BEHIND THE LABEL:
NIMAN RANCH BACON
We are on Mike and Suzanne Jones’ 73-acre pig farm near Louisburg, North Carolina, hunkered down in the shade of some trees, watching a sow doing something that would amaze anyone who knew about sows only from factory farms. This sow lives with several others in a two-acre enclosure that includes an open field in pasture and woods along the southwest side. A half-dozen little arched huts known as ‘English arcs’ are scattered along the edge of the woods. This particular sow is ambling about in the brush along the tree line, biting off twigs and leaves and carrying them back deeper into the woods where she is building a nest. It looks like a large bird’s nest on the ground, about five or six feet in diameter, a ring of tangled small branches, leaves and detritus from the forest floor. The sow carries a leafy branch into it and tucks it in among the others. She goes back, snaps off another branch, and this time carries it out to one of the huts, as if she has changed her mind. Mike says they do that sometimes. ‘The sow that had her pigs yesterday made two different nests and then decided which one she liked better. This one may do this too. The other sow that had her pigs this morning made her nest under the honeysuckle vines.’
Mike left the world of corporate confinement pig production to produce his own pigs on pasture and to work for North Carolina Agricultural and Technological State University in a program to help small farmers establish low-cost pig operations like his own. Also with us are the Halverson sisters, Diane and Marlene, who advise the Animal Welfare Institute on its Animal-Friendly Husbandry Program and also serve as consultants to Niman Ranch. Mike’s farm raises pigs for the Niman Ranch system, and the Halversons have invited us to come along on one of their periodic inspections to ensure that the farms are conforming to AWI’s strict standards for animal-friendly farming. The Halversons live on their family’s farm in Minnesota and aren’t at all surprised by what we are seeing. Sows about to give birth, Diane tells us, have an instinctive drive to build nests from materials like leaves or straw. The nest will provide a comfortable place for her to snuggle into when she gives birth to and then feeds her piglets. In fact, allowing sows the ability to build nests—having both space and the freedom of movement to build the nest from materials natural to the environment or provided by the farmer— is a requirement of the AWI standards, because it is regarded as a key element of good sow welfare.
The sow does not appear to be in a hurry, so as we sit and watch, we chat about Mike’s former life working in the confinement buildings of one of the nation’s largest vertically integrated corporate pig producers. Mike tells us how he had to move pregnant sows from the crates of the gestation buildings to the farrowing crates in another building. ‘There were these long, slippery concrete runways. The sows were late in gestation and they weren’t very comfortable. They weren’t in very good shape because in their stalls they hadn’t been able to move around. It was very stressful for them.’ Mike would use a high-pressure washer to clean off all the faeces that had accumulated on the pigs while they were in the gestation stalls and then disinfect the sows before putting them in the farrowing crate. Mike says that a sow able to build a nest is less anxious than one confined to a crate, who has no way of relieving the drive to nest. In his experience, sows able to move around when pregnant are also stronger and healthier than those kept immobile in stalls.
Talk turns to the various animal welfare standards that are being advanced as consumers become more aware of, and critical of, mainstream pork industry practices. Mike tries to follow the AWI standards in his work of helping farmers set up pasture pork farms. ‘I encourage them to conform to AWI standards, because if they do, they should be able to comply with any other kind of niche market opportunity that may come up for them.’ We talk about consumer confusion over labels and claims that arise as more and more sets of welfare standards are advanced. Besides AWI’s program, there is Certified Humane, which we discuss more fully in a later chapter. Then there are the programs behind the label claims of Organic Valley, Applegate Farms, Whole Food Markets and other food companies. A mention of the National Pork Board’s Swine Welfare Assurance Program drew a sharp response from Diane Halverson: ‘There is no such thing as “welfare assurance” in a program that sanctions crating pregnant sows so they can’t walk, or forcing pigs to live 24/7 on bare concrete floors with only bars and blank walls for vistas!’ There are many scientific studies documenting the damage done to animals by these housing methods, she told us, adding: ‘To call a set of standards that permits these conditions a “welfare assurance program” is a perversion of the truth.’
We walk through some of the other pig pens on Jones’ farm. Mike shows us a small, uprooted elm sprout that has been stripped of its bark. The pigs, he says, love elm bark for some reason, so he gives it to them for a treat. We’re in one of the pastures where the pigs are ‘finished’ to market weight. There’s not much grass or clover here. The ground is mostly bare and pocked with mud holes that have been rooted out by the pigs. Some farmers with pigs on pasture put rings through their noses because that causes discomfort when the pigs root around and so reduces damage to the pasture, but Mike doesn’t do that. ‘I don’t care if they devastate it,’ he says. ‘I’ve got that tractor and I can fix everything up and plant it in grass again.’ He laughs. ‘I don’t see why we spend so much time and money trying to fight nature. Seems crazy to me. If they want to root, they are going to root—even if that ring’s in there. They will just rip it out, and it will hurt.’ It’s the same philosophy he follows with his sows and nursing pigs. He leaves a litter with their mother to nurse for six to nine weeks, as opposed to a couple of weeks in intensive pig systems. ‘She’s going to wean them naturally at nine weeks anyway. It saves me money if I don’t have to buy expensive starter rations for weaned pigs.’ Someone makes a remark about how he does not spend money to control nature. ‘Right,’ he says. ‘I adjust my management around what pigs do. Rather than try to make them fit into my box, I build my box around them.’
A few weeks later, mindful of the restrictive farrowing crates we saw on Wayne Bradley’s intensive pig farm in Iowa and the argument that these crates are necessary to prevent the sow smothering her piglets, we ask how many piglets the sow had and how many were smothered. The answers are fourteen and none.
Pigs in Clover
The Holmes family—Tim, Mike, and their father George—also produce pork for Niman Ranch, on 360 acres near Albemarle Sound on the North Carolina coast. Tim starts the tour by showing us his pregnant sows—some grazing, some sleeping in a lush, green field scattered with small A-frame huts made of weathered plywood. He points to a barren, empty field beyond them and explains how he moves the sows from pen to pen, depending on weather and pasture condition. ‘They ate that down, and we moved them in here. They love this clover.’ We all go quiet for a moment, just watching the sows’ activity. ‘This is about a nine-acre field and there’s roughly forty sows in here,’ Tim says, and then adds with a chuckle, ‘That’s a little more space than a crate!’1 At the Holmes’ stocking density, each sow has almost 10,000 square feet of space. That is a square about a hundred feet on a side. That single sow has as much space as a typical factory allocates to 700 sows confined in gestation crates.2
The Holmes have 120 breeding sows and sell about 2000 market pigs a year. All of them live outdoors in pens. The fencing is electric: two wires, one about knee-high and a lower one about six inches above the ground, powered by a small solar panel rigged up to a 12-volt battery. It’s cheap and easy to move from pasture to pasture. As for the pigs getting electric shocks, Tim points out that they aren’t going near the fence: ‘Once they learn, they’ve learned.’ He points out a shallow trench that runs along the sides of the pens to catch any flow of wastes during heavy rains. There is a mild smell of pigs and manure, but it does not have that heavy, suffocating odour that emanated from factory pig farms we drove by in Iowa. Tim motions for us to look down in the grass, where he points out some pig dung. It is heavily fibred and dry from exposure to the sun. He explains that the chlorophyll in the pigs’ diet from grazing produces ‘pasture poop’ that is not as smelly as that from grain-fed factory pigs. Almost all of the sows had their heads down, busily grazing the fescue grass and clover. Diane points to one, saying we can see that pigs are grazing animals as well as rooting animals. She tells us about studies of domestic pigs allowed to live in a forested enclosure near Edinburgh. The researchers found that during daylight hours, the pigs spend most of their time either grazing (31 per cent), rooting (21 per cent), or examining and working over the area, exploring and manipulating objects they found (23 per cent). That comes to three-quarters of their day.3 The idea that pigs like to lie around all day is wrong—they only become ‘lazy pigs’ when we confine them so that they have nothing to do.
Tim also feeds them grain every day; he scatters it right on the ground all around the pens. The idea, Diane explains, is to make sure that each sow gets some feed. ‘They have to work at it and get through the grasses to get at the feed. That way the boss sows don’t “hog” it all.’ That, she comments, is one of the main excuses that industrialists use for putting sows in crates—to keep the more aggressive sows from fighting the others away from the feed. ‘But this is the sane solution: let them have enough space and spread the feed around.’ One sow comes trotting across towards us. ‘You can see how well they can walk and trot, with no lameness or soreness from hard floors.’4
Diane elaborates on the principles behind the AWI standards for these pasture pig farms. ‘The basic one is that the pigs have to be able to fulfil essential elements of their normal behaviour. That is determined, really, by both practical farm experience and the research that’s been done on the behaviour of domestic pigs in the kind of environments that their wild ancestors came from.’ There are two key elements for sows, she says. The first is to live in a social group, and the second, as we saw on Mike Jones’ farm, is to build a nest.
We ask Tim about the labour involved in his pasture operation. ‘It’s a lot of feeding, a lot of sorting pigs. And with this system, it’s a lot of fence running. It’s putting fence up, getting fence down. It’s moving shelters and moving animals.’ We tell him that we see tails on all of the pigs. ‘That’s not an issue out here,’ he says. ‘There’s really no reason to dock tails if you’re keeping your pigs outside. We have had them inside in the past, though, and I can say that you will run into some trouble inside.’ We remark that pigs indoors are smart animals confined in a sterile environment. ‘And that’s it, too,’ he says. ‘The standard used to be eight square feet of space per pig. A hog’s a curious animal, so they’ll look for something to do and…’
Our next stop is the farrowing area, another field of about two acres, enclosed by an electric fence. The Holmes’ farm uses the same ‘English arcs’ as Mike Jones. ‘We try to bring the sows in here at least a week before they are going to farrow,’ Tim says. ‘We like to put about eight to a pen, maybe as many as ten.’ We look at one of the huts up close. It is about eight feet square at the ground and chest-high at the top of the arch. It sits right down on the ground; there is no floor, just a thick bedding of hay. ‘You don’t want that floor,’ Tim says. ‘You want that hay. And then when we move it, the sunshine will kill any kind of pathogen that’s in there. Sunshine is a beautiful thing. And that’s something that you can’t use in confinement. I can tell you, when we were raising them inside, every group of pigs we took in there, the first thing they’d do within a week was scour. [‘Scour’ is the term farmers use for diarrhea.] Every group. And we had to break out the neomycin or whatever antibiotic we were using. We had to treat every group. But in an outdoor setting like this, I never had any trouble.’
The piglets remain with their mothers in the farrowing area for about six weeks before they are moved to other pens for feeding to market weight. The farrowing pens are alive with their youthful energy and constant motion. Some flock around a sow, annoying her with their demands for milk; others join up with other litters of the same age in racing up, down, and all around the pen.
We bring up the subject of castration of the male baby pigs. Tim says it is the market. ‘Hey, if I didn’t have to cut them, that would be just wonderful.’ But this is one issue on which the organic farmers agree with Wayne Bradley. US consumers won’t accept meat from intact male pigs, so there is no alternative.
The Man behind Niman Ranch
The day before we visited the Holmes family, we’d met Bill Niman and the Halversons in Chapel Hill. Bill had regaled us with the tale of the unconventional origins of Niman Ranch—a business that now has annual revenues of about $50 million. Bill is from Minneapolis and graduated with a degree in anthropology from the University of Minneapolis. He went to Berkeley to do graduate work at the University of California. It was the 1960s—the days of the Vietnam War, but also of flower power and hippy culture—and Berkeley and San Francisco were at the heart of it. Instead of going to war, Bill was able to do alternative service teaching at a school in one of California’s agricultural districts, so he got to know something about agriculture. Later he became part of a group that wanted to set up an alternative kind of society, growing their own food and living in harmony with nature and with each other. Bill and his wife moved up to Bolinas, about 25 miles north of San Francisco, where, living in a kind of commune with other like-minded people, they kept chickens, goats, pigs and horses. Orville Schell was their neighbour—he’s now dean of the school of journalism at Berkeley—and he was raising pigs on about 11 acres of land. Niman became his partner, and they sold sides of pork to neighbours and the local community. Bill’s wife started tutoring the children of some of the local ranchers, who raised Angus and Hereford cattle. When they had a couple of surplus calves, they gave them to Bill and his wife. They were traditional ranchers who took care of the land and didn’t use antibiotics or hormones, and Bill and his wife learned from them.
Bill’s wife was killed in an accident, but Bill and Orville continued raising pigs and cattle. At one point, Bill says, they wanted to be like ‘modern’ pig farmers. ‘We thought, “We’re going to expand this operation and raise a lot of pigs.” We travelled to Iowa. We were pretty seduced…we wanted to be like those guys. We built this barn with flush gutters and gestation pens… then realised, “Wait a minute, this isn’t right” and we never put any pigs in the building. We ended up raising shitake mushrooms in it.’
Niman and Schell kept raising pigs outdoors, as well as cattle and lambs. They started selling to Chez Panisse, Zuni, and other upscale restaurants. Word got around and the business expanded, but Schell, who had studied Chinese history at Berkeley, was also pursuing a writing career. (He has published 14 books, including several influential volumes on China, and an excellent, if now dated, book entitled Modern Meat: Antibiotics, Hormones and the Pharmaceutical Farm.) Eventually Niman bought him out.
As the demand for outdoor-raised pork outgrew his capacity to supply it, Niman made contact with Paul Willis in Thornton, Iowa, who was raising pigs on pasture. ‘We tasted his pork,’ Niman said, ‘and it was exponentially better than what we were doing in California.’ Around 1994, Niman began selling Willis’s pigs one week and their own California pigs every other week, but they moved over to selling only Willis’s pigs. When the demand exceeded his supply, Paul began looking for other pig farmers using methods similar to his own. He had heard that the Halverson sisters had, together with the Animal Welfare Institute, developed a set of standards for the humane rearing of pigs. Willis contacted Diane and Marlene, and they helped him find other farmers who met those standards. In that way, Niman Ranch added one farm at a time, until now they are supplied by 470 active pig farms in 15 states, providing them with 3500 pigs a week.
Niman Ranch pays its farmers 5 cents per pound above the going market price—for example, in July 2005 the market price was 47 cents per pound, so Niman was paying 52 cents. Niman also pays an additional bonus that varies according to the quality of the meat and some other allowances. The handling and processing costs associated with Niman meat are higher than the industry average, too, partly due to Niman’s relatively low volume. The result is that by the time it gets to the stores, Niman Ranch bacon can cost twice as much as factory farm bacon. The Oscar Mayer bacon Jake bought cost $4.59 a pound, while Mary Ann’s Niman Ranch bacon was $6.65 a pound at Trader Joe’s, and can cost even more in some stores. That price difference reminded us of our conversation with Wayne, the Iowa intensive pig farmer. When we told him that we were looking at open range pork production, too, and wanted to speak to someone who had a different point of view, he was characteristically direct: ‘Well, I definitely have a different point of view on that. Whether it’s right or not, my philosophy is that there has to be a place for the average citizen who’s making the average wage to be able to go and buy a good healthy product. I take a lot of pride in the fact that our product doesn’t demand ten dollars a pound for hams like Niman Ranch gets.’
We told Bill and the Halversons the gist of what Wayne had said. Bill responded: ‘It’s this whole American thing about having cheap food. It’s a fallacy. That guy thinks his food is cheap, but you and I are subsidising that cheap food by paying for the social and ecological issues that are occurring in that community.’ ‘Not to mention the animals,’ Diane added. ‘The farmer should always get a decent reward for having given decent treatment to the animals. They need that in order to stay interested in raising animals well and to keep another generation on the farm. Meat and the lives of animals should be treated with much more regard. People should be prepared to pay more and not think of meat as an everyday, throw-away food.’
The pigs at Mike Jones’ and Tim Holmes’ farms are living in a different world from that inhabited by the pigs in Wayne Bradley’s sheds—even though, among intensive pig producers, Bradley must be one of the best. Unlike almost all the big producers, he avoids the use of sow crates, and because he is relatively small for an intensive producer, he keeps more of an eye on what is happening than the managers of many larger units. Nevertheless, his pigs, confined permanently indoors on bare concrete, cannot, as Mary Ann put it, express who they truly are. On the farms that supply Niman Ranch, the pigs really can be pigs, and they seemed to be enjoying that.
Right now, most pigs in America can’t really be pigs. As we saw in Chapter 4 more than 90 per cent of them are in total confinement, never getting to walk around in a field. Economics and the consumer demand for cheap food continue to drive the pork industry. Are ethics and affordability in irreconcilable conflict here? We’ll return to that issue in our final chapter, after considering some other possibilities.