The Hog Barons

How Iowa’s largest hog producer courted power, turned farming into a numbers game, and transformed the American heartland.

By Charlie Mitchell and Austin Frerick Updated Apr 19, 2021, 8:00am EDT
Photographs by Kathryn Gamble for Vox

Jeff Hansen, who owns Iowa’s largest hog operation, brought about 5 million pigs to market last year. Each one spent its entire life in a windowless metal shed called a confinement. Passing clusters of the massive sheds on the rural highways, you wouldn’t imagine that a standard confinement holds almost 2,500 pigs — unless the wind wafted the thick stench of manure in your direction. The manure drops through a shed’s slatted floors and collects in a deep pool below. Often, that pool will run through a pipe to a manure pond or lagoon that holds the overflow.

Hansen’s company, Iowa Select Farms, employs more than 7,400 people, including contractors, and has built hundreds of confinement sheds in more than 50 of Iowa’s 99 counties. Since they began to arrive in the 1990s, these sheds have provoked controversy. Citing damage to health, livelihoods, property values, the environment, and the farm economy, rural communities in Iowa have campaigned fiercely against them.

While their efforts have yielded small victories, they have lost the war: The state’s hog industry, led by Hansen, has cultivated close relationships with state politicians on both sides of the aisle to roll back regulations, and confinements have flooded the countryside. The Hansen family’s charitable efforts have seemingly solidified these ties; it’s not unusual for a sitting governor to attend a charity gala thrown by the Hansens.

Since Iowa Select was founded in 1992, the state’s pig population has increased more than 50 percent — while the number of farms raising hogs has declined over 80 percent. In the last 30 years, 26,000 Iowa farms quit the long-standing tradition of raising pigs. As confinements replaced them, rural communities have continued to hollow out.

While other states have placed regulations on the hog industry out of concern for the environment and economy, Iowa has peeled them back. It now raises about a third of the nation’s hogs, about as many as the second, third, and fourth-ranking states combined. As the largest pig farmer in a state that both the American hog industry and export market depend on, Hansen is an agricultural force with international influence.

This story was produced in collaboration with the Food & Environment Reporting Network, a nonprofit news organization.

Pigs in Iowa outnumber human residents by a ratio of more than 7 to 1, and they produce a volume of waste equivalent to nearly 84 million people, more than the population of California, Texas, and Illinois combined. In theory, this manure, when spread on nearby crop fields, is a useful fertilizer, but residents and scientists alike point to evidence that this “Mt. Everest of waste,” as one University of Iowa water quality researcher describes it, is frequently mismanaged. It filters through soil to underground pipes that discharge directly into rivers, and when manure is over-applied, rain and snowmelt can sluice it into waterways.

much more here: https://www.vox.com/the-highlight/22344953/iowa-select-jeff-hansen-pork-farming