Corporate Welfare: The Empire Of The Pigs

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The company already operates huge hog farms in five southwestern Kansas counties, where it accounts for more than one-quarter of the state's 1.5 million pig population. The pigs are raised in Kansas until they are ready for slaughter and are then trucked to the processing plant in Guymon. Kansas issued $9.6 million in industrial revenue bonds to help Seaboard develop the farms.

Actually, the term farm is a misnomer, for corporate hog farms bear no resemblance to traditional family farms. Instead, they are massive industrial operations. Call them pig factories.

In a long barn that houses about 1,000 animals, the hogs spend their days jammed next to one another, eating constantly until they grow from about 55 lbs. to 250 lbs. They stand on slatted floors so their wastes drop into a trough below that is flushed periodically into a nearby cesspit. The number of cesspits is exploding. From 1990 to 1998, the Oklahoma pig population soared 761%, jumping from 230,000 to 1.98 million, with Seaboard accounting for about 80% of that number.

It is not pleasant living amid this. Just ask Julia Howell and her husband Bob. The couple live on a farm near Hooker, about midway between Guymon and Liberal, where four generations of Howells have grown wheat and raised families. Now feisty Julia Howell, 69, talks about her "40,000 neighbors" and explains why she seals the farmhouse windows, stuffs pillows into the chimney and seldom ventures outdoors without a face mask.

It's the ever present stench--the overpowering smell from Seaboard's 40,000 hogs closely confined in 44 metal buildings, where exhaust fans continuously pump out tons of pungent ammonia, mixed with tons of grain dust and fecal matter, scented with the noxious odor of hydrogen sulfide (a poisonous gas produced by decaying manure that smells like rotten eggs), all combined with another blend of aromas wafting from five cesspits each 25 ft. deep and the size of a football field. They are, in effect, open-air sewage ponds, and 75 ft. below lies the Ogallala aquifer, which provides drinking and irrigation water for much of that part of the country.

Think of all that waste this way: imagine that you are sitting on the front porch of your farmhouse on the prairie, surrounded by four Washington Monuments, each filled to the top with pig manure. And then there are all the dead pigs lying about. By law, the carcasses are supposed to be deposited in Dumpsters with the lids tightly closed, and the contents disposed of daily. But with hundreds of thousands of hogs dying before their time each year, Seaboard often falls behind in disposing of them. Sometimes the overflow from Dumpsters is stacked nearby. Sometimes dead hogs are piled up beside barns, sometimes at the side of the road. And sometimes they lie about so long that the flesh rots away.

After issuing repeated warnings to Seaboard, the Oklahoma agriculture department fined the firm $157,500 in December 1997 for improper disposal. After an appeal, the company paid the state $88,200 for the infractions. In all, the Seaboard death toll reached 48 hogs an hour in 1997--420,000 for the year. And the carcasses are picked up only once a day--assuming the dead-pig truck is on schedule. Sometimes it isn't. Which is why at any given moment during the day there are hundreds of dead hogs lying about the fields of Texas County.