Cheap bacon and bigger barns turn Iowa inside out

“It’s an entirely different system”

Fresh off work at the local grain elevator, Nick Schutt sports a cut-off plaid shirt and dusty jeans. He greets me with a strong handshake, his oil-stained paw engulfing mine.

He shows me his father's 80 acres, where Schutt still farms corn and beans and occasionally tinkers with a tractor or two. Long-haired dachshunds bark, a rabbit skitters under a trailer and a barn cat hides. His uncle lives directly across the road.

"He and my dad drive out and meet every morning on the lawn mowers to talk … 'You hear what happened to so and so,' " Schutt tells me.

Schutt, 43, lives a couple minutes away and stops by to check on his parents and have supper after work most days.

Schutt wheels his mini-van down the rutted dirt roads of Williams. We're about an hour north—and a world away—from Des Moines off I-35. "These roads are rougher than a cob," Schutt says, blaming the animal confinement operations—mostly hogs, some cattle—within a few miles of his house, which bring truck traffic that the roads weren't designed to handle.

Almost two dozen confinement barns, representing thousands of animals, all sprung up within the past decade or so.

Much like Peterson, Schutt only wants to farm. It's in his blood. The irony of living in rural Iowa these days, he says, is that—counter to the Farm Bureau's assertion about easy entry points—farming is increasingly a rich man's game.

"We live in a state where agriculture is the No. 1 industry, and I can't make a living farming," he says. "I've been farming my whole life."

In 1950 Iowa had about 206,000 farms total. The most recent U.S. Department of Agriculture Census found that farm total had dipped to 88,637.

But hog totals persist. Iowa has almost seven hogs for every human in the state. The next highest state, North Carolina, has less than half that amount at 9.3 million hogs. The money dwarfs other states too—hogs are a $7.5 billion a year business in Iowa—comprising one-third of the national total.

"It's still one of quickest and easiest ways for young people to get into farming: You can get a few acres, put up a barn, become a pork producer," says Iowa Pork Producers' Birkenholz.

About 94 percent of hog farms in Iowa are family owned, according to Iowa Pork Producers. NC Farm Families, too, boasts that families run more than 80 percent of North Carolina's hog farms.

But many are what are referred to as contract farmers—raising hogs for large corporations. The farmers own the buildings; the hogs they're raising are owned by Iowa Select Farms and Christensen Farms.

"It's not just that we're better at [livestock raising] now," says Patty Lovera, assistant director of Food & Water Watch, a Washington, D.C.-based group focusing on corporate and government accountability relating to food, water, and corporate overreach.

"It's an entirely different system."

The companies dictate how the farmer raises and cares for the hogs: how much space the pigs get, what they're fed, how their health is monitored.

Contract farmers raise approximately 44 percent of all hogs and pigs sold in the U.S. But there's a flip side to the economic impact: While Iowa now sells twice as many hogs compared to three decades ago, their value has plummeted.

Lovera and colleagues found that between 1982 and 2007 in Iowa, the market share of the top four hog processors almost doubled, the number of hogs sold in Iowa doubled, but the economic value of hog sales, adjusted for inflation declined by 12 percent.

Corporate giants can absorb plummeting values, Lovera says. Smaller, individual farmers cannot. Over that time Iowa lost 82 percent of its hog farms, and counties with the highest hog sales and biggest farms had worse and declining economies than state averages.

"We see the closure of local barns, fewer small town vets, things like that as well," says Adam Mason, state policy director with the nonprofit Iowa Citizens for Community Improvement. "The infrastructure that supported family farms started to disappear."

Agricultural economist, author and sustainable farming advocate John Ikerd remembers times past. As a young man in southwest Missouri, he noticed that if farmers in the small towns got wealthy, there was a "bit of jealousy." But the less fortunate gained too, as a prosperous neighbor meant better silo infrastructure, a wider selection of threshing equipment, stronger banks. The whole community was buoyed.

"Farms of the past were more than just farms," says Diane Rosenberg, president and executive director of Jefferson County Farmers & Neighbors, Inc., in Iowa. "There were more people working the farms, there was the infrastructure like grain elevators, lockers, and processers. These CAFOs [confined animal feeding operations] come, and the money leaves the communities."

Birkenholz, of the Iowa Pork Producers Association, counters that hog operations are buffering communities from larger trends tearing at their economic fabric. "We know that there are some counties, communities that aren't doing too well," he says. "But in many of them farming is still the only thing keeping them above water."

When I speak with professor and researcher Frank Mitloehner of University of California, Davis on the phone, his answer to consolidation is cold and pragmatic: "The farm of the past—you know, the red barn-type scenario, pigs out in the wild—those days are long gone," he says.

The traditional hog farmer "raised hogs, repaired planters, fixed tractors, ground and made their own feed, they bought fuel and seed and fertilizer," says Ron Plain, an agricultural economist from the University of Missouri. "They had an enormous number of decisions and things to worry about.

"The fact is that large operations can do what they do more efficiently and at lower cost than small operations. I can hire someone and train them to do two things or three things, and it's much easier than having someone do 200 or 300 things," he says.

Efficiency is one part of it; another is corporate control over all aspects of pork—from piglet to market. Before large industrial farms there was a predictable pattern: hog prices go up to profitable levels, producers over-expand production. Then prices go down, producers lose money, cut production, and prices go back up.

Such cycles, and the inherent inconsistent profits, discouraged corporations from being too involved. They like stability and growth to keep investors happy.

However, in the late 1980s and early 1990s, hog slaughter and processing corporations started buying large concentrated feeding farms, making them both suppliers and buyers of the hogs, Ikerd says.

In doing this, they gained control of the market, driving hog prices down to $10 per hundredweight (100 pounds) in 1998, the lowest price in 30 years. Independent hog farmers simply couldn't stay in business at these bottomed-out prices. Big hog producing states—North Carolina, Iowa, Missouri—lost about 90 percent of their independent hog producers when large industrial farms showed up, many turning to contracts or simply finding another way to make a living.

Peterson was one of these farmers, handed a foreclosure notice on the farm in the late 90s.

"We lost $70,000 in net worth, and our collateral—hog equipment, feeders—all at once were worth nothing," he says. It got so bad that the local bank came after his children's things—clothes and other items they bought themselves.

Back in Williams, Iowa, where Schutt lives, the county, Hamilton County, is the eighth highest hog producer by sales in the U.S. The county's average farm size is 406 acres and livestock provides an estimated 10 percent of the jobs.

Schutt points out roadside ditches he mows for free to get hay for his hobby horses. He shows me his boarded up basement windows, where the smell from nearby confinements barns would settle and permeate the house.

We shake hands goodbye around 8 p.m. For him, it's time for dinner with mom and dad, a short drive down the dirt road home, and a bit of rest before another day of two jobs, mowing ditches, and, if he's lucky, a bit of time to wrench on a tractor.

Just steps from the giant red barn on his dad's land he speaks candidly about what will happen when his father passes. "My brothers and I will get some land, I'll probably get 20 acres," he says.

"I guess it'd be nice to have one job."

Property value plummets

When Gail and Jeff Schwartzkopf bought their home just outside Rudd, Iowa, it was a country dream.

Within three months, a hog confinement was put up about 2,000 feet from their new home. Now hanging outside means gagging or being mobbed by flies. They can't sleep with their windows open.

"We simply can't go outside," Gail tells Peterson and me as we chat at her kitchen table. The smell—when manure is applied during the day and winds change at night—in nearby fields is so powerful they've woken at 2 a.m., running around the house to close windows.

"I used to be so active working in my flower beds, enjoying the wildlife and the summer breezes … all that stopped when the CAFO went in," she says, adding that being forced indoors has made her gain weight, which is "too depressing to think about."

Floyd County, ranks 77^th out of 99 Iowa counties for quality of life, according to rankings by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, a public health-focused philanthropy organization. Gail, who works at a nearby Love's Travel Stop, has had co-workers tell her that the smell is part of living in the country. "They have no idea," she says.

Birkenholz echoes Gail's friends. "Hogs have always stunk, always will."

"Yes there's odor, but it's not continuous and not on a daily basis," he adds.

Gail begs to differ, and Birkenholz admits that the relationship with large farms and neighbors isn't always perfect.

The Pork Producers Association is working with farmers to address these concerns, working with Iowa State University and other groups to site new barns where they'll have the least impact on neighbors. Another effort focuses on vegetative buffers, he says. A line of trees around a barn, he says, "can really knock down some of that odor."

Such buffers can also capture up to 74 percent of dust from large confinement operations, according to a 2016 University of Iowa study.

Gail and Jeff show me the trees they planted around their property when they moved in. Jeff talks about growing up on a farm, working with his grandfather. When I ask them if they've thought of moving, Gail turns the question back to me: "Where would we go?"

"At our ages there aren't a lot of choices for employment in another state," she adds.

And while Gail doesn't ask it, there's also a question—a big question—of who'd buy her home: Big hog farms tend to destroy nearby home values. A 2008 Iowa study of more than 5,000 homes found houses within three miles downwind from a confined animal farm lost as much as 44 percent of their value.

Breaking point

There's an undercurrent of rural rebellion in Iowa, and a lot of people are arming themselves with new knowledge about water, air, zoning and pork politics.

"I never thought I'd be an activist," Gail Schwarzkopf says, a refrain echoed from almost everyone I visit in Iowa.

Peterson and I leave the Schwartzkopf's and hop back on the highway. We climb in his Subaru and he ignores the car's seatbelt alarm.

His eyes are bothering him badly — "Damn diabetes," he says. He opens up to me about a troubled upbringing in Iowa, including a veteran father who returned to the U.S. only wanting to farm but who ultimately received a foreclosure notice—just as Peterson did in the late 90s.

Peterson's sore eyes tear up, but only briefly. He has a sick hog to deal with, an upcoming trip to DC, and more communities to rally.

Hell isn't going to raise itself.

Editor's note: This story is part of Peak Pig: The fight for the soul of rural America, EHN's investigation of what it means to be rural in an age of mega-farms.

Tomorrow: Pork, political sway and provoked communities