DESPITE THE TREND toward confinement and consolidation in the hog industry, there is a growing group of pig farmers turning back to small-scale animal husbandry. Paul Willis, founding farmer and manager of Niman Ranch Pork, is leading a movement to let pigs be pigs—giving them space to roam and root, fresh bedding to nest in, and healthy pasture to graze in. A visit to Willis’s farm reveals an agricultural model for the future.
There is not much prairie left in the Corn Belt, where the bison once roamed in the tens of millions and the sky darkened when passenger pigeons in the hundreds of millions passed overhead. Paul Willis, manager and founding farmer of Niman Ranch Pork, has joined a growing movement to restore at least a part of the prairie ecosystem. The wildflowers and grasses he has planted or that have returned on their own have names that must surely have sprung from the tongues of poets: bluestem and Indian grass, pale purple cornflower, death camus, butterfly milkweed, and rattlesnake master.
Willis is an old-fashioned pig farmer. In our agribusiness age, that makes him as remarkable as such other passing American phenomena as a pitcher who can go nine innings and an actor who can sing without lip-synching.
When I first visited him, Paul served me coffee and pie in the farmhouse kitchen, and then took me to see his spread. We crossed the road to a field where young pigs gamboled in the grass, noses twitching in a wind heavy with the scent of flowers and new grass. A few sows lay in the shade of their farrowing huts, where their litters suckled, slept, and moved about.
“Don’t approach them too quickly; they are protective mothers,” Paul said.
The sows lay there placidly, each one like a nanny sitting on a park bench, taking in the world while her young charges played and tumbled nearby. When one of the sows walked over to the feeder, I slowly approached the back of her hut, a piece of corrugated aluminum bent into an arch, with the floor being nothing more than deeply bedded hay. The tiny piglets, climbing over each other and playfully nipping, were awfully cute. The fact that the natural position of a pig’s mouth looks very much like a human smile serves to amplify the affection that such babies elicit.
Willis, and most of Niman’s farmers, raise a hog known as a Farmer’s Hybrid, not because of extensive research but because it is the hog that Willis has always raised. Its genetics are a multigenic stew that typically contains Chester White, Hampshire, Duroc, and Large White genes. It is bred for flavor, hardiness, and mothering ability. The first is what is most important to the consumer, but to achieve that flavor the animals must be able to thrive well outdoors and raise healthy litters (it costs just as much to maintain a sow that keeps nine piglets to weaning as it does to maintain a sow who loses two of her litter).
“Basically, I am just trying to raise pigs the way we did fifty years ago when being a farmer meant being a family farmer,” Willis says. “You raised some corn, some soy, some chickens, a cow or two. You planted fruit trees around the house. And you let your pigs be pigs. Which means you gave them plenty of room, the opportunity to be outdoors where they could root and graze, and lots of straw so that they could have deep, fresh bedding. In the winter, the deep bedding can absorb waste material [although given the choice most pigs will deposit most of their waste outside]. When the hay decomposes, the bed produces its own natural warmth.”
Speaking about the comfort of his animals brings Willis to one of the things about which he is most proud. Niman Ranch Pork was the first national livestock company whose practices were approved by the Animal Welfare Institute. The AWI standards include: (1) Pigs must be owned and raised by family farmers personally involved in the business, and they must apply AWI standards to every animal they own. (2) Pigs may never be fed bonemeal or other animal products. (3) They may never be raised in close-quarter confinement and must be given sufficient room to roam, forage, and interact with other pigs. (4) No growth hormones are allowed, and antibiotics are permitted only to treat disease. (5) No tail docking is allowed, and animals may not be weaned before they are six weeks old.
Summing it up, Willis says, in his low-key manner, “It’s not rocket science; it’s really allowing the animal to be a pig. In other words, what are the natural inclinations of a pig?”
Willis grew up at the old farmhouse that now serves as the headquarters of Niman Ranch Pork. His life detoured away from the farm for twelve years, but he eventually returned and began raising pigs again. “I was aware of things like free-range chickens on the one hand and the poultry factories and hog factories on the other,” Willis said. “I realized that simply raising pigs outside, the way we used to, was becoming pretty rare. I knew there had to be a wider market for it. I had been looking for a way to sell the type of pork that we were raising probably ten years before I met Bill Niman.”
Niman Ranch Pork is named after its association with Bill Niman, who founded a cattle ranch in Bolinas, California. His grass-fed beef and lamb had attracted the attention of Alice Waters, the great chef and prophetess of the nationwide interest in fresh, wholesome ingredients. A mutual friend introduced Willis to Niman during a California visit.
“We had lunch at a burger joint in San Francisco,” Willis explains. “I told him what I was doing, and he gave me some of the locally raised pork he was selling. I took it back to my sister’s, in Brisbane, California, where we prepared it and it was . . . all right.”
That’s Paul’s nice way of saying it wasn’t special, so I prodded him on it.
“Actually, it was mediocre. When I returned to Iowa, we packed up a box of frozen chops and roasts and sent them to Bill. He then sent the pork around to various customers, one of them being Chez Panisse [Alice Waters’s restaurant]. I’d never even heard of Chez Panisse at the time. Anyway, they all loved the pork. So Bill said, ‘Send me thirty hogs.’
“This was really a far cry from what we had been used to doing, which was to call up hog buyers and whoever had the best price locally, you would take your hogs in and they would write you a check and that was it. This was a different deal. The pork went to the West Coast over the weekend. So the pigs had to be at the slaughterhouse on Wednesday, killed on Thursday, chilled on Friday, and shipped out. The meat got there at five-thirty Monday morning. That was a pretty exciting moment.
“Bill said, ‘Well, what do you want, what’s your price?’ That was the first time as a farmer that I wasn’t really dealing in a commodity. I had something that I could put value on!
“So we came to an agreement. I started out sending hogs, every other week, about thirty-five head, then we’d go to thirty-seven head, forty head, and when I couldn’t keep up with the numbers, I started looking for some neighbors and some other farmers I knew. First was Glen Alden, a local, and Bob Gristoff, right from Thornton. We started getting calls from other farmers. That fall . . . I had about thirty, thirty-five farmers involved.”
Departing from what was then the norm for farmers—selling to a packinghouse and collecting the money on the spot—Willis had to figure out a new way to get the farmer paid. “Through the Packers and Stockyard Act, farmers must be paid within a couple of days. With Niman, the cash flow situation was different. A pig comes from the farm, goes to a packing plant, then to California, then to a customer, and you, the farmer, have to wait weeks before the money comes back to you.
“So the pork company was created to enable us to pay the farmers right away, out of cash flow. We made it a requirement that each of our farmers would pay a capital contribution each time a pig was sold. It started out at one penny a pound. That was matched by Niman Ranch in California. So we as farmers put money into the company to build up a reserve, to be able to buy pigs from ourselves, and the parent company would reimburse the pork company. That penny a pound also built the farmer’s equity in the company.
“The commodity business is all about doing more and doing it cheaper, but our thinking is, if you’re raising the best pork, you should be paid the best price. We decided to pay around fifteen dollars a hog over the market price. We also established a floor for those times when the local market falls below a certain point. In 1998, hog prices went to eight cents a pound. Niman Ranch paid forty-three and a half cents at that time. The good part was that we saved people’s farms; we made a big difference. The bad part was that we weren’t able to buy all of everybody’s pigs at the time.”
Willis related to me his company autobiography in bits and snatches over the course of a day, much punctuated by incoming calls on his cell phone. We drove through the rolling green Iowa countryside, with its old-fashioned red barns, easy on the eyes, even soothing. Everything was, to outward appearances, as it had always been since the late nineteenth century, with the exception that here and there, standing out from the landscape into which they would never blend, were low white buildings with peaked roofs.
“See over there?” Paul said. “That’s a fifteen-hundred-sow operation.” He was referring to a confinement operation. “Everybody says they don’t want to see more of them, but some farmers are up against it and see it as a way out.” When small farmers find themselves pitted against factory farms, the economics often force them to give in despite the long-term benefits of small-scale farming.
The family farm—a symbol that is much praised by politicians but that is being driven to extinction by public policy—represents one way of dealing with the land, the plants that grow on it, the livestock that is raised there, the wildlife that somehow manages to find a way to freeload on the edges of fields, woodlots, and uncultivated set-asides. I think of this outlook as the Agricultural Way, or, as the historians of rural life say, the Agrarian Way: agrarian, with its connotations of populism and land stewardship—not merely planting, raising, and harvesting in the shortest period of time. What goes on in the sugar plantations of Florida, the chicken factories of Arkansas, the hog factories of North Carolina (and Iowa, and Illinois, and Colorado, and more) is decidedly not agrarian nor is it truly agriculture: it is industry.
Industry is about qualification, standardization, risk management. It consumes resources and therefore depletes them. The agrarian approach, on the other hand, is about managing resources sustainably, creating while consuming, renewing while reaping. There are no factories, that I know of, that have been around for five hundred years, yet there is land the world over that has been managed agriculturally for hundreds if not thousands of years: the vineyards of France, the cattle-supporting pampas of Argentina, the oak savannas of western Spain, the rice paddies of Indochina. The industrial model seeks to control nature; the agrarian seeks to manage it. The former consumes more and more resources to maintain output; the latter can go on producing forever.
With his small, multigenerational family farm, with his acres of reclaimed prairie, his woodlots with soil-conserving trees, his use of manure from his animals to fertilize the fields that produce the feed that sustains the animals that, completing the circle, produce the manure that starts the cycle all over again, Willis represents one thread of American agricultural history. The other thread—the one of the endless frontier and the genetically engineered and petrochemical-based “Green Revolution”—has been wildly profitable (for the shareholders of agribusiness corporations), but it is inevitably ruinous for the ecology.
The alternative to this approach is diversified farming of the kind that typified family farms and that, in some measure, is practiced by supporters of sustainable agriculture such as Willis. He is among the most influential of a very few who are employing modern business practices in the service of traditional agriculture.
“The Polish peasants’ farmers union had a conference,” Willis says as he recalls an event he was invited to. “They had farm leaders, veterinarians, animal welfare people, environmentalists, and—this really impressed me—they had philosophers and they gave them equal billing! It made sense. I mean, the whole idea was about basic questions of how we and the animals live. And the thought struck me, ‘Gee, I wonder if at our next conference at Iowa State we could get some philosophers.’ You know, in the farm business they never want to make decisions unless they are based on sound science. But you can manipulate science to whatever your objective is. Philosophers could help.”
“You mean like Wendell Berry at your next farrowing conference?”
“Sure, why not?” he said.