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IATP Hog Report IATP Hog Report http://www.iatp.org/hogreport/2/27/2006 3:49:57 AM Table of Contents The Price We Pay for Corporate Hogs Table of Contents By Marlene Halverson i. Executive Summary and Overview July 2000 I. Are Independent Farmers an Endangered Species? Sponsored by the Funding Group on Confined Animal Feeding Operations. II. Putting Lives in Peril Copyright 2000: Institute for Agriculture and Trade III. Building Sewerless Cities Policy IV. Part of the Pig Really Does Fly Dedicated to the V. The Hog Factory in the Backyard memory of Ruth Harrison VI. Pigs in the Poky Author of Animal Machines:The New VII. Stop the Madness Factory Farming Industry (1964). VIII. Funder to Funder June 1920-June 2000 IX. Animal Welfare Institute Husbandry Standards for Pigs Acknowledgements ● Contacts - Some organizations and individuals known to Home Page be working on the animal factory issue and humane, sustainable, and socially just alternatives. ● Funders Acknowledgements Sponsored by the Funding Group on Confined Animal Feeding Operations. Written by Marlene K. Halverson About the author: http://www.iatp.org/hogreport/indextoc.html (1 of 2)2/27/2006 3:49:58 AM Table of Contents Marlene Halverson was raised on a southern Minnesota dairy and crop farm. She is a Ph.D. candidate in agricultural economics at the University of Minnesota. In 1992, she was a guest researcher at the Department of Animal Health and Environment, Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences, where she studied the economic effects of animal protection legislation on Swedish hog farmers. She has visited farms and pig research institutes in several European countries. From 1995 to 1997, while employed by Iowa State University, she assisted Iowa and Minnesota farmers adopting a humane, sustainable Swedish hog production system. She has served on the University of Minnesota Institutional Animal Care Committee's subcommittee on agricultural animals used in research and teaching. She participated in the "Hogs Your Way" project of the Minnesota Department of Agriculture Energy and Sustainable Agriculture program and is a member of the Minnesota Institute for Sustainable Agriculture Alternative Swine Systems Task Force. Halverson has written for popular magazines, citizen group publications, and farm and scientific journals on the subject of humane, sustainable pig production. Charles Benjamin contributed an early draft of this report, assisted by Andrea Repinsky, who collected many of the contact names and addresses and contacts' descriptions of their work. Duane Sand provided critical oversight. Others who assisted were Barbara Clark, Diane Halverson, Charlene Lucken, and Charmaine Wright. Several individuals recommended strategies and action alternatives for inclusion at the end of each chapter. The author is especially indebted to Robbin Marks for her thoughts on these. Robbin Marks, Paul Sobocinski, Christine Stevens and Sr. Kathleen Storms made comments on specific sections of the report. The author is responsible for any errors that remain. Graphic design and production: Brett Olson, Geografix. Graphic design assistance: Jason Russell. Cover photo reprinted by permission of Diane Halverson. Cartoons reprinted by permission of Agri-News, Rochester, Minnesota. Mark Ritchie, Presudent of the Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy, oversaw the production of this report for the Funding Group on Confined Animal Feeding Operations. We acknowledge the growing number of independent family hog farmers who are striving every day to farm more humanely and more sustainably. May this report highlight their cause. 2nd Printing © 2000 Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy. The views presented in this report are those of the author and do not necessarily represent the views of the Funding Group on Confined Animal Feeding Operations or others who assisted. We encourage you to reproduce this report or portions of it without permission if credit is given. http://www.iatp.org/hogreport/indextoc.html (2 of 2)2/27/2006 3:49:58 AM Section 0 i. Executive Summary Executive Summary and Overview Section Summaries: The Price We Pay for Corporate Hogs Are Independent Farmers an Endangered Species? The industrialization of U.S. animal agriculture has pressed on, unabated, for half a century, gradually changing the faces of American farming and Putting Lives in Peril rural communities. The changes wrought by industrialization are occurring in all of animal agriculture. This report focuses on the impacts of hog factories. Building Sewerless Cities The industrialization of hog farming has been attributed in great part to Part of the Pig Really inexorable advances in science and technology and the freedom afforded Does Fly economic development by an unfettered marketplace. Indeed, some experts see current industry structure as simply "what has evolved out of Hog Factory in the Back the marketplace,"1 the inevitable result of impersonal, irresistible Yard economic forces triggering a kind of "natural selection" process over which we are powerless to do anything but go with the flow. Pigs in the Poky Writing about mega-hog factory Seaboard Corporation's move to Guymon, Oklahoma, however, authors from the North Central Regional Stop the Madness! Center for Rural Development note that the move was hardly due to market forces at work. Describing the over $60 million in publicly References supported incentives that drew Seaboard to Guymon and helped it build its facilities and train its workers, they note:2 Guymon is a case of state-directed, rather than market- driven introduction of new economic activity. | Next Section | The chink in the armor of the natural selection theory is that the | Table of Contents | industrialization process is not impersonal or natural or necessary. It, too, has been engineered. Says rural sociologist Doug Constance:3 | Home Page | It is very importantthat we do not accept the industrialization process, the industrialization of agriculture, as something natural, as something inevitable, as something determined. It is no such thing. It is a plan. It is a plan for certain people to benefit and others to pay. The industrialization of hog farming has taken place in a political- economic environment or context in which the quality of natural resources, the quality of human and animal life, the safety and quality of our food, and the quality of life for future generations are valued lower than short-term economic gain. http://www.iatp.org/hogreport/sec0.html (1 of 11)2/27/2006 3:50:00 AM Section 0 The choice as to whether or not to change the political-economic context in which American agriculture operates that is, the set of laws, regulations, penalties, incentives, and community expectations influencing agricultural development is a political choice. We can change the political-economic context, within which structural change in agriculture occurs, and thereby change its direction. For the good of the planet, our response to the changes the industrialization process in agriculture is invoking must not be hands-off. The Need for An Historical Perspective What people tend to think of as modern problems associated with a modern industry have been in the making for decades, as long as the industrialization of agriculture has been taking place. Consider the problem of antibiotic resistance, which medical scientists contend stems in significant part from the use of antibiotics at subtherapeutic levels in animal feeds to control disease and make animals grow faster. Thirty-six years ago, in Great Britain, Ruth Harrison wrote a book entitled Animal Machines: The New Factory Farming Industry in which she described the cruelty of animal factories. The story she told could have been written today:4 [F]eeding firms are entitled to incorporate up to 100 grammes of antibiotic in each ton of animal feeding stuffs as a regular supplement for intensively kept animals, and the farmer may buy and incorporate antibiotics at any level he thinks fit. This, when the merest trace can mean the difference between life and death to a consumer. Since 1964, Great Britain and other parts of Europe have taken effective steps to reduce at least some antibiotic use in agriculture. In the United States, to date we have not. For the past 40 years, the profits of a few have repeatedly trumped the benefits to the many who depend on the continued effectiveness of precious antibiotics. It is important to know that the question of antibiotic use in animal feeds has been debated for four decades and that the evidence for agricultural origins of antibiotic resistance has been building for many years. We need this awareness to resist agribusiness' and the animal health industry's continued calls for more study, more time, more proof before acting to restrict the use of how antibiotics are used in agriculture. We need it to know for certain that it is time to stop listening to agribusiness and take action. Hence, this paper places some animal factory issues in a historical context, http://www.iatp.org/hogreport/sec0.html (2 of 11)2/27/2006 3:50:00 AM Section 0 in consideration of George Santayana's observation that "those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it." It also describes, in more detail than is usually seen, the experiences of people who have tried to channel industry change in more socially beneficial directions, because we can learn from each other's experiences. The report is organized in seven parts. Each provides a detailed description of its issue and closes with a list of strategies and action alternatives for constructive reform. This Executive Summary and Overview closes with a list of ways foundations can help empower citizens and their organizations in their efforts to preserve family farms and protect the public, farm animals, wildlife, and the environment from the ravages of animal factories. Summary of Parts 1 through 7 I. Are Independent Farmers an Endangered Species? Part One of this report asks "are independent farmers an endangered species?" The statistics indicate that is the case.
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