Best Food Writing 2013 (25 page)

Heritage pigs, on the other hand, were bred to retain the ability to give birth independently and possess the instincts necessary to be good mothers without reliance on gestation and farrowing crates. They were also selected for their genial temperaments. In the days when pigs still roamed barnyards at will and had to be fed and mucked out manually, no farmer wanted to work around quarter-ton creatures with vicious dispositions. Because producing huge numbers of offspring was not a priority, heritage sows tend to have smaller litters than their commercial cousins—typically, eight or so a litter, although some varieties give birth to half that many. “So right off the bat, you have a 20 or 25 percent difference between the output of a commercial ‘pink pig' and one of ours,” Yezzi said. Furthermore, Flying Pigs' sows are not confined to crates. Allowing sows to have the freedom to live normal lives carries the unfortunate cost of having the occasional piglet smothered by its mother, further reducing the rate of successful reproduction.

Not only do factory pigs produce more pigs per litter than heritage pigs, they produce more litters per year. It's common to wean commercial piglets at age three weeks or even earlier, when they
weigh about twelve pounds. In the industry, this practice is called “early weaning,” and Yezzi says it can be detrimental to the health of the piglets, which have to be housed in climate-controlled buildings and fed a special diet supplemented with drugs to survive. Weaning brings the sow back into heat within a few days, and after another four months in her gestation crate, she produces another litter. That works out to two litters every ten months.

Flying Pigs piglets live with their mothers and nurse for two to three months, until they weigh between twenty-five and forty pounds. When they are a couple of weeks old, they begin to nuzzle at the feed troughs of the mature pigs, slowly weaning themselves. A sow left to nurse her brood until the natural age of weaning requires thirteen to fourteen months to produce two litters, meaning commercial sows produce 20 percent more piglets per litter and produce litters 30 percent more often than pigs allowed to breed naturally. Given those numbers, I could understand why a heritage piglet costs Yezzi and Small about 120 dollars, while twelve-pound early-weaned commercial piglets cost factory farmers only about fifty dollars each, and at forty pounds sell for about seventy dollars. Even before the hog that produced my chop had been released on Flying Pigs Farm's pastures, my chop was worth twice as much as the one mass-produced by Swift.

Growing Pains

In addition to being offspring-producing dynamos, pink pigs have been bred to grow fast and convert feed into meat efficiently. They are helped along, if you want to call it that, by some marvels of modern factory farming. First of all, they do their growing inside warehouse-like barns typically holding two thousand hogs, all of the same age. The growing pigs are kept in groups of about twenty in pens that allow each animal between five and eight square feet on which to live out its life—an area measuring two feet by four feet, maximum. With no way to move freely, they don't burn off precious calories with exercise. Their food often contains animal byproducts. Those can consist of feathers, heads, feed, and viscera from poultry processing plants and excess baby chicks from hatcheries. They can also include slaughterhouse waste such as hog hair, tendons, ligaments, entrails, bones, and blood from cows and pigs. Occasionally,
commercial hogs are fed spent restaurant grease and rejected ingredients from packaged snack food factories—batches of overdone corn chips, defective candies. Not particularly healthy, but highly caloric.

Artificial lighting and climate control assure that the pigs live under optimal growing conditions all year round. They receive daily rations of antibiotics, not to keep them from becoming sick, but because low-level (subtherapeutic) drug administration makes livestock grow a few percent faster than they would normally. Mechanical augers transport food to their troughs; slats in the floor allow their excrement to fall into pits below, where machines move it away. Human presence is all but unnecessary. Liberty Swine Farms, for instance, an Indiana operator, produces about twenty-two thousand pigs a year with only eight employees. One employee's salary is spread over 2,750 pigs. Jennifer Small recalled visiting a commercial hog barn in Illinois housing thousands of animals. No humans were there. It was as if the entire barn was on autopilot with mechanical devices handling all the husbandry duties of a traditional farmer. “It was eerie,” she said.

Six months after it is born, a factory hog has gone from a creature you can cradle in the palms of your hands to a 250-pound porker that is ready for slaughter. But at Flying Pigs Farm, a pig takes between eight and nine months to reach a similar weight, longer during the cold season when the animals have to burn calories just to stay warm. Human contact is a constant factor in a Flying Pig's life. Yezzi and Small go out of their way to make sure that their pigs are docile and accustomed to human contact, not for sentimental reasons or to make pets of them, but because becoming used to humans reduces stress, and unstressed pigs are easier to handle, grow better, and produce better meat.

Thousands of factory animals can be crowded into a single barn that occupies a fraction of an acre of land, but the four hundred or so hogs found on Flying Pigs Farm at any time have the run of twenty to thirty acres. An acre is about the size of a football field. Yezzi has three full-time employees, plus one part-timer, and an employee's salary can be spread over only 170 pigs, not the 2,750 at the Liberty facility. Employees at Flying Pigs have to deliver feed to the pigs daily by tractor and wagon. To prevent the spread of parasites, Yezzi never keeps pigs on the same patch of ground for two years in a row,
so he actually has forty to sixty acres of valuable land tied up as pig pasture. The pigs live in groups of five to a couple dozen, depending on their size, in roomy paddocks enclosed by electric fencing. Each group has a feeder, water spigot, and portable metal hut in which to take shelter. Workers move the huts, hoses, feeders, and fencing to fresh pasture every two weeks in the summer. In the cold months, they insert wooden platforms inside each hut so the pigs don't have to lie on cold, wet ground. Straw, which can cost a dollar a day per hut, is placed on top of the platforms to help the pigs stay warm. Yezzi's crew has to be vigilant and clean out the huts whenever the bedding becomes even slightly moist—pigs are notoriously susceptible to pneumonia. Every morning and evening someone visits every hut and rouses its residents and makes them get up and move about. “We check for illness,” said Yezzi. “If an animal is slow rising or has its tail and ears down and is looking mopey, we move it into the barn for closer observation and treatment if necessary.”

The only time a Flying Pig hog receives medication is when it becomes sick. Antibiotics are not given as part of the daily regimen of healthy animals, even though they will not grow as fast as regularly treated pigs. And because of the presence of animal byproducts and other chemicals that Jennifer describes as “gross” in commercially formulated feeds, Flying Pigs Farm uses a custom formula of corn and soybeans mixed at a local grain mill, a step that costs sixteen thousand dollars a month. Being on pasture, the couple's pigs are always active, rooting, running, and mounding together fifty-strong in pig piles on chilly days. All of this activity gives their flesh color and texture lacking in commercial pork. They forage while on pasture, but Yezzi says that the benefit to that is not so much the weight gain, but that they are kept active and interested. Foraged food also adds flavor to their meat.

The Day of Reckoning and Beyond

Efficiency being the watchword, a two-thousand-pig commercial barn gets filled all at once with animals that are the same age. When the hogs reach slaughter weight, the barn is completely emptied, as all of its former residents are trucked off to slaughter. The large slaughter facilities that commercial pigs go to can kill and butcher more than a thousand pigs an hour, a process that inevitably leaves
a few animals alive and sentient when they are dipped in vats of scalding water for hair removal, according to People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals. Unskilled and often ununionized (and undocumented) workers wield knives along a disassembly line, repeating a single cut all day long, rather than performing the skilled job of butchering an entire animal. The “kill fee” at a big plant is between ten and twelve dollars per carcass. According to United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) statistics, an unskilled slaughterhouse worker earns a little over eleven dollars an hour. A Vermont study showed that trained meat cutters in the area near Flying Pigs earned sixteen dollars an hour.

Flying Pigs pays a kill fee of fifty dollars per animal. How commercial hogs and Flying Pigs' animals die is as different as how they are raised. Yezzi loads between ten and twenty pigs a week into his truck and drives them to a USDA-certified slaughterhouse about ten miles from his farm. They arrive there the evening before they are due to be killed and are housed together in their own enclosure overnight. Spending the evening among pigs they know calms them and relieves the stress of transport. Excessive stress at the time of slaughter can ruin the flavor and texture of pork. With no fear of humans, they remain calm until they are killed one at a time by the facility's owner, who processes a maximum of thirty pigs a day. This not only assures as humane a death as a pig bred for human food can get, but allows the on-site USDA inspector to examine each carcass individually, taking all the time needed, an impossibility in a mega-plant where a thousand pigs an hour stream past on a conveyor system. In addition to paying the kill fee, Yezzi spends up to two hundred dollars per carcass, nearly twice the going rate, to have a professional butcher cut it to his exact specifications.

Yezzi has a tremendous advantage over many other small-scale meat producers in that there is a USDA-approved slaughterhouse just down the road. Before it opened, he or one of his employees had to drive for over an hour to the nearest facility, wait there until the animals were off loaded, and return home—twice a week. It represented a tremendous cost in fuel and labor that he no longer has to bear. His fuel bill is further reduced because he burns recycled vegetable oil from nearby Williams College and other sources.

Every Thursday, Yezzi picks up his meat. He hits the road for
the 225-mile drive to New York City between six and eight o'clock in the evening, arriving at about one o'clock Friday morning. He crashes at a friend's apartment (another money-saving measure that other small producers don't enjoy) and gets up at six o'clock to make deliveries to his restaurant customers. Two hours later, he arrives at one of the three farmers' markets he attends each week in the city. But even as customers line up for his pork, Yezzi is still incurring expenses. Renting a space at a market costs seventy-five dollars a day. He has to hire sales help in the city to tend his booth for an additional hundred to hundred and fifty dollars a day—about 5 percent of his gross sales. Late Saturday afternoon, he packs up and drives back to the farm to get ready for the next group of pigs.

As you may have guessed, even before I undertook my hard-edged financial analysis, I had already made up my mind that the taste of rare, heritage-breed pork was worth it to me. Sure, it's expensive. But we are all supposed to be eating less meat, so my answer to those who say that grass-fed beef and pastured pork are elitist luxuries would be, “Eat less meat and when you do make it the good stuff. Your wallet will be no worse off, and your circulatory system and conscience will thank you.” Now I can add, “And take some comfort knowing that the extra money is spent on better production practices.”

There wasn't any fine print on the label of my package of Flying Pigs chops to explain all the extra costs that had gone into producing them. It said only, “Premium pork from the Battenkill River Valley.”

The fine print on the label of those $3.49 a pound Swift Premium chops that were “guaranteed tender” said: “With up to a 12 percent solution of pork broth, sodium citrate, and natural salt.” Huh? “Natural salt?” “Sodium citrate?” A little research revealed that the supermarket chop had been “enhanced,” which means the meat was injected with a saline solution to remedy its lack of taste and dry texture. By my objective calculation, that factory pig corporation charged more than forty cents a pound for salty water. Did I feel ripped off? You bet.

 

 

T
HE
U
PSTART
C
ATTLEMAN

By John Kessler

From
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution