Hog Heaven
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But between scooping feed and hauling straw bedding, he takes a moment to point out to a visitor a tangled pile of metal and concrete heaped behind a shed. This is all that's left of a system of confinement hog production he and his wife, Irene, used for 14 years.
“Those days are gone,” says Frantzen without a hint of regret.
Those days consisted of raising hogs in closed buildings with concrete floors. The floors had special slots in them so that urine and feces could drain down into a pit below. All this liquid manure had to be pumped out and disposed of. Such a system was bad for the stressed-out animals (they fought each other and required lots of antibiotics) and the environment (liquid manure often finds its way into waterways), as well as members of the Frantzen family (they had to work in facilities full of dust and toxic gases). In short, says Frantzen, this system treated animals as machines, manure as waste, and farmers as barnyard janitors.
But three years ago the Frantzens junked the trappings
of confinement and started raising hogs in deep-straw bedding in
open-ended, Quonset-hut like structures called hoop houses. The family
was already raising hogs on carefully managed pastures in the summer,
but producing pork during harsh midwestern winters meant the hogs had
to be confined – or so the Frantzens thought until they visited Sweden.
There they saw pigs being raised under natural conditions using deep
straw bedding.
Art and Suzy Biggert from Ocean Sky farm, Bainbridge Island, WA. Photo by Joel Sackett.
The family was sold on the system from the start. For one thing, it could be set up for about a third of the cost of a confinement facility. In addition, the pigs were healthier because they were allowed to follow their natural instincts to socialize and nest. Finally, when the manure mixed with the straw, it created a composting “pack” that kept the animals warm and served as a valuable fertilizer for crops.
Still, Tom was apprehensive about making such a significant switch from a system that had the agri-science seal of approval. His concerns were put to rest when he turned those first pigs loose in a just-completed hoop house one day in September 1997.
“They
ran around all day long, and they must have run around all night long,
too, because when I went out to the building the next morning I will
never forget what I found,” he recalls. “I peeked into the hoop house
to see 180 pigs in one massive straw nest – snoring. I laughed until I
cried. Their stress was gone, and so was mine. I know I'll never go
back to confinement. Once you cross that road, there is no way you can
go back.”
Against the grain
To factory farming's
boosters, people like Tom Frantzen have done more than cross a road –
they've traveled to a galaxy far, far away and landed on Planet
Goofball. The current megatrend in American livestock production is an
industrialized system that packs tens of thousands of animals into
hard, low-slung buildings run by computers and low-wage employees. This
system looks good on paper to Wall Street investors, but on the farm
level it's an economic and ecological barnyard bust. Manure spills and
shuttered Main Streets are the only bumper crops such facilities are
producing these days.
So many are taking a different route: combining some old-fashioned animal husbandry with new, low-tech facility design and sophisticated ideas about the relationships between livestock and the land.
In dairy, beef, and poultry production, this new ecologically based farming has taken the form of management-intensive rotational grazing, a system where animals move frequently through a series of grass-filled paddocks.
But it's the sustainable trends in hog farming that have caught the most attention recently. Hundreds of hoop houses have been erected in the Midwest in the past half-dozen years by small farmers like the Frantzens, who market about 1,200 pigs annually.
Perhaps the most
amazing thing about sustainable hog production is that it has gained a
hoofhold with virtually no support from the land grant university
research system, that traditional purveyor of “progressive” farming
techniques. Informal farmer-to-farmer information exchanges and
research done in Sweden have been the main vectors for this system's
spread. And now that a few land grant researchers are finally turning
their attention to these methods, they're surprised to find them quite
competitive economically, mostly because of low construction and
operating expenses. In fact, a hoop structure with deep straw bedding
can produce pigs for about $1.50 per hundred pounds cheaper, according
to Iowa State University research and results from Canadian hog trials.
Tight nutrient cycle
But it's the ecological benefits
of alternative hog production that are creating the biggest stir. An
environmental audit done last year on the Frantzen farm by the
University of Northern Iowa found the operation was producing between
only 20 and 30 pounds of excess nitrogen per acre annually, a sign that
it's extremely efficient at keeping wayward nutrients from becoming
environmental pollutants. In comparison, nitrogen loss on factory
operations is measured in the hundreds of pounds per acre.
Environmental Protection Agency officials have expressed surprise at
the lack of odor emanating from hoop houses they've visited in
Minnesota, and tests for toxic gases like hydrogen sulfide have shown
these facilities to be well within health standards.
Hoop buildings, or any other off-farm products for that matter, aren't environmental silver bullets. Rather, they just happen to lend themselves nicely to a system of farming that considers all of an operation's enterprises and resources as part of a larger whole. The compost produced by the hoop house system is a biologically rich fertilizer, which farmers like the Frantzens use on their crops. Those crops are then fed to the animals and cycled back to the land as manure, helping to produce more feed crops. In addition, the straw itself comes from small grains such as oats, a soil-conserving crop that can naturally break up weed and insect pest cycles. And pasture-farrowing hogs during the summer – along with grazing cattle – helps the Frantzens economically justify having a large portion of their farm in perennial grasses, which add biological diversity to the landscape. Striking such a balance between land, animals, and crops produces a closed nutrient cycle, rather than one that imports a lot of inputs and pumps out even more waste.
Farmers who use diversified, sustainable livestock methods say they help accomplish another important part of their whole farm's overall goal: maintaining a good quality of life.
“It's a fun way to raise pigs, a healthy way to raise pigs and it's profitable,” says Preston, Minnesota, farmer Dave Serfling, who, along with his wife, Diane, has participated in studies that show their small, sustainable enterprise is more efficient than much larger operations. “It's a size that I can raise my kids on, keep my bills paid, and have a good life.”
All
of this is good news to people who are fighting factory operations.
Organizers with the recently launched Factory Farm Grassroots Campaign
of the Global Resource Action Center for the Environment (GRACE) work
with communities threatened by giant livestock operations. Part of
their effort involves providing information through visits, as well as
the Internet, on how alternative livestock production is more
economically and environmentally viable than the factory model. “To
just get up and complain about the way hogs are being raised without
offering alternatives can't work,” says Karen Hudson, an Illinois
farmer who works as a grassroots organizer with a GRACE “SWAT” team.
Sustainable shopping
But
all the low-cost sustainable livestock production in the world means
little if farmers can't get paid a fair price. The good news is that
several farmers, including the Frantzens, are now receiving a premium
price for antibiotic-free, sustainably produced pork from places like
Niman Ranch, a San Francisco-based company. And Organic Valley, a
farmer-owned label that requires hogs to be raised in natural
conditions, recently made its way into supermarket meat cases. Other
farmers are taking their products directly to consumers via farmers'
markets and the Internet. These alternatives are in their infancy, and
the majority of family farmers are still being denied profits in a
market controlled by corporate livestock operations. But Frantzen sees
a glimmer of hope every time he delivers more pork to a local natural
foods co-op and consumers use their pocketbooks to show him how much
they appreciate his efforts to raise hogs sustainably.
“When people make a buying choice they are casting a ballot for the type of food system they want. That sends a tremendously powerful message back to rural America about what sort of farming is valued.”
Brian DeVore is editor of the Land Stewardship Letter, a publication of the Minnesota-based Land Stewardship Project. The Project can
be reached at www.landstewardshipproject.org or 651-653-0618.
Contact GRACE at 212-726-9161 or http://www.gracelinks.org.
