Chris Petersen’s days began in darkness. Long before the first light bled across the north-central Iowa sky, he, his wife, and two teenage children were already at work on their Berkshire pigs, boots crunching across frozen gravel in winter or slick, dew-damp grass in summer. The morning and evening routines each took three hours, with the rest of the day spent baling hay, tending grain, and often working late into the night because labor was tight.
Petersen, now 71 and retired, farmed on 300 acres in Clear Lake, between Des Moines and Minneapolis, about 20 miles south of the Minnesota border. The heart of the operation was hogs, but there were also row crops and hay. In the 1980s and early ’90s, the place thrummed with activity. The family put up “10,000 small squares of hay per year,” grew grain, and tended 200 commercial sows, producing about 2,500 market pigs per year. It was a full-time life that left no room for idleness.
The Berkshires lived in bedded, open-front buildings with access to outdoor cement lots. Each morning, when the sun rose, the animals were let out to eat and do their business, then they “would come back and stand by the farrowing crate to be with their babies.”
The farm wasn’t perfect, but it worked, reflecting a system where animals thrived and humans were accountable to the land. The family cleaned the barns once or twice a week, hauling out a mixture of hog manure and straw bedding that, when spread on the fields, built the soil rather than depleting it. “When pigs run around like any other animal, they build their muscle,” he said. He describes Berkshires as “top quality” and equates them to Kobe cows. One of his biggest markets, alongside niche restaurants, was exports to Japan.
Not so long ago, small operations like Petersen’s supplied meatpackers with the majority of the pork Americans put on the table. But by the late 1990s the landscape was shifting. As antitrust enforcement weakened, packers moved directly into the livestock business. Petersen recalled that the government gradually allowed them to own the animals they processed, and the companies began raising pigs themselves.
Then came the next turn of the screw: the invention of the gestation crate. A few feet of metal bars, barely bigger than a sow’s body, it signaled a new industrial logic that equated to efficiency at any cost. What had once been a barnyard became a factory floor, and the modern confinement era began.
Once large meatpackers contracted with growers and built their own confinement facilities, independent farmers were edged out. Smithfield and Iowa Select moved to contract-growing, pushing family farms out of business and making it nearly impossible for small producers to turn a profit. “The packers owned the pigs,” Petersen said. “Why would they need us anymore?”
The fallout was brutal. In the late 1990s tens of thousands of pig farmers went bankrupt. Petersen was one of them, and he knew several others who committed suicide, unable to save their family farms. “The government didn’t do a damn thing about it,” he said. The 1980s farm crisis, marked by high interest rates, collapsing land values, and falling crop prices, had already devastated rural communities, leaving lasting scars across the Midwest.
Those wounds are economic, cultural, social, ethical, familial, and now epidemiological. In the vast, low-slung barns that today dominate U.S. pig farming, animals are packed so tightly that routine doses of antibiotics are the only way to keep disease at bay. Those same conditions are undermining the ability of doctors to fight infections in humans. They result in a breeding ground for antibiotic-resistant superbugs, a threat the World Health Organization ranks among the gravest dangers to global health. The scale and methods of industrial pork production clash with values many Americans hold dear, such as respect for life, personal responsibility, and community well-being. Yet government policies have often reinforced the system rather than curbed it.
“I have lived on the same 400 acres for 50 years,” Petersen said. His grandparents emigrated from Denmark in 1913 and homesteaded six miles south of where his farm now stands. They endured the Depression, losing their property once before buying it back, and eventually retired in the late 1950s. Petersen kept the farm going until consolidation made the old way of raising pigs nearly impossible. Every day demanded hands-on attention, a rhythm attuned to the animals and the seasons. “I raised pigs and cattle sustainably,” Petersen said, “but I couldn’t put a pig in a crate, then move it to a farrowing crate, then back again. Speaking as a farmer and as a human being, I couldn’t do it.”
Over the past half-century, the scale of pig farming has exploded. The U.S. pig herd has grown rapidly in recent decades, with more than 120 million pigs now slaughtered annually. Millions of sows are now confined in gestation crates for 16 weeks at a time in industrial barns. This growth, driven by corporate consolidation, technological advances, and the push for cheap pork, has amplified risks to both animals and humans.
Gestation crates, a relatively modern invention, represent a particularly dramatic departure from traditional practices. They turn intelligent, social creatures into production units, creating conditions where disease spreads easily and antibiotics become a crutch. In dim, windowless barns across the American heartland, millions of mother pigs live their adult lives in metal crates barely larger than their own bodies. They cannot turn, root, or play. When they give birth, they are moved to farrowing crates where their only contact with piglets is the few inches needed to suckle, a free milk bar rather than a mother-child bond. About 60% of U.S. breeding sows spend each 16-week pregnancy in these stalls over concrete slats. Conditions unimaginable to anyone outside the industry are presented as necessary for efficiency and safety, yet the reality is one of profound restriction and suffering.
Scientists have tracked how these confinement systems contaminate air and water with microbes and nitrates. Communities living near large hog complexes report higher rates of respiratory illness. The nation’s unshakable “bacon mania” has ballooned into an enterprise of industrial proportions, with severe consequences for the quality of our food, public health, and the survival of family farms.
All of which is why, in a stunning and rare assertion of local power, 10 states have voted to ban or entirely restrict gestation crates: Arizona, California, Colorado, Florida, Maine, Massachusetts, Michigan, Ohio, Oregon, and Rhode Island.
Because they lost at the ballot box, Big Ag is now pushing its allies in Congress and the federal government to pass a new Farm Bill to effectively override the voters’ wishes. “California wants to ban our bacon?” wrote Joni Ernst, in the Washington Examiner in April. “Not on my watch.”The Republican senator from Iowa is leading the proposed Ending Agricultural Trade Suppression (EATS) Act, which would override state protections by preventing enforcement of animal-welfare or public-health standards stricter than federal rules, threatening to undo the few safeguards that exist. Ernst maintains a long-standing relationship with Smithfield Foods, which is owned by the Chinese company WH Group, and which has become a lightning rod for criticism, with observers citing both animal welfare abuses and national security concerns.
“Senator Ernst & co’s main claim is that state bans impose an undue burden on what they call ‘family farms,’” tweeted Liv Boeree, the British poker player, philanthropist, science communicator, and advocate against factory farming. “But in reality, it’s putting the small family farms out of business. It’s Big Ag that treats their pigs badly, not the little guys. And because of this, they can’t compete, and are getting swallowed up by giants like Tyson and Smithfield. That’s why real family farmers have been the leading voices speaking out AGAINST the EATS Act. And it’s why giant conglomerates like Smithfield are backing it, because it gives them even more market dominance.” Calls to Sen. Ernst’s office for comment were not returned.
“This provision would not only trample voter-approved initiatives,” said Tom Harkin, the former Democratic senator from Iowa. “It would also undercut family farmers who have invested in more humane practices. Instead, it rewards massive conglomerates—like Smithfield Foods, which is owned by a Chinese corporation—that want to impose one-size-fits-all rules favoring industrialized systems over community-based agriculture.”
“[The Farm Bill] is a complete F you to Republican values of states’ rights of self-determination,” Boeree added. “It hurts small farmers, and it is terrible for American health.”
Strangely quiet are MAGA and MAHA activists, for whom this issue would seem to be a slam dunk. Opposing the EATS act would favor family-owned farms over crony capitalism, states’ rights over federal power, America over China, and outlaw a process loathed by evangelicals as well as activists concerned about chronic disease. So why the radio silence?
“Agriculture and industry are mutually exclusive by definition,” John Gilbert, a farmer in Hardin County, Iowa, who sells pigs to Niman Ranch, told Tablet. “In agriculture, there is no waste. In industry, you consume resources to make goods and waste. So when you hear somebody say ‘industrial agriculture,’ you know it’s a problem. You’re paying the price someplace else.”
Industrial pig operations replace the judgment of skilled farmers with standardized infrastructure: climate-controlled barns, mechanized feeding systems, and confinement designed to maximize output. “From a pig standpoint, it wasn’t necessary. What they did was take space away. Instead of letting pigs root, move, and choose inside or outside, they were crammed together. Pigs are naturally clean and intelligent, but when you take away their space, it’s like shoving eight or 10 people into an elevator and telling them to live their lives there,” Gilbert said.
Major pork companies such as Smithfield Foods, Tyson and JBS USA dominate the market. Corporate consolidation allows these companies to dictate practices, often overriding local and state attempts at regulation. “Industrial systems are top-down: It’s integrators and packers making the decisions, not the farmers themselves. Farmers are often just workers,” Gilbert said. Foreign ownership, as has been proved repeatedly, can negatively influence domestic practices, from production standards to the prioritization of exports over local food security.
The environmental consequences are immense. North Carolina, a state with roughly 8 million pigs and 11 million people, has become emblematic of industrial hog pollution. Lagoons storing millions of gallons of manure dot the landscape, releasing nitrogen, ammonia, and pathogens into the air, soil, and waterways. Overflowing lagoons have caused catastrophic contamination events. Rick Dove, a former fisherman on the Neuse River, recounted how industrial pig operations decimated his livelihood: After leaving the Marine Corps and establishing a small fishing business, Dove watched the fish die and fell ill himself, victims of the toxic single-celled organism Pfiesteria piscicida, fed by nitrogen-laden pig manure.
In North Carolina, industrial hog farms have grown so vast and concentrated that their open pits of liquefied manure—known as waste lagoons—are now detectable by satellite imagery. From orbit, Landsat images capture the brown swaths of effluent scattered across the coastal plain, each one venting gases so foul that nearby residents describe feeling trapped in their own homes. The odor is not a faint farm smell but a rancid stench that clings to laundry and walls, settling over neighborhoods on hot days and forcing families to keep windows shut and children indoors.
Petersen summarized the industrial logic: “You cram thousands of hogs into a building, dose them with antibiotics, haul them in trucks across the country, and you wonder why disease spreads?”
Public health concerns extend beyond Pfiesteria. The 2009 H1N1 influenza pandemic, also known as swine flu, with genetic contributions from swine, birds, and humans, originated in communities adjacent to pig production, like La Gloria, Mexico. Residents warned of a looming crisis: “We are living in a time bomb. We don’t know when something else bad is going to happen to us. The government must get rid of the farms because while they remain, the pollution will continue, and I am sure there will be more new diseases,” said Guadalupe Gaspar, a local leader. Overcrowding, poor ventilation, and routine antibiotic use in industrial pig farms create the perfect conditions for pathogens to emerge, mutate, and spread, risks that have only grown as federal oversight has leaned toward supporting industry rather than mitigation.
Policy battles over these practices are ongoing. California’s Proposition 12 bans the sale of pork from crate-confined pigs. The Supreme Court upheld the state’s law in 2023, but the pork industry seeks carve-outs in federal legislation, aiming to dilute state-level protections. Petersen, while cautiously optimistic about state reforms, recognized their limits: “A little, but it’s just one state. California’s economy is huge, but it won’t spread nationwide. Status quo. Unless something unforeseen happens, confinements will keep expanding.”
Environmental impacts ripple far beyond local communities. Grain-fed animals consume vast quantities of wheat, corn, and soy that could feed humans directly, while runoff from feed crops contributes to oceanic dead zones. Industrial pig production emits greenhouse gases, depletes biodiversity, and transforms once-thriving agricultural landscapes into near-deserts for wildlife. Some 62% of mammalian biomass worldwide is made up of farmed animals, with humans accounting for 34% and all wild mammals just 4%. Domesticated birds make up 70% of all avian mass. These numbers illustrate the planetary scale of industrial agriculture’s reach and its implications for food, ecosystems, and resource use.
Public-health experts warn that the routine, low-dose antibiotics fed to pigs, designed to speed growth and prevent disease in crowded conditions, are breeding resistant bacteria that travel far beyond the farm. These “superbugs” hitch rides on contaminated water, on the boots and clothing of workers, and even on the pork that reaches grocery shelves. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates that antibiotic-resistant infections kill more than 35,000 Americans every year; a significant share of the resistant strains have been traced back to livestock production.
This industrial mindset doesn’t just threaten animal health and public safety; it also clashes with the ethical and moral principles many Americans associate with stewardship of the land and care for God’s creation.
For Polyface Farm founder Joel Salatin and other faith-driven farmers, the contradiction is stark. He frames honoring the “glory of the pig,” allowing animals to express natural behaviors and live in accordance with creation, as a spiritual imperative that political leadership has ignored.
From Salatin’s perspective, the industrial system is not just cruel to animals; it is a failure to live up to moral and religious principles. That “pigness,” he says, includes running, playing, digging, wallowing, making babies, and caring for them. Modern gestation crates, by design, deny pigs all of it: “The pig can’t walk; can’t dig; can’t wallow; can’t teach babies what to eat and how to dig. It deprives the pig of everything that makes it distinct from other creatures and certainly does not allow it to express any of its unique qualities.”
Suppressing that God-given essence, he argues, has consequences. “When creation’s glory is suppressed,” Salatin said, the creature “becomes a liability rather than an asset,” more prone to sickness and propped up by pharmaceuticals.
In Britain, however, gestation crates have been banned since 1999, replaced by crate-free group housing or outdoor roaming. The ban followed a parliamentary bill introduced by former pig farmer and MP Sir Richard Body, a reform spearheaded by Compassion in World Farming that went on to inspire similar measures across the European Union.
Stateside, there’s increasing energy coming from the grassroots. Niman Ranch operates crate-free systems, prioritizing animal welfare without sacrificing economic viability. Gilbert emphasized the philosophical distinction: “Niman Ranch talks about the pig, letting it express natural behaviors. Industrial systems talk about pork; the process doesn’t matter to them. That’s instructive. In short, just because we can doesn’t mean we should.”
These days, approximately 40% of U.S. breeding sows live in group housing or crate-free systems. Major food companies, including Chipotle, Applegate, and Whole Foods, are implementing policies that prioritize welfare in their supply chains, encouraged and monitored by organizations like Compassion in World Farming through reports such as PigTrack. These incremental shifts show that ethical, economically viable alternatives exist, but they require vigilance, advocacy, and pressure on political leaders.
American pig farming today reflects broader tensions in U.S. society: Big Ag over family farms, federal over state authority, corporate profit over animal welfare and public health, and foreign ownership over domestic control. The stakes are moral, economic, and ecological. Industrial pig production is not merely a technical problem; it is a mirror of societal priorities and failures. As Gilbert and Petersen repeatedly emphasized, the choice to reform the industry rests on collective awareness and moral clarity: “Gestation crates are an abomination,” Gilbert said. “You don’t have to be an animal-rights activist to see that.”
Every decision, from supermarket purchases to federal legislation, shapes the future of pork, rural communities, ecosystems, and American farming culture. Each crate, each farm, each legislative vote tells a story not only about the pigs confined within but about the world we choose to inhabit. “Just take care of the animals,” Petersen said. “Don’t confine them in ways that make them miserable. The rest, like economics, markets, and policies, will follow. Nature wins in the end.”
