"Hogs and the Meaning of Life in Iowa"
by
Richard P. Horwitz
Versions of this essay appeared in 1996 Festival of American Folklife,
ed. Catherine Hiebert Kerst (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1996), pp. 18-20, and
Festival of Iowa Folklife: A Sesquicentennial Celebration!, ed. Rachelle H. Saltzman and
Catherine Hiebert Kerst (Des Moines: Iowa Sesquicentennial Commission, 1996), pp. 19-20, and
"Americans Old and New," Mississippi: The River of Song, PBS Online
(The Filmmakers Collaborative and the Smithsonian Institution, 1998).
In the Spring of 1995, the President of the United States visited Iowa. The occasion was a conference on rural life, the sort of event that might be used to wax quotably about the heartland, rugged individuals and other pastoral pieties. Orators have done so since the days of Thomas Jefferson and continued well after most Americans -- among them, most Iowans -- moved to town and took jobs behind a counter or a desk. But there was reason to worry that the President’s photo opportunity might get testy. He would be met by citizens rallying to protect family farmers from “vertical integrators,” the large, high-tech, multi-national operations that already dominate poultry and have set their sights on pigs. With statutes that are perennially reconsidered, the state of Iowa has long been hospitable to family farms, which diversify by raising hogs, and relatively inhospitable to factory farms, which diversify by trading grain futures, patents, and packing plants. Clichés about yeomen or imagery drawn from “Little House” would hardly calm passions. Iowa Senator Tom Harkin did his best, introducing the President with a joke: “No one should be allowed to be president, if they don't understand hogs.” Most everyone laughed, though likely for varied reasons.
Iowans are used to kidding about the state’s most infamous products, corn and its four-legged incarnation, hogs. In tourist shops, next to the joke postcard with a thirty-foot ear of corn on a flat-bed, you can see ample evidence of self-deprecating Iowa humor. There are “hogs ‘n kisses” T-shirts, coffee mugs, hand towels, sow pin-up calendars and other swine-laden memorabilia with “Greetings from Iowa.” The nickname, “The Hawkeye State,” is a reminder of Sauk and Fox Indian heritage as well as the noble birds that are easily spotted soaring or perched on fence posts in the countryside. But on souvenirs, the nickname is apt to read, “The Hawgeye State.” Iowans, including people with a serious stake in “pork production,” are as amused by swinalia as anyone else.
One way to explain the fascination would be by recognizing that Iowa and hogs simply do have a special relationship. Since World War II, Iowa has been the center of “The Swine Belt.” About two-thirds of all the pigs in the U.S. are raised on family farms within two hundred miles of the state capital. Des Moines is also home of the National Pork Producers Council which financed the ad campaign that slid the expression -- “the other white meat” -- onto America’s common tongue. They could bury you in statistics showing that Iowa hogs help balance the U.S. trade deficit, boost employment, and feed the world.
Swine are, among other things, miraculously efficient converters of grain to meat. Hence too, they help farmers hold grain off the market, “add to its value” by eating it, until the price improves. Then, as the saying goes, “the corn walks itself to market.” Since grains seldom fetch their cost of production, that fatal walk helps keep food affordable and agriculture solvent.
The walk proceeds up a loading chute onto a jerry-rigged pickup or onto a fleet of multi-tiered semis on minute-by-minute schedule. Hog carriers bounce across a vast grid of farm-to-market roads, headed for meat-packing plants “in town” that hitch farms through pork to the wider world. For most of the past century “town” could be just about anyplace with a decent water supply. Iowa is the only state with excess capacity, meaning that large packers still maintain little buying stations off on gravel roads. They signal an open market for the occasional goose-necked-trailer load when the price is right or cash is short.
Under current circumstances raising pigs is one of the very few ways left for a young person to start farming. You do not need much more than a small piece of ground, a couple of modular buildings, a tractor, and a grinder to tow behind. With thorough planning, six digits of credit, and hard work, you might be able to make a go of it. Not surprisingly, given the nurturing that sows and their pigs require, women have been especially prized around the farrowing house. You still might be able to schedule chores around carpooling the kids and other part-time jobs. Pieties aside, raising pigs in this part of the world remains close to a democratic art.
So, Iowa hogs are an essential part of family farming, small towns, the pricing and transportation system, and the landscape. They also show up on the dinner table. Nearly everywhere you go, you can grab a “brat” or a tenderloin sandwich the size of a competition Frisbee. And many a pie or pastry maker still claim that the key to flaky crust is lard. Of course, observant Moslems, Hindus, Jews, and vegans disagree, but there is no denying the material significance of hogs in Iowa. Jokes about them, would seem inevitable, given their . . . weight.
But much the same could be said of other places that embrace hog culture less closely or at least hold their nose. For example, the ratio of pigs-to-people and their concentration on the land is actually a lot higher in the Netherlands, and Denmark is the world’s leading pork exporter. But you could easily travel those countries without knowing it. Their joke T-shirts sport clogs and Kierkegaard rather than pigs. The difference cannot be because their pigs have less material significance or smell any sweeter.
There probably is no simple explanation. Traditions are like that, composted from garden-variety realities, hard and soft, silly and sad, new and changeless over the years. Probably farmers, the folks who share daily life with hogs, know that culture best. Lessons about birth and death, tenderness, impatience, and the value of a dollar are apt to have been first gained working for a ribbon with a 4-H litter. Tales are swapped about the infuriating ability of at least one sow in every group to bark and jump at the most inopportune moments. Some herders develop a bias for belted Hamps or Durocs, but nearly everyone has learned how to see what “you like what you see” in a good market hog. Learning requires a mixture of sculpture appreciation and market prediction that has made celebrities out of the best stock-show judges. And nearly everyone knows the fear that comes in hearing about a pathogen outbreak in the neighborhood. Nights are spent in sleepless worry or taking turns with a spouse on hourly trudges to the farrowing house through drifting snow. And midst the scares, the tedium, the ups and downs, there is always the clang of lids on steel self-feeders telling you that you are home. Depending on how long it takes to spot a lame one, a prolapse or another broken or frozen waterer, the sound may or may not be welcome. But the hogs that bang those lids are part of Iowa’s welcoming crew.
Of course, Iowans who work less directly with pigs -- buyers, butchers, feed dealers, equipment manufacturers, employees and kin -- like those who work in office towers and bed in urban apartments, have fewer pig tales to tell. But they, too, know about a distinctly porcine cultural surround. And that will certainly change. The specific way that hogs have been raised, the taste of consumers, and the demands of companies that link one to the other have been extremely dynamic, possibly no more so than they are today. At stake are hard decisions about economy, ecology, and quality of life, about the edge between adaptation and loss. A measure of understanding, respect and maybe good humor will be useful on all sides.
It might not be wise to insist that presidents understand hogs. But it is worth encouraging.
Updated: April 2026
E-mail: Richard-Horwitz@uiowa.edu