The stock judge at the livestock show yesterday was Jan Busboom.
During one of the breaks, we were talking and I told him that the stockman who usually supplies hogs to our 4H club is stopping hog production. (their family has run hogs on their place in lower valley for over 100 years- that will be history in October of this year when the last hogs are shipped. They supplied about 1000-1200 hogs annually to the local market).
He told me that the industry dynamic has shifted such that currently 90% (IIRC- it could have been 80%- either way is mind boggling) of the hogs delivered to market now come from operations that supply more than 100,000 hogs annually.
This raises questions in my mind about security- quality, etc.... not that these things aren't necessarily there, but how they are maintained and can continue to be maintained.
I'm interested in your comments- and I'm sure there are lots of tangents this topic can follow.
My family farm always produced hogs for market when I was growing up and my dad and I continue to raise hogs until I retired from active farming in the mid 1980's. In a way not too dissimilar to poultry production, commercial hog operations are highly mechanized and are a capital-intensive farm enterprise.
The idea that if you can make say $1,000 with an operation of a certain size, that if you multiply that by a scale of 10, you'd make at least ten times as much and maybe achieve a higher efficiency because of the economies of scale so maybe make more than ten times as much. Of course, you also multiply the associated risks by some factor as well.
I suspect that almost all the pork we buy from a chain supermarket has been coming from pork mills for several years now so I think the change is well in our past.
Chipotle advertises its "naturally raised" pork products. I can't eat there too often, but I enjoy it when I can spare the calories.
As with many other industries, agriculture is affected by many outside pressures, taxes, ever growing and changing regulations, coupled with the uncertainties and volatilities of markets, not only for the produced commodities, but especially of the inputs (feed, fertilizer, fuel, power, labor costs, etc.), the pressure to either "go big or go home" becomes overpowering.
You may remember an ex-employee of mine that flamed the old board for a time a few years back. He works at a big pig farm now. If you want to eat a pig that he has had a stake in be my guest. I will stick with the other white meat myself.
I can remember when nearly every county in the midwest had one or two weekly livestock auctions. Now there are a handful in the state. Most livestock production is by either huge operations or smaller ones contracted to supply to a particular corporate buyer. And some of those contracts are heads-we-win-tails-you-lose where the supplier has most of the risk but his reward is limited.
This means that free-market economic theory no longer applies, and that bothers me.
It also means the system is less robust. Efficiency and robustness often counter each other in any endeavor. The system can't handle as well any sort of change, particularly an outbreak of disease.
I don't think grain production has gone so far down this path. But many of them do contract part of their product in advance. I heard of one operation with several hundred acres of corn who contracted to deliver $100K worth at some price. With the drought it looks like it may cost them $200K to buy and deliver what they can't grow.
If you are really serious, the best senario is you establish a relationship with a local producer and you buy local from him. It is a win, win, win all the way around. My Father in law raises meat grade sheep. He sells them all at the farm.
New Federal and state regulations have made it questionable or illegal for an individual to sell to another individual food for consumption without Federal inspection and made it costly for small producers to jump through the hoops. Thank the FDA, USDA, and others. I can understand their concerns with safe food, but the problem has not been the small local farm, but the large industrial providers.
Most anywhere across Texas our feral hog is free for the taking.
Trap one or more and they are yours.
🙂
Dannon Yogurt has signed contracts with a single family-owned dairy with three huge locations in Western Kansas to supply 100 percent of their dairy product needs. That is insane. One supplier for all of Dannon's production. Dannon is taking a huge risk.
