Pork Palaces on the Panhandle

Abstract

An astonishing new hog-producing region of awesome proportions has emerged virtually overnight in southwestern Kansas and on the panhandles of Oklahoma and Texas, in the very heart of the Dust Bowl of the 1930s. The 1992 Census of Agriculture reported that farmers in Texas County, Oklahoma, in the middle of the panhandle, marketed only 31,274 hogs, and most of the good citizens of the county hardly knew what a hog looked like. Four years later the panhandle was plastered with proliferating pork palaces, and Texas County alone produced 2 million hogs [ILLUSTRATION FOR FIGURE 1 OMITTED]. It was the epicenter of an area that produced 4 million hogs, 4 percent of the national total and one-seventh as many finished hogs as the entire state of Iowa (Campbell 1997). Everywhere you look there seem to be hog farms, their unpainted metal roofs shimmering in the sun. Each hog farm is a duster of two to ten long, narrow, one-story structures of gleaming white sheet metal. The buildings are in rigid rows on bare dry ground, in the niches between cropland circles onto which effluent is pumped [ILLUSTRATION FOR FIGURE 2 OMITTED]. Some have sides that can be opened for ventilation; others have large exhaust fans. Beside each building are cylindrical metal bins with cone-shaped bottoms from which spidery tubes carry feed to all the hogs in the house at the mere touch of a button. The manure from all the houses in each cluster is flushed into a lagoon, where the solids settle and the liquid evaporates, producing a terrible stench. The clusters of buildings are variously known as farms, sites, or units. Each duster has a specific function in the tightly organized cycle of hog production. The functions are kept separate to facilitate the isolation of units if disease necessitates. The brood sows remain in a sow unit for breeding, gestation, and farrowing. The pigs are weaned at fourteen days - when they weigh 12 pounds - and taken to a nursery unit, where they stay until they weigh 50 pounds. Then they are hauled to a finishing unit, where they grow to a market weight of 275 pounds at the age of six-and-a-half months and are ready to go to the processing plant. The processing plant that the Seaboard Corporation built near Guymon, county seat of Texas County, is the linchpin of a whole new hog-production system [ILLUSTRATION FOR FIGURE 1 OMITTED]. It processes 1,000 hogs an hour, so a single shift working forty hours a week without overtime can process 2 million hogs a year. Operations began in December 1995; a second shift was added early in 1997. The plant employs 1,100 to 1,400 people and has an annual payroll of around $30 million (Campbell 1997). The Seaboard Corporation is a diversified international food-production, food-processing, and transportation company with annual sales of more than $1 billion. It has rewritten the geography of the panhandle. In the early 1990s Seaboard received a state economic-incentive grant of $12 million for the construction of its plant in Guymon, but that sum is a mere drop in the bucket compared with the total of $291 million that the company invested in hog-production and hog-processing facilities in the panhandle between 1992 and 1997. The corporation has developed its own hog farms to ensure a steady supply of animals for the processing plant, but it is also happy to buy hogs from other producers, as long as they meet its standards. The company provides hogs, feed, medication, and expertise and expects the producer to provide land, buildings, and labor. The cost of suitable new buildings, which runs around $1,000 per sow, has deterred some prospective producers, but Paul Hitch, the scion of a well-known panhandle family, has 15,000 sows and has contracted with Seaboard to deliver 300,000 hogs a year; and Val, Inc., a Spanish company, has a 25,000-sow farrow-to-finish operation on the panhandle that produces 500,000 hogs a year. The availability of the processing plant and the relaxation of international trade barriers as a result of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade and the North American Free Trade Agreement have attracted other hog producers to the panhandle. …