The Grass Is Greener, page 3

Hogs and Pasture

Pigs benefit from being pasture-raised too. Their diets are less dependent on grass, but confinement feeding of pigs takes the same toll on the environment and on animal health. Large-scale industrial confinement pork operations have quickly overtaken family farm production in the last 10 years, and today control over 75% of the market. Communities near large confinement feeding operations report air so acrid it is difficult to breathe or work out-of-doors. Confining thousands of hogs under one roof means more disease, more antibiotics, and more issues with waste-management and pollution. There are real questions about whether it makes sense to raise animals this way, when compared to the benefits of pasture-based farming.

“There are huge differences,” says Tom Frantzen, who raises pork for Organic Prairie. “If you take the life of average confinement hogs, they are born on a slat floor, and see little else but stainless steel. From there, it’s off to a flat floor and concrete walls. It’s an extremely mundane environment. My pigs, they’re born outside. Later, they are in a hoop building with fresh air, sunshine, and they get a fresh shot of bedding every two or three days.”

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