"Hog Wars and Pig Ties"
by 
Richard P. Horwitz
 

A version of this essay is a chapter in 
Fear Itself: Enemies Real and Imagined in American Culture, ed. Nancy Lusignan Schultz 
(Lafayette, IN: Purdue University Press, 1999), pp. 377-387.
 

* * *

Our hog farm consists of 30 sows; so, anything over 100 sows, I thought was big. 
Then I hear these people talking about thousands of sows. It just blew my mind. 
Two nights later we had a meeting and organized opposition, and we've been going ever since.

-- Martha Stevens, co-founder of Partners in Progress1 
 

It's kind of an axiom: "What's good for the pigs is good for the people." 

- Terry Coffey, head of research and development for Murphy Farms Inc.2 
 

$Oink, $Oink 

--Title of an article in Forbes on the rapid growth of Smithfield Foods3

* * *
 

For most of the past two decades, I have worked two jobs -- one full-time as a professor of American studies and the other part-time as a hired hand, on a hog/grain/cattle farm of more than 2,000 acres near my home in southeast Iowa. The original attraction in this mix of figurative and literal manure was the chance to stay in touch with neighbors and to get some exercise outdoors. But, as it turns out, the commute also afforded me an opportunity to understand how pigs might provide much more than midlife salve or a target for silly signifiers like Arnold Ziffel or Miss Piggy. During the last couple of decades of the twentieth century, pigs -- the genuine article -- actually grabbed some headlines, even outside the American Swine Belt. In the spring of 1995, for example, they set the tone for a visit to Iowa by the president of the United States. Iowa may be the capital of things swinely, but it is normally a flyover state for leaders of the Free World. Something powerful must have been afoot. 

The obvious even if unstated purpose of the president's visit was far from porcine. Bill Clinton was shooting for enough profile points and slam dunks in local caucuses to wow potential contributors to his 1996 reelection campaign. Iowans are accustomed to hosting such warmup games every four years. But the excuse for this particular spectacle was agricultural. He was to lend luster to the opening ceremony of yet another Iowa State University conference on rural life. American policy makers often use such functions to pose as principled, and academics as real-worldly. This one, with its furrowed backdrop, would be especially propitious for the populist pose. He could wax quotably about rugged individuals, the heartland, and other pastoral pieties. Orators have done so since the days of Thomas Jeferson 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 this president's photo opportunity might get testy, and the cause was resolutely porcine. 

The president would be met, everyone knew, by protesters rallying to protect "family hog farmers" from "vertical integrators," the large, high-tech, multinational operations that took over poultry in the 1970s and that in the 1980s and 1990s set their sights on pigs. With statutes that are perennially reconsidered, the state of Iowa, like other states on the Plains, has long been hospitable to family farms (which-diversify by raising animals as well as crops) and relatively inhospitable to factory farms (which diversify by trading grain futures, patents, and packing plants). Citizens were squared off, for and against change to accommodate "the big guys" of pork production. Hence, otherwise calming cliches about yeomen or imagery drawn from Little House could turn incendiary. Iowa senator Tom Harkin did his best to chill the crowd, 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.4  

The tension that Harkin diffused was about the fate of actual animals and their caretakers, but even then they were cast as instruments of symbolic aerial warfare. Rather than evaluating the qualities of particular changes in pork production, people tended to line up on one side or the other of a single, exaggerated divide. From my vantage point their arguments, which began in the late 1980s and persisted through the '90s, shed about as much light on farming as the World Wrestling Federation sheds on wrestling. Both mainly provided an occasion for a chorus of cheers or jeers as stereotypes were body slammed.

Even when combatants met face-to-face, as they often did (not just in court) to work on their differences, depressingly predictable changes would ensue. In 1994, for example, with great fanfare the governor and some state representatives organized a public hearing in Creston, Iowa, where passions were running dangerously high. I was pleased that elected officials were trying to lead Creston back from the brink of blood feud to common interests, if not common sense. But proponents and opponents of corporate hog farming (a.k.a. "progressive producers" /"thieves in the night") seemed only to agree that they could not agree. They lined up on two sides of the room and spent the balance of the session trading invective.5 

In substance, the divide in most of these disputes resembled that between the "cultural right" and "left" that I already found tiresome in my job at the university. I had hoped to find on the farm some respite from the "culture wars," as presidential aspirant Pat Buchanan dubbed them, of late-twentieth-century America. But allied forces tussled around the hog lot as furiously as they did around the ivory tower. The ammunition was standard-bore.6

On one side, you could hear the measured tones of manly "realism." People recall an inspiring past when -- distinctly, supposedly -- the best Americans (in this case, hog farmers) had the maturity to meet harsh challenges for the benefit of us all. The old days were great, though more in spirit than substance. (Who would want to go back to sod huts and bouts with yellow fever?) A reinvigorated, don't-look-back enterprising spirit will continue to yield bigger and better things, as it always has, and help inspire confidence to face changes that, like it or not, the real world demands. Make way for the big guys. 

On the other side, the tone is more "populist" or "progressive." Underdogs or their self-appointed protectors see a less salutary "reality." The past requires pruning for style as well as substance. The first branches to lop are those whose fruits include pollution, arrogance, and injustice for most people and incontestable betterment only for a narrow elite. Hope might best come in restraining consumption and in better distinguishing the short-term interests of robber barons from the long-term interests of the public, the planet, and generations to come. Just say, "Whoa!"7 

These, are familiar and, for many of us in academics, even tedious battle lines. Back-pew arguments and letters to the editor of Swine Belt newspapers resemble the dialogue you might expect, say, between Jesse Helms and bell hooks or the Heritage Foundation and the Brookings Institute.8 The realist line is most visible in feature stories or editorials facing farrowing-house flooring and dewormer ads in hog trade periodicals. The progressive line is more likely found amid ads for New Age music or radical wear in the Soho or college-town press. For example, after a good deal of success exposing cruelty in veal-calf operations, the Humane Farming Association launched a "campaign against factory farming" from its office suite in San Francisco. The more mainstream press, of course, opted for "balance" of the on-the-one-hand/but-on-the-other variety, as if, wisdom lay in fifty-fifty doses of resignation and reform, the journalistic equivalent of Solomonic justice.9

But even the mainstream press gave voice to Chicken Little. When, for example, Time magazine covered the hog wars in its "Business" section, the story began: 

Colorado farmers Galen Travis and Jim Dober have seen the future, and it stinks. . . . From Colorado to the Carolinas, enterprising growers like [Ronald] Houser and agribusiness giants such as Cargill and Continental Grain are building such livestock factories to mass-produce hogs for packers like Hormel Foods and John Morrell. . . .The vast livestock factories are a long way from the here-a-pig, there-a-pig operations of traditional farms.

Note the forced choice between the Eden of yore and hell 'round the bend. Moreover, the invoked "tradition" only makes sense if your ag experience has been pretty much limited to summer camp choruses of "Old MacDonald Had a Farm." There have been precious few here-and-there-a-pig operations in the United States (next to none capable of supporting a family) for at least a quarter of a century. The choice seems to loom so large in part because the past has been so heavily airbrushed. And the integrators who lead "the march of commerce" are dressed in jackboots:

Megafarms ... turn out pigs as if they were piggy banks from football-field length buildings, where the animals are confined to small pens, fed, medicated and monitored with an exacting precision that fattens them to 265 lbs. in six months. . . . [These] porkopolises are multiplying like rabbits. 

Of course, Time does offer some information here that is worth crediting. Modern hog buildings are, in fact large, often even larger than football fields. Cargill and Continental Grain (though neither Hormell nor Morrell) have been among the key players, as they have been in just about every scrap of food grown, shipped, or processed since World War II.  Yes, pigs reach their market weight in six months, but they have been doing so (give or take a couple of weeks) for decades. And animals are confined, fed, and medicated with increasing precision. But are we to gather that their care should be less exacting? Is the choice simply between the singular purity of what has been and the stink of what is coming? To hear Time tell it, at issue for citizens is nothing less than a mechanized assault on their way of life."10

Such a background of hyperbole may help explain popular acceptance of hallucinatory scenes like the scene that opened the film Babe. With film noir lighting and camera angles, viewers get the impression that Babe, piglet, was rescued from a state-of-the-art operation that could pass for Treblinka under the Schutzstaffel. Sows, we are told, are routinely yanked from their suckling young (who are instead nursed by robots), marched onto pen-side semis, and hauled to slaughter. Only through homespun miracles can Babe live out his/ her days with a family that, we are to believe, can make it on home canning and pasturing a couple sheep (who, incidentally, never go to market).

"Big deal," you might counter. A business story in Time or a Hollywood movie (for children, no less) can only be expected to bloat its plot, given a distractible audience. But plots are also distended in otherwise staid periodicals. Look, for example, at the way the topic was covered in a 1996 issue of US News and World Report, not in its "Business" section, but in "Culture and Ideas" under the title, "Hog Heaven -- and Hell." The story begins with a stock journalistic hook. An innocent (just like you, reader) vaguely recognizes a foul omen. In this case, that innocent is retired farmer Sidney Whaley, who for months forebears "the nauseating odor and clouds of flies from 1200 pigs" on a big guy's farm upwind, Onslow County, North Carolina. Whaley patiently rocks behind closed doors and windows, waiting for a response to letters that he has sent, politely requesting relief from government regulators. He is a model citizen. And then the omen proves prophetic. On 24 June,1995, 

After heavy rains, some twenty-five million gallons of feces and urine flushed from the buildings where the pigs were confined, burst out of the farm's eight-acre waste lagoon. The reddish-brown tide, more than twice the volume of oil spilled by the Exxon Valdez, poured knee-deep for two hours across the. highway between Whaley's red-brick bungalow and the First Church of God.11

Even in the sugar-free, low-sodium prose that is US News cuisine, Whaley becomes Job, and his suffering a signal from the Lord. 

Actually, churches were receiving prophecy from the hog house well before Onslow County's Armageddon. Back in November 1994, for example, an ecumenical throng gathered at St. Augustine's Church in Des Moines to witness testimony under the title: "Community, Church and Large-Scale Hog Production." The list of speakers was a Who's Who of rural activism. Their names dotted front-page stories through the 1980s and1990s. They were. progressives -- Methodist, Baptist, Catholic, and academic-agnostic. 

Although I could not attend (I had to teach that day), I did buy four hours on videotape and got on their mailing list. And I could not avoid laughing with the participants about the unlikely title of the conference and session subtitles such as "The Theology of Hog Confinement." But these were also people who had to be admired. They were soft-spoken and compassionate, obviously sincere, self-sacrificing, and committed to social justice. Many of them had been drawn into "the battle" by personal experience, growing up in a loving farm family that suffered greatly in prior farm crises. Key institutional participants included the National Catholic Rural Life Conference, which began with the great farm depression in 1923, and Prairie Fire Rural Action, which formed in the foreclosure epidemic of 1985, a period of transformation for many of those in attendance.

Moreover, I greatly admired the savvy coalitions that they were able to build. Several conferees were influential in the self-designated "Citizens' Task Force on Livestock Concentration." Their report, including detailed legislative and regulatory recommendations, was endorsed by an amazingly large and diverse set of interests, ranging from the Diocese of Sioux City to the Iowa AFL and the Sierra Club. It was a model of good sense in countering the governor's version, which was more in-house and accommodative, less a grassroots, leadership affair.

We may not agree that the Lord has chosen to speak through hogs or that your average Midwestern farmer fits among the suffering meek of the world, akin to Mozambique refugees. I, for one, have a hard time restraining my cynicism when clerics put modern farmers at the head of a lineage stretching straight from Jehovah through Isaiah, Jesus, and Thomas Jefferson. They neglect to mention, for example, that the humble farm "community" to which Jefferson belonged was itself a model of vertical integration. And its meek were chattel slaves. But, quibbling aside, it is hard to resist a clincher moral: "Hey, how. many executives of ag multinationals (versus family farmers) live next door to the huge hog barns and manure lagoons they are building? And if they will not, why do they feel entitled to stick them next to someone else?" It is, populists justly insist, a violation of the Golden Rule.

In general, I share their suspicion of high technology, monopoly capitalism, and rapid change, especially when the profits are so much more visible in suburban office parks than in the countryside or the city. I share their affection for neighborliness, greenery, and agricultural diversity, which I, too, have lived with for most of my life. But my experience with "empowered local communities" has been less inspiring. After all, if locals really had their way, most of the people who plant cotton and rice in the United States would still be slaves, and my immigrant ancestors would likely still be living (or, even more likely, slaughtered) "back where they belong." Rural populists, in particular, have consistently included some of the most vicious bigots in American history. Every time commodity prices take a dip, the grassroots are ablaze with conspiratorial fantasies about, Russian or Mexican intrigue and Jewish bankers. Thank goodness, cosmopolites have been willing and able to check some of the ugliest of agrarian impulses.12 That which is traditional, family, local, and small cannot be so simply set against that which is new, corporate, distant, and large, like catechismic poles, Good and Evil. 

This recognition has fueled my determination to parse and evaluate more pointedly the charges and countercharges that arise whenever people get to talking about hogs these days. The commonplace practicalities of "pig production" and pork consumption attract conflicted environmental, social, technical, and spiritual alliances. The issues around which they ally can be very complex, each with its own cadre of specialists who have much to say, surely more than I could adequately cover here. But they deserve sustained, critical-even presidential-attention. The idea is to connect abstractions that pass for "culture" more precisely to circumstances on the ground, and vice versa.13
 

Notes

  1. Patty Cantrell, "Is the Family Farm an Endangered Species?" Ms., March/April1997, 33. Ms. readers learn pig politics through the achievements of Martha Stevens, a family farmer and activist from Missouri. Cantrell associates Stevens's passion with "one of her spiritual 'mentors,' Susan B. Anthony, whose image hangs on a shiny medallion around her neck." Prompted by giant new hog operations, courtesy of Continental Grain, thirty miles from her farm in Hatfield, Stevens and a retired schoolteacher, Velda Smith, joined with outraged neighbors to found Partners in Progress, which through the Missouri Rural Crisis Center is affiliated with the National Campaign for Family Farms and the Environment. Cantrell credits Smith and Stevens. for having "taken up unpaid positions in the hog wars" (34).

  2. Jim Barnett, "Raising a Stink," Raleigh News and Observer, 18 July 1993, l0A.

  3. The article centers on the success of Smithfield's CEO, Joseph Luter III, who had at that time acquired stock worth $47 million; see Rita Koselka, "$Oink, $Oink," Forbes, 3 February 1992, 54-56.

  4. Photo caption, Daily Iowan, 25 April 1995, 1. Harkin's quip is a standard one in the hog trade, prominently featured among the trivia that the National Pork Producers Council (NPPC) puts in its publicity and credits to former president Harry Truman. In fact, I suspect that Harkin got the quotation from the NPPC, if only because it was otherwise so' hard to find. I was unable to find it in any primary or secondary sources in the university library. Staff whom I asked at the Truman Presidential Library were similarly stumped, and Harkin's staff never responded to my request for sources.
         I refer here to the Little House on the Prairie books and TV series because they are among the strongest and most popular evocations of "family farming" -- self-reliant, intimate, independent. Their image is doubly misleading, not only because they fictionalize the memoirs of Laura Ingalls Wilder, but also because her daughter, Rose Wilder Lane, so revised the memoirs to harmonize with her profound disaffection for New Deal programs. Linda Kerber, ''Women and Individualism in American History;" The Massachusetts Review 30 (winter 1989): 604-5; Stephanie Coontz, The Way We Never Were: American Families and the Nostalgia Trap (New York:; Basic Books, 1992), 168-76.

  5. "Task Force Dragged into Fierce Creston Debate about Hog Lots," Iowa City Press-Citizen, 10 September 1994, 5B.

  6. See, for example, Cantrell, "Is the 'FamiIy Farm an Endangered Species?" 33- 37.

  7. The words "populist" and "progressive," of course, have unique and quite specific referents in American history, especially when capitalized (as in the Populist or People's Party, which in 1896 endorsed the presidential candidacy of William Jennings Bryan and the Progressive Party, associated with the presidential aspirations of Theodore Roosevelt and then La Follette, 1912-24). I here use them much more loosely and, hence, pretty interchangeably. I generally prefer "populist" to connote a rural, blue- collar, backward-looking, or demagogic quality and "progressive" for a more urbane, bourgeois and hip, forward-looking, or utopian one. But I use both to signal opposition to corporate domination, presumably in defense of humbler folk. Jeff Zimmerman, an epidemiologist at the College of Veterinary Medicine at Iowa State University, provided an example of this usage, as we got to talking about vertical integration: "I have a lot of conflict with it myself because, in the larger sense, I'm a populist. I believe that what works best for society is if everybody owns a piece of the rock. If one guy owns the rock and if everybody else is just working there, I don't think it makes for a good society. So, I understand all about efficiency and all the wonderful words you hear, but I think we have a healthier society with a lot of small, independent operators. And whether that's farming or whether it's business, I think it's best," Jeff Zimmerman, interview by author, Ames, Iowa, 3 June 1993.

  8. Michael G. Kammen, Mystic Chords of Memory : The Transformation Tradition in American Culture (New York: Knopf, 1991). For a tiny sampler from generals in the 1990s culture wars, see: Roger Kimball, Tenured Radicals: How Politics Has Corrupted Our Higher Education (New York: Harper and Row, 1990); bell hooks and Cornel West, Breaking Bread: Insurgent Black Intellectual Life (Boston, MA: South End Press, 1991); E.D. Hirsch, Jr., Cultural Literacy: What Every American Needs to Know (Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin, 1987); and Henry Louis Louis Gates, Jr., "The Weaning of America," New Yorker, 19 April 199-3, 113-17.

  9. For a nice example of "realism" in the hog trade magazines, see the special issue of National Hog Farmer (15 May 1994), which was heavily dedicated to the boom outside the Swine Belt and heroic adaptations in the Midwest. For a counterexample in the populist mode, see the press releases from the Humane Farming Association or Lenor Yarger, "Iowa's Hog Hell," Icon, 25 January 1996, 4-5, which is based almost entirely on the testimony of Sharon and Ken Petrone, who had long been involved in organizing to stop vertical integrators in Iowa. See also the "Boss Hog" expose that first appeared in the [Raleigh, North Carolina] News and Observer (19-26 February 1995) and was then posted on the World Wide Web and widely cited elsewhere. Ronald Smothers, "Slopping the Hogs, the Assembly-Line Way," New York Times, 30 January 1995, 8A. Journalists touting balance used titles like "Huge Hog Farms Mean Big Dollars, and Foul Odors." For example, the "Business and Farm Section of the Waterloo [Iowa] Courier; organized a whole series of articles by staff writers under the banner, "Hogging the Market: Are Giant Pork-Producing Farms the Way of the Future for Iowa or Just a Big, Smelly Mess?" Waterloo Courier, 17 April 1994, Bl, B4. See also Jay P. Wagner, "A Big Year for Agriculture: Stories That Made Headlines on the Farm Pages," Des Moines Sunday Register, 1 January 1995), 1J.

  10. John Greenwald, "Hogging the Table," Time, 18 March 1996, 76. Note also that the name "Porkopolis" was originally coined to refer to the city of Cincinnati because of its packers, not farms. The author apparently collected his most alarming tales from a "Hog Summit" which featured such environmentalists as Nancy Thompson (staff attorney for the Center for Rural Affairs in Walthill, Nebraska), Carla Smalts (Oklahoma "farm wife" who is a leader of legal and grassroots actions against hog expansion), and the Alliance Conserving Tomorrow.

  11. Michael Satchell, "Hog Heaven -- and Hell," US News and World Report, 22 January 1996, 55.

  12. "Churches and Hogs," Des Moines Sunday Register, 27 November 1994, 3J. I purchased the videotapes, also titled "Community, Church and Large-Scale Hog Production: Theology and Resolution of Hog Production Conflicts in Rural Communities," Church Land Project (CLP), Des Moines, Iowa. According to CLP, 130 people registered. Church Farmland News 4, no. 3 (April 1995), 2. Among the main speakers were Rev. Jerry Avise-Rouse (Mt. Ayr Larger United Methodist Church, Mt. Ayr, Iowa), Rev. Gil Dawes and Barb Grabner (Prairie Fire Rural Action), Bernard Evans (St. John's University), William Heffernan (Department of Rural Sociology, University of Missouri), Carmen Lampe (First Baptist Church. Mt. Ayr, Iowa), Barb Mathias (Iowa Council for lnternational Understanding), Barbara Ross (Diocese of Jefferson City, MO), Mark Schultz (Land Stewardship Project, St. Paul, MN), Denise Turner (Christian Church, Trenton, MO). Citizens Task Force on Livestock Concentration, A Citizens Report: Recommendations for the 1995 Iowa Legislature on Concentrated Livestock Production, 12 October 1994. "Profit Is Only Motive for Some Forms of Ag," The Bishop's Bulletin, January 1995, 7. 
         In viewing the videotape, I was put off by glib contrasts of "family farms" and "corporations," as if their members had different access to God. CEOs were accused of breaking covenants, in the manner of Jerusalem elites starving Palestinians in the eighth century B.C. (Isaiah 5:7-10). It is one thing to say you disagree with people; it is another to presume that there are only two sides, and yours is God's. Furthermore, despite all the talk of leading the downtrodden, by my count, there was only one name on the list of conference registrants that was not Anglo-Saxon, and it was mine. Such quasi-Aryan solidarity plus their awfully easy equation of morality with Christianity made me glad I was absent. "When I say 'we,' I mean the Church. . . . All of us are Christian," a convener announced. For this occasion, ecumenicism meant Catholics and Protestants allying to root out moneyed interests, a solidarity that cannot be very reassuring for a Jew. I do not mean to say that these members of the clergy or their allies were bigots or that they were utterly insensitive to the possibility of abuse. Prairie Fire is to be particularly complimented for its efforts to stop the "Jewish banker" rumors during the 1980s' ag crisis. But my background as a Jew and knowledge of the history of rural populism does leave me wary. I tend to see rural folk both as both more sensible than your average academic and more likely to hang you from the nearest tree. See "Profit Is Only Motive," 7. 
         Recall that Tom Watson, Huey Long, and other champions of the little guy also pampered racists. On bigotry and its role in U.S. populism in general, see John Higham, Strangers in the Land: Patterns of American Nativism, 1860- 1925 (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1988); V.0. Key, Southern Politics in State and Nation, 2nd ed. (Knoxville, TN: University of Tennessee Press, 1984); Catherine McNicol Stock, Rural Radicals: Righteous Rage in the American Grain (Ithaca, N.Y: Cornell University Press, 1996); Walter T.K. Nugent, The Tolerant Populists: Kansas Populism and Nativism (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1963); Jeffrey Ostler, "The Rhetoric of Conspiracy and the Formation of Kansas Populism," Agriculture History 69 (Winter 1995): 1-27; Jeffrey Ostler, "Why the Populists Party Was Strong in Kansas and Nebraska but Weak in Iowa," Western History Quarterly 23 (November 1992): 451-74; and C. Vann Woodward, Tom Watson: Agrarian Rebel (London: Oxford University Press, 1938). Historians and political scientists have long debated the relative importance of nativism among rural progressives before the Great Depression. Woodward and Nugent, for example, nicely parse the extremes. Whether fundamental in the grass roots or superficial in the posture of a few leaders, white supremacy, xenophobia, anti-Catholicism, and anti-Semitism were undeniably evident in otherwise progressive movements through the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in the United States. Armed compounds in the Utah or Texas outback uniformly celebrating the "little guy" and his adamantly Northern European and Protestant lineage -- show those connections remain strong today. Chip Berlet and Matthew N. Lyons, Too Close for Comfort: Right-Wing Populism, Scapegoating, and Fascist Potentials in U.S. Political Traditions (Boston, MA: South End, 1996).
         Xenophobia was clearly a resource in the hysteria surrounding Indiana Packers Company, which built a 300,OOO-square-foot plant in Delphi, Indiana. Among the key complaints was that it was "foreign owned," a joint venture of Ferruzzi of Italy and Mitsubishi of Japan, even though at the time the NPPC was working furiously to remove EC and Japanese barriers to U.S. ventures. See "Communicating the Views of America's Pork Producers," in National Pork Producers Council, 1993- 94 Issues Handbook (Des Moines, IA: National Pork Producers Council, 1994), 35.

  13. Richard P. Horwitz, Hog Ties: Pigs, Manure, and Mortality in American Culture (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1998).
     

Updated: April 2026
E-mail: Richard-Horwitz@uiowa.edu