohad chosen conversion told me. "Thiskind of farming doesn't take any tal-ent. The company gives you a plan, aconsultant, the feed, and the pigs. Allyouhave to do isfollowthe plan. Peoplewho had no talent thought it wasgreat."

Luter's system demanded that farm-ers subtly shift the way they looked attheir animals. The good farmer had toknow his animals. The successfulSmithfield producer has to watch hisinputs, death rates, and pounds gainedper pound of feed to maximize proteinproduction. Instead of paying atten-tion to individual pigs, producers

focused on the efficiency of

A the herd as a whole.

tibiotic growth promoters likeTylan are advertised in trade maga-zines as tools to help producers dealwith such abstractions:

"Tylan helps minimize attrition loss-es and maximize economic returns,"one ad reads. "On average, 30-35%of pigsborn never reach full-value mar-ket weight because they die, are culledor are lightweights at marketing."

As one Midwestern veterinarian putit, his role has changed from some-thing akin to a family doctor to a pub-lic health planner. "The days when Iwould get called in to see one sick pigare long gone," he said.

Instead, workers dispatch sick hogswith a bolt gun, or simply swing therunts by their hind legs against theconcrete floor. Healing is inefficient.

As the wayproducers looked at pigschanged, so did the animal itself.Luterneeded a brave new pig for his newsystem, and in 1990, Smithfield pur-chased exclusive U.S. rights to the ge-netic lines of extraordinarily lean pigs

. from the National Pig DevelopmentCompany. These hogs excelled at ef-

ficiently converting feed into salableprotein, because they wasted little en-ergy on fat production. As an addedbenefit, the lean meat they producedappealed to lipophobic Americans. Atthat time, health-conscious Ameri-cans shied away from fatty meats butconsidered chicken lean and virtuous.In J 986 the National Pork Board hadbegun an advertising campaign thatwould recast the pig as a second typeof chicken. Pork, advertisers asserted,is "the other white meat." Smithfieldmade this claim a reality.

As other pork corporations turnedto the Smithfield model, breedingcompanies designed pigs to accom-modate the desire for leaner, more ef-ficient swine. Today geneticists havedeveloped tools to reshape pigs al-most as ably as Ford's engineers re-shape radiators.

WE HAVE GONE TOO FAR

I decided to attend the NationalSwine Improvement Federation Con-ference in Ames, Iowa, to find outwhat the leading lights of the hog in-dustry thought of the animal they hadcreated. Surprisingly,meatpackers, aca-demics, and private-sector scientistsall gave me the same answer: We havegone too far.

Geneticists have made great stridesin the last decade. The portion of thehog that people can actually eat (asopposed to the skin, bones, and fat)has increased by 1,04 percent-theequivalent of an extra pork chop perpig. Scientists have shaved 12.9 daysoffthe time it takes the animal to reachmarket weight and increased the areaof the loin eye (used as an indicator forgeneral muscle size)by 1.9 centimeters.Sows give birth to an average of 1.56more piglets per litter. Today's pigs areimpressively uniform and grow large,lean muscles quickly. But the pork hasbecome so lean that packers often haveto inject saline marinades directlyinto the meat-s-and chefs must drownit in heavy sauces-to make it palat-able. What's more, a combination ofoverbreeding and stressful living con-ditions makes a percentage of our porkmore acidic and less tasty than it usedto be.

Standing in an Iowa State Univer-sity lecture hall, flanked by dual Pow-

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erPoint screens, food scientist KenPrusa told the swine improvers thatthe future of the industry lay in pro-viding customers a "positive taste ex-perience." And providing a positivetaste experience means providing lessacidic pork, Prusa said.

In pork, acids break down muscletissue, turning it to mush, bleaching it

. of color and giving it a slightly sourtaste. The industry calls this condi-tion "pale soft exudative" or PSE. Prusaheld up a plastic-wrapped loin to theaudience. The pale meat slumpedaround his hand.

"What's all this reddish liquid slosh-ing around?" he asked.

"Exudate," someone called out."Purge," said-another. "Water."

"Right," Prusa said. To be exact, thefluid is mostly water with some iron,proteins, and trace minerals mixed in.He clicked.to a slide showing a micro-scope photograph of healthy muscle,honeycombed with cell walls.Then heclicked to a picture of pale, soft, ex-udative meat. The slide showed only amass of gray.

"When the cell structure breaksdown like this, the meat losesability toretain water," Prusa said.

When cooked, this acidic pork (witha pH below about 5.5) grows rubberyand dry. But as the pH rises-grow-ing less acidic-the pork becomes "ataste experience we can only imag-ine," Prusa said.

. "At pH 6.2 and above-I don'tknow if anyone's ever eaten one ofthose, but you would not forget it,"he said.

For years, the Japanese have beenbuying all the best meat from Ameri-can slaughterhouses. They needmeat that won't melt to mush inshipping, and they are also morewilling to pay for quality food. Sofar, meatpackers have simply pickedthe best meat off the disassemblyline-from one hog here and anoth-er there-to satisfy this demand.The Japanese choose. the meat bycolor: darker pork signifies less acid.Americans get the leftovers: the oth-er white meat. But this is changing,Prusa said. If people want more per-fect pork, geneticists may have tobreed a different animal.

"What's your definition of perfectpork?" asked an audience member.

54 HARPER'S MAGAZINE I MAY 2006

"An excellent eating experience,"Prusa said.

"But commodity consumers aren'tinterested in that."

Prusa's response pointed toward atransformed marketplace: "I don'tthink we're going to have commoditypork much longer."

Instead of settling for "commoditypork"-i.e., the cheapest thing on theshelf-American shoppers seem in-creasingly willing to pay more for abrand they can trust or for some in-formation about their meat's past. Andalthough cheap, unbranded pork mayremain on supermarket shelves, in thefuture it will probably come fromcountries .like Brazil and China-countries with cheaper labor and few-er lawspreventing farmers from dump-ing their waste.

At the cocktail party after the lec-ture, I asked Dan Hamilton, a geneti-cist for the breeding company Geneti- .porc, if scientists would be able toreengineer the pig to produce lessacidic meat. It's a difficult problem, hesaid,because many factors govern acid-ity. It depends, for instance, on howquickly packers cool the meat afterslaughter and how people treat the an-imal beforehand. But geneticists cancontribute by breeding more docileanimals-pigs that can endure tryingconditions without becoming stressed.

When pale, soft, exudative meatfirst emerged as a major problem, sci-entists linked it definitively to stress.Inbreeding the Smithfield-type superswine, geneticists had inadvertentlyselected for a gene that made hogsprone to panic. Pigs exhibiting thistrait might tremble all their lives anddie of shock when a barn door bangedshut too loudly. Hogs under stress (andhumans as well) use an energy-production shortcut, rapidly burningglycogen in their muscles and creatinglactic acid as a byproduct. Genetical-ly stressed-out pigs live with their mus-cles immersed in lactic acid and, unlessthey die in unusual placidity, theirmeat goes quickly bad.

Iowa State University ProfessorLau-ren Christian is credited with discov-ering "the stress gene"-shorthand fora segment of DNA that producedheavily muscled, ultra-lean, but alsoexceptionally high-strung pigs, In 1995he called on the industry to eliminate

the gene, and the breeders responded.Today most genetics corporations havepurged it from their breeding pools.All the same, the problems associatedwith the stress gene still exist. Farmersstill complain of pigs that drop dead·when they drive their tractors too closeto the barn, and the pork industry stillloses money on pale, soft, exudativeflesh. The American Meat ScienceAssociation found that the amount ofPSE pork had increased from 10.2 per-cent in 1992 to 15.5 percent in 2002,when the problem cost the industry$90 million. Either the genetic causesof stress are more complicated thanChristian thought or something else ismaking the pigs crazy.

If genes are no longer responsiblefor all this watery, floppy meat, ani-mal living conditions may be the cul-prit. Scientists have found that themodern pig's monotonous life incramped quarters puts it on edge. Tem-pie Grandin, a professor of animal sci-ence at Colorado State University, hasshown that when workers petted pigsfor five minutes a day, let them out oftheir crates for a brief walk, or gavethem a piece of rubber hose to playwith, the animals calmed down. Pigsare, after all, highly intelligent ani-mals-probably more intelligent thandogs-and, like dogs, they growrestlesswithout anything to do. When swinecannot so much as turn around in theircrates, they often develop repetitive 'movements, biting at the air andswinging their heads from side toside-movements that some studentsof animal behavior say signal frustra-tion or neurosis.

As breeders have pushed for effi-ciency, they have also relaxed the stan-dards for physical traits that allow pigsto stand on concrete their whole lives

, without going lame. Hogs can live upto twenty years in the wild, but largepork producers usually cull sows afterless than four years. Sows can producemore than ten litters, and older sowsbirth larger, healthier pigs. In con-finement a sow's health won't hold upmuch past three litters. Swine pro-ducers recognize the problem, and afaction at the conference argued thatit was time to make a change.

In an effort to help breeders choosepigs that are less likely to go lame,Dale Miller, editor of National Hog

Farmer, was distributing posters atthe National Swine ImprovementFederation Conference. The postersillustrated the good, the bad, and theugly in hog body types. As I studiedthe pictures of pigeon-toed pigs,Miller chatted with Peggy Hawkins,a scientist from Monsanto, who hadjust ordered a set of posters. Monsan-to, the agricultural biotech firm mostfamous for making the herbicideRoundup and Roundup-resistantcrops, also sells sows under the regis-tered trademark "Genepacker."

"This lack of soundness has becomea real problem," said Miller, who lookslike a slim Teddy Roosevelt. "I can'tbelieve the producers have stood for itas long as they have."

"Well, if you buy a sow from Mon-santo and it dies, we replace it forfree," Hawkins said. "So it doesn't af-fect the producers one way or the oth-er. We figure they're better off havingthe top genetics."

"It affects them when they have todrag dead sows out of the crates everyday," Miller retorted.

It would be unfair to leave this bitof casual conversation out of context,since, to judge from its marketing,Monsanto recognizesthat farmersneeddurable sows to maximize production,and it specifically positions theGenepacker as a pig with the fortitudeto withstand the rigorsof confinement.

The solution to this problem ofsoundness, as far as Monsanto or thoseat the Swine Improvement Conferenceare concerned, is to breed "better"pigs-pigs that can stand on a 2'x7'rectangle of concrete all their liveswithout going lame or insane withboredom. And if genetic modificationdoesn't work, technology often canprovide a mechanical solution. SwineRobotics, for instance, has developed adevice that removes dead animals fromcrates--a contraption that looks like ahand truck with a power winch. This"Boar Buzzard" eliminates the prob-lemsof poor employee morale and backinjuries. On the PSE front, scientistshave found they can reduce the amountof pale, soft, exudative meat by takingpigs'offtheir feed eighteen hours beforeslaughter. The hungry pigs burn offtheir glycogen reserves, and withoutglycogen they do not produce lacticacid, no matter how stressed they are.

As practical as they may be, thereis something troubling about thesetechnical work-arounds. Bit by bit,scientific breakthroughs have eman-cipated the hog industry from the de-mands of nature, but each freedomcomes at a price. Each new liberty forpork producers depends on further'control, further domination of the pig.No one at the conference suggestedwhat seemed the obvious answer: do-ing away with the causes of stress andlameness. But then, swine geneticistsare innovators, not policymakers.

In just a little more than a decade,the modern hog industry has produceda tower of efficiency-maximizingprod-ucts, one stacked atop the next, eachinnovation fixing the problem the lastfix created. It is a monumental ifsomewhat haphazard structure, com-posed of slatted floors and aluminumcrates, automatic sorting scales andmechanized wet-dry feeders. It is con-structed of Genepacker sows, Tylanantibiotic feed, Agro-Clean liquid de-tergent, Argus salmonella vaccine,Goldenpig foam-tipped disposable AIcatheters, CL Sow Re-placer milk sub-stitute, and Matrix estrus synchro-nizer. The scientists who add theirdiscoveries to this edifice do not seethemselves as its architects. As theysee it, their job is not to shift thefoundations of the hog industry but tobuild atop its tower of technology,masking what structural flaws they

can with new construction,~ reaching ever upward.

!hat night, at the National SwineImprovement Federation Conferencedinner, I found myself face to facewith three slabs of white pork smoth-ered in gravy. One of the confereesheld up the meal long enough to givean invocation.

"Dear Lord," he said, "thank youfor giving us the gift of technologyand showing us how to use that gift tohelp the industry we serve, the porkindustry ... "

He went on for several minutes,giving me time to consider my meat,in light of all I had learned in thepast month.

". , . and serve humanity withoutsomeone looking over our shoulder,amen."

The pork was tender and juicy, but

I washaving a hard time swallowing it.For the first time since I had had my il-luminating conversation with Beckyin that bar in Idaho, I knew exactlywhat I was eating.

There are plenty of good reasonsstacked in favor of the system that haddelivered the pork to my plate. Or ifnot good reasons, at least powerfulones. There is tremendous pressure toproduce cheap food-and, adjustingfor inflation, the price of a pork chophas fallen about a dollar a pound inthe last ten years. The pressure to sellcheap lean pork leads to the buildingof uniform pigs and confinement fa-cilities-which leads to the need forbiosecurity regulations. These regula-tions, in turn, make artificial insemi-nation, in all its absurdity, not onlyreasonable but necessary. And as Ichewed my pork loin, I could not avoidthe conclusion: All these powerful rea-sons for the transformation of hogsinto predictable production machinesimply the existence of an equally pre-dictable consumption machine, some-one like me who expected to find iden-tical cuts of inexpensive pork everytime he entered the supermarket.

I had gone in search of artificial in-semination's original cause and now Ihad found it. I swallowed and ginger-ly took another gravy-laden mouth-ful. I had never thought of my bacon-eating self as part of the pig industrialcomplex. Corporations like Smithfieldand Pig Improvement Company bearthe responsibility for engineering themodern pig, but, as they will point out,they made it to the specifications oftheir master: the vast collective Amer-ican maw.

Yet the reduction of humanity toblind and ravenous consumer is not adescription of people as they really are.Instead, like the simplification of thepig to a meat-making machine, it is avision that serves the pork industry'spurposes. In reality, shoppers can seeperfectly well. But by the time porkreaches the supermarket it has shedall markers that might allow consumersto evaluate their purchase save one:its price. It's no wonder that, whengiven this solitary criterion for judg-ment, shoppers choose the cheapestpossible meat. Anyone who has daredto ask a supermarket butcher aboutthe origins of a pork chop knows it is

LEDER FROMIOWA 55

almost impossible to learn anythingsignificant and that food workers reactto the question as if it were frivolousand slightly impolite;

The industry has responded ad-mirably to the demand for consistent,copious, and cheap pork. But in satis-fying those desires, it has done awaywith the other qualities that once dis-tinguished pork, like flavor and variety.The industry may argue that it simplyprovides what the consumer wants,but it also has reduced pork variety tothe extent' that shoppers have no oth-er option. They can select only fromwhat the industry chooses to givethem. If I wanted to replicate my rev-elatory meal, I could find identicalpork in any American supermarket.In fact, I'd have a hard time finding anyother type of pork.

TOWARD A POSTINDUSTRIAL PIG

A few months after the Swine con-ference, the magazine Park ran an ed-itorial forecasting consumer demands:quality meat, organics, and animal-welfare assurance, the editor predict-ed, would be trends in coming years..During the 2005 Academy Awards,the National Pork Board launched anew advertising campaign toutingpork for its own charms rather thanits similarity to chicken, and Smith-field unveiled its line of high-quality"Preferred Stock" pork, saying it was"going back to the basics" (read: "fat-tier"). It's worth noting that evenSmithfield, which thrives by replac-ing variety with uniformity, had tolook to swine from outside its LeanGeneration line to go back to the ba-sics. After a decade of modem hogfarming, Smithfield still had alterna-tive genetics at its disposal. If modemtrends had continued for much'longer, however, going back mightnot have been an option.

But while the marketing of porkseems to be making a Uvturn, not allthat much is changing down on theindustrial farm. Brands like PrairieGrove and Salmon Creek are charg-ing extra for a promise of "swine wel-fare assurance" but still squeeze thepig' into the same mechanized, in-door system.

Much of the change in marketingis coming about because the pork in-

56 HARPER'S MAGAZINE I MAY 2006

dustry has taken note of the successof a few pork producers who treattheir pigs as sentient animals ratherthan protein units. These farms ac-count for less than 1 percent of thepork in the United States, but theirgrowth is sending shockwavesthrough the industry because itviolates a fundamental axiom ofefficiency-based agriculture. It provesthat consumers don't always rewardthose who can best increase efficien-cy and drop prices.

Before leaving Iowa, I visited PaulWillis, who runs the Niman RanchPork Company out of the brickhouse where he was born. When Iarrived, early in the morning, it feltthe way I once imagined a farmshould feel. Pigeons cooed in a coteand somewhere a rooster proclaimedits wakefulness. It smelled earthy,not septic. But although Willis'splace looks like an old-fashionedfarm it is also a scientifically sophis-ticated operation based on a revolu-tionary idea: "Weare trying to adaptto who the pig is," Willis said.

Instead of pushing the pig to thelimit of what it can stand. so that itwill better fit into an efficient sys-tem, Willis has created a' farm thatworks in cooperation with the ani-mals. Give the pig what it wants, thetheory goes, and in return the pigwill thrive and someday make atoothsome meal.

Scientists have shown that whenpigs.have their druthers, they spendtime grazing in pasture and rootingin the earth. Willis used these stud-ies to refine traditional methods andcreated a system that would allowhogs to indulge all their grazing, for-aging, socializing, and nest-buildinginstincts. This system allows Willisto dispense with the great heap ofgadgets and drugs that confined-animal feeding operations must buy,and when pigs have room to spreadout, their manure enriches ratherthan pollutes the soil.

But it's the little things thatcount. For instance, Willis spendsenough time with his sows so thatthey get to know him. They aren'tupset when he comes in and didn'tprotest when I entered the bam. Hefirmly believes that a pig that lives alife of placid ease is more likely to

become the best-tasting meat in theworld-and it's his mission to cre-ate that meat. Willis isn't interestedin maintaining strict genetic unifor-mity, and his hogs can survive thechance encounter with a germ ortwo, so artificial insemination is notof much use to him. And since hispigs spend most of their time run-ning around outside, catching themfor insemination would be a full-time job. When I asked him if it'smore efficient to let the boar do thework, he nodded.

"A boar," Willis said, "is a cheaphired man."

There's no arguing with the pricetag, however. A Niman Ranch porkchop costs significantly more thanone from Smithfield. Nonetheless,the pork has been a hit. In 1997 thecompany was producing 120 pigs aweek. Now, to keep up with de-mand, it sends more than 3,000 hogsto slaughter each week. N imanRanch has 450 farmers growingswine according to its protocols, andWillis is recruiting more.

Willis is particularly proud to begiving these small farmers a way tomake a decent living, though heknows N iman Ranch alone can't re-populate the dying towns of the Mid-west. We drove together through thetown of Thornton, Iowa, and Willispulled up at his old high school. Hehad been a Thornton Thunderbolt-a dying breed. As large farms re-placed small ones, the population ofThornton became too small to war-rant its own high school. Now hishigh school serves as a middleschool for both Thornton and threeother towns.

Willis pulled away from his almamater, and we drove in silence. Buthis mood brightened a moment later.He stopped the truck and pointedout a group of his pigs in a cornfield.The pigs frolicked. Yes, anthropo-morphism be damned, they frolickedamid the dried cornstalks. Theydashed off in one direction, only todash back again. They rolled on theground. They ran in little circles ofporcine glee. They drove their nosesinto the earth, burying themselvesup to their ears.

"There it is," Willis said. "Pork-topia." _