Ruminations 24-05: Pastured Pork Commentary 5

This will be my last regarding a video that I came across from, This’ll Do Farms. If you stuck with me through all this time, thank you very much and please hit the subscribe button for more farm updates and content like this. With that, let's get into my 5th pastured pork commentary regarding scale and sustainability.

Scale and Sustainability

One of the major knocks on pastured pork is the limited scalability of this manner of raising hogs, especially compared to industrial hog barns. I raise 15 to 25 hogs a year and all of them are going direct to the consumer. Those customers are getting food. They're not trading a commodity with a multinational corporation for their food. This is a big distinction between a small operation like mine and a larger operation; not that one or the other is right or wrong but rather one is working within their context of a whole community versus being independent outside of that community.

My hogs take up roughly 5 acres of agricultural land, two in pasture, three in cropland, at a high estimate, compared to how many hundreds or thousands to maintain hog buildings for manure spreading and corn and soybean monoculture agriculture. The efficiencies gained using industrial style hog barns are offset by the environmental damage that is potentially taking place with their manure spreading and concentration of animals in that tight of space.

The assumption that sustainability has something to do with amount of acres per animal is ludicrous. What happens if water happens to be the resource we run out of before we run out of land? What if we max out our soil capacity and refuse to rebuild it causing us to not be able to grow what we need to sustain that level of production?

In addition to these questions, there's also the issue of industrial agriculture pushing production to the point of waste. Over 20% of all meat produced is thrown out before it even meets the consumer. Of that food that meets the consumer, 30% is thrown out before it is actually eaten as food. Where is the sustainability in a model that sees a third of what it produces as trash and the other two thirds as the simple commodity to be traded on markets instead of foods sold to families and individuals? What other options do you have for a million dollar facility that is specialized in raising hogs on an industrial scale? You can't use that for anything else. You have to use it for that purpose or the bank comes running.

True sustainability is being able to adjust to markets and provide for your customers what they need. By staying small I have the opportunity to be flexible. I can change on a dime to lambs or hens or cattle instead of hogs if that's what the market decides and what my customers want. If I were strapped to a hundred thousand a million facility I would have no choice but to do what that facility was made for.