E.B. Writers of Dallas

Special to The Wall Street Journal, Dec. 1, 1999
By Esther M. Bauer

LUBBOCK -- Proponents of a new hog-raising system say it can deliver tastier pork with less risk of damage to the environment - and its creator says it can turn Texas into America's hog headquarters.
Developed at Texas Tech University, the Sustainable Pork program is being promoted as an alternative to high-density indoor hog-raising operations, which have drawn opposition from neighbors and environmentalists for smelling foul and menacing water supplies.
For a new system, it's strikingly similar to those of bygone days. Hogs are raised in low-density houses or on grassy pastures; sows nurse piglets in pens. The pasture is rotated every two years or so and planted to grains or hay, fertilized by the manure the hogs leave behind.
By contrast, the most-modern hog operations raise the animals in huge numbers indoors, on slatted metal or concrete floors that allow waste to drop through and be flushed into open-air lagoons. It's a good method, argues the Des Moines, Iowa-based National Pork Producers Council.
"The concept of raising hogs for specific consumer groups is promising, but there's nothing inferior about modern hog production,” says spokesman Steven Cohen. “We think the typical production systems' designs and operations are very animal-friendly." And size alone is not an environmental concern.
If Sustainable Pork is a return to old style marketing, it's with modern marketing twists. The label tells consumers the hogs did not get subtherapeutic doses of antibiotics - commonly given to healthy hogs to speed weight gain and prevent disease - and were raised in a way described as friendly to them, the environment, workers and the community.
As envisioned, the Sustainable Pork infrastructure will include a nonprofit certifying agency - to check producers for compliance with the 32-page guidelines - and a for-profit marketing company, which will contract with or even operate a processing plant; both are still in the planning stage. A certified producer will send his hogs to the chosen processing plant; the marketing company will sell the meat to upscale outlets and split the profit with the producer.
Meat from the first large-scale test of the system - about 2,500 hogs - is scheduled to be tested starting Dec. 9. Previous tests found Sustainable Pork more tender, juicy and flavorful than standard confinement pork.
Trial marketing will begin early next year. Since Sustainable Pork will be higher-priced, initially only specialty stores and restaurants are likely to carry it. John James McGlone, professor of animal science and food technology at Texas Tech, head of its Pork Industry Institute, and creator of the system says his conservative estimate is that 5% of today's pork-buying public - a niche worth $700 million wholesale last year - would be willing to pay more for meat that tasted better and promised environmental benefits. But in time, he adds, the better pork will win outright.
"In 20 years, half of all pigs will be raised this way; 50 years from now, this is the only way pork will be produced,” he says. “Consumers will demand it." The system's supporters see potential in export markets as well as in the U.S.
Texas produced nearly 1.2 million hogs in 1998, not so much by national standards - the state ranks 20th in the U.S. - but quite a few considering it had hit 900,000 only once in the previous five years. Mr. McGlone predicts that within 20 years the state's hogs will outnumber the cattle in its feedyards, though even some of his fellow hog enthusiasts call that a little too enthusiastic. Texas feedyards process six million cattle a year.
But Mr. McGlone sees the Southern Great Plains as the nation's future center of hog production, for the same reasons cattle feedlots are here: arid climate, availability of grain and water, easy transportation and not many people. Given current laws, though, it won't be a future of huge confinement operations. Colorado, Kansas and Oklahoma - as well as Nebraska and Iowa - have limited corporate hog farming, either to preserve family farms or protect the environment.
And even in Texas, where towns in thinly populated areas of the Panhandle and western part of the state - looking for some desperately needed economic development – are inviting the big hog-raising operations, organized opposition has arisen. It happened in Perryton after Japanese pork producer Nippon Meat Co. built a complex of 1,000-hog barns and waste lagoons on 26 square miles outside the Panhandle town of 7,600.
The Perryton officials who invited the Japanese say the smell isn't any worse than that of the region's cattle feedyards. But neighboring farmers sued the Texas Natural Resource Conservation Commission, which licenses hog farms, contending regulations are too lax and the stench is driving them indoors. They won one suit on a technicality that voided a permit - but only momentarily: The TNRCC amended its regulations to correct the problem and then granted the permit.
If Mr. McGlone's vision of a Southern Plains-centered hog industry comes true, it would be at the expense of North Carolina, which in 15 years has come from nowhere to become the nation's No. 2 hog producer, thanks to huge confinement operations. As Mr. McGlone is wont to note, the hazards became apparent earlier this year, when Hurricane Floyd sent lagoons spilling into area rivers.

Raising hogs in low-lying coastal areas is "not good for the animals, it's not good for agriculture and it's not good for the environment." North Carolina is "doomed."
North Carolina hog experts say they're not too concerned about higher-cost, old-fashioned competition. But researchers there are accelerating studies of alternative production methods.
"If the political pressure continues as it has,” says Steve Washburn, extension leader at the Department of Animal Science at North Carolina State University, “then there's going to have to be some changes." ###