How to turn a failure into success, oink oink – Penelope Trunk Careers

During Hurricane Ian, millions of gallons of hog poop shot through North Carolina. Pork dung catches my attention. I raised my kids on a pig farm and the water was too contaminated to drink because for decades I farmed gestation crates: a birth invention of factory farms, which are a stacked storage system to get the most pigs per acre.

In recent years, Hurricane Florence and Hurricane Matthew have thrown fecal matter through the air so we know the problems that result: human disease, contaminated drinking water, rivers, plants and fish. There is also a racial issue. The farm owners are white and their pig shit ends up on black property.

We don’t see many politicians taking up this cause. The pig lobby owns North Carolina. The only other state with significant hog operations is Iowa, and you can’t win a presidential primary throwing hogs in the trash.

But California sidestepped the fact that pork producers don’t live in their state, and 68% of voters said California shouldn’t allow the sale of breed box pork. Many attempts to control the pork producers have failed, so whiners have dismissed this one as The Bacon Apocalypse, but lawyers have pushed the law through two appeals and the Supreme Court will hear the case this week.

The state of California will argue that gestation crates are the worst example of animal confinement. The crates do not allow pregnant pigs to move; They can stand or sit, but will not roll over for most of their lives. I hope California also adds something about pigs having intense social-emotional lives and higher IQs than dogs.

But like all legal matters, the conversation will likely boil down to money. The pork industry will invoke interstate trade laws to say that replacing gestation crates with moderately larger stalls is too much of a burden for businesses outside of California. The court will use the Pike test to determine whether the moral cost to the consumer of eating poorly raised pork outweighs the financial cost to the producer of redesigning larger boxes.

The cost argument only works because the meatpacking industry controls the farmers and only the few financially independent pig farmers have been able to study the cost of changing gestation crates. But also universities that are able to do this research are funded by manufacturers of carrier boxes.

My son discovered this problem first hand. As he grew up, our operation transitioned from gestation crates to free-range farrowing. The farmer had a degree in swine genetics and we collected data for nine years using a (mostly) scientific method that was cumbersome at the time, but produced a data set that is unparalleled in the US.

The transition was financially successful. There were fewer sows per acre, but each sow had a greater number of healthy piglets and the herd no longer required antibiotic therapy. There have also been huge cost savings in labor costs because gestation crates require constant cleaning and it is disgusting work.

Even more dramatically, in contrast to their boring, sluggish counterparts, free-ranging piglets at two months old could roam around the pen in small groups like puppies. They were funny and curious and could always get back to their mother if she called.

In high school, my son wanted to work for a professor to see if he would like to be a scientist. So he collected qualitative and quantitative data from 100 sows and more than 1000 piglets and presented them to agricultural departments at universities. Even if there is no data set that comes close to this in terms of quantity or quality, there were no takers.

One professor said that for a study on this subject he would need comparable data for pigs in a state-of-the-art carry box system and pigs from boxes with equivalent conditions. The key: state-of-the-art. All academic swine research must be funded by the gestation crate system manufacturers.

My son hasn’t worked with a professor, but he had a good answer for the college essay prompt: Write about a time when you failed. And today he’s studying psychology because he’s realized that the question of why whelping boxes weren’t banned is clear. But how farmers cope with the daily abuse when they are so close to their animals is a much harder question to answer.