Posted on 08/25/2013 9:29:36 AM PDT by Kaslin
The placid cornfields of the upper Midwest have the look of a place where nothing important ever changes. But here, at a large pig farm five miles south of town, the beginnings of a small revolution are unmistakable.
My host today is Bob Johnson, a sturdy 6-footer who gives the impression he would not be rushed if he were running with the bulls in Pamplona. As president of Johnson-Pate Pork Inc., which he co-owns with two sisters and a brother-in-law, he has taken a big role in changing the way hogs are handled.
In recent years, one major food corporation after another, from McDonald's to Safeway, has announced plans to stop buying pork from suppliers that confine pregnant sows in gestation stalls -- individual enclosures so tiny the pig can't turn around. Target has set a deadline of 2022, voicing an increasingly common sentiment: "We're committed to the humane treatment of animals, and believe they should be raised in clean, safe environments free from cruelty, abuse or neglect."
Johnson, who has lived on this farm since he was a teenager, saw a business opportunity in getting rid of the cramped crates, as well as eliminating the routine use of antibiotics. So in 2010, his company switched -- a big undertaking for a farm that sells 20,000 pigs per year.
Traditionalists say that gestation stalls are indispensable because when pigs are housed in groups, they fight -- with bigger and fiercer animals injuring smaller ones and getting more than their share of the feed.
But that's not what is on display in the gestation building, a structure about 60 feet wide and 250 feet long occupied by some 625 pregnant sows. They are walking around and lounging quietly in large group pens. Some cool off under sprinklers that go off intermittently, as a few take their turn to eat. When the weather is good, they can go into an outdoor enclosure.
Johnson says when the pigs are moved into the pens after being inseminated, there is "some fighting, as they establish their social order." Before long, each pig knows when it's her turn to eat and, equally important, when it's someone else's.
Each pig has a radio transmitter attached to her ear, which carries a ticket for one free daily meal at the electronic sow feeder -- a narrow chute that dispenses an enriched mixture of corn and soy meal. Once the pigs have eaten, they understand they won't get fed again till the next day. Well, most do: As we're watching, one sow decides it's worth trying to get seconds. No luck.
Peggy Pate, Johnson's sister, has two animal science degrees from the University of Illinois and takes a hands-on role with the pigs, checking to see that they're healthy and well fed. "I'm in the pens at least twice a day," she says.
A slim woman wearing a T-shirt commemorating the 1994 Cornfest 10K, she's dwarfed by the hogs, which weigh in around 450 pounds. But she says the animals are calmer than they were in gestation stalls. Back then, she says, "I always wore earplugs to block the noise."
It's helpful to Pate when the radio transmitter indicates a pig hasn't eaten, which is sometimes a sign of illness and sometimes a sign that an ear tag has fallen off. She uses a computer to adjust the feed for specific hogs that she sees losing weight or gaining too much.
Does raising pigs more humanely cost more? Johnson reports that expenses are a little higher with the new methods, but his customers, which include Whole Foods and Fork in the Road Foods, are willing to pay a premium for his pork.
The effect is small compared to changes in the cost of feed, which adds up to 70 percent of his expenses and has doubled over the past decade. The returns are enough to make it worthwhile. "We'd do it over again," he says.
Others may want to learn from his example. Nine states have passed measures to outlaw gestation stalls. In conservative, Republican Arizona, 61 percent of voters voted for the ban.
A lot of Americans are not entirely comfortable with how farm animals are treated to maximize output and minimize costs in food production, and they are hopeful there is a better way. As it happens, there is. At the Johnson-Pate farm, there is something new in the air, and it's not the smell of pigs.
***Which just proves the point that urban dwellers are ignoramuses on the subject of how their food is produced. ****
Urban dwellers should have no say in farm management.
Next they will demand we buy meat made in the store, not from an animal on a farm!
You Wiki link use crates and stalls interchangeably.
It’s a BS article by animal-rights morons.
HaHaha
If I hadn’t heard words to this effect with my own ears I’d thought it was some kinda prank by farmers.....
Truth is stranger than fiction....
Gestation stalls are used, as the name suggests, during the gestation period, which is 3 months, 3 weeks, 3 days (113 days). They are used so that each sow can receive the proper amount of feed (see post #7), and so that fewer developing baby pigs are lost due to fighting.
The stalls also allow for better husbandry because each animal can easily be evaluated, as compared to a group where the sick one can kind of 'get lost' in the group.
They differ from farrowing stalls in that they have no place for baby pigs to be, the feeding trough is much smaller, as farrowed sows are put on full high energy, high fat, feed soon after farrowing (the proper word for a sow giving birth). A lactating sow will eat 15 or 20 pounds of this high energy feed per day, which is a large volume, and needs a large trough.
Hey, clown, I’ve got decades in farming—including hogs and cattle. Your posts make farmers sound stupid and cruel.
Where does it say that she’s an ag professor? All is says is she’s got two ag degrees. Many, many farmers have animal science or similar degrees these days.
"Gestation stalls,......... are only for a short time to protect the newly born piglets from getting squished by their mothers."
I thought maybe there had been some confusion between gestation stalls and farrowing crates.
They are talking about gestation stalls not farrowing stalls. I believe they still go into the farrowing stalls when pigging time comes. We always used farrowing stalls as well for both pig and sow safety but didn’t use the gestation stalls to keep sows year roung other than breeding.
That’s ok. no offense taken....
***Hogs, like chickens before is now the domain of Big Ag...***
This area used to be in the economic stranglehold of the Chicken Men. You worked at their starvation wages or you did not work. Then Sam Walton started his Walmart store and people flocked there for better wages.
The Chicken Men could not get cheap help so they began to import Mexicans back in the LATE 1960S.
Then they began to start HOG FARMS here. The smell was so bad that they eventually closed most down and relocated to the high plains around Guymon, OK, where there was lots of empty land.
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