Pig Out

The cycle begins with a horny boar in Kansas. The beast mounts a steel surrogate sow that's shaped like a barrel, draped with a piece of carpet for comfort. Leg supports sprout from its sides for easy gripping. The boar grunts and thrusts, and workers stand at the ready with sterile plastic bags, poised for the moment of porcine ecstasy. This is ground zero for "vertical integration," a business model that's helped Merriam-based Seaboard Corp. rise to third place among the world's pork producers. It's a simple concept: The company's pork subsidiary, Seaboard Farms, owns every step of its pork producing process -- from semen to tenderloin.

Once the boar is spent, Seaboard workers dilute his semen, divide it and seal it into 20 little bags, load it on a refrigerated truck with thousands of other bags, and ship it to a row of barns deep in the Oklahoma panhandle. Each barn is identical: white walls and silver roof. Inside, 27,000 sows wallow in long rows of pens roughly 10 inches wider than their bodies. Unable to turn around, the mama pigs chew at the bars that confine them. At their heads are feed troughs, each attached to a measurement meter that divvies out exact amounts of grain. Below the sows' feet run long, thin holes for the sows to mash their feces and urine through. Water washes the sewage out through tubes into a pit as wide as a soccer field. Prairie birds float on the pit's nearly black surface, snapping at bugs.

Seaboard calls the row of barns the Dorman sow facility -- just one piece of an empire that's exploded across the plains of Oklahoma, Kansas, Texas, and Colorado. Ten years ago, the company didn't own a single hog. Today, Seaboard houses 167,000 sows yielding a combined litter of 3 million each year. Comprising one of the company's biggest facilities, the Dorman barns sit in Beaver County, Oklahoma, population 6,016 -- that's less than a quarter the number of sows. At Dorman, each sow gives birth to 21 piglets each year. The farm has also given birth to controversy. Over the past year and a half, it's been the focus of citizen ire, state fines, a lawsuit filed by the Sierra Club, and a criminal investigation launched by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA).

Inside, three stages of a pig's life unfold simultaneously. In one area, workers lead a harnessed boar down a narrow aisle between the sow pens. When a sow catches a whiff of the manly pig, she stiffens and locks into place. Another worker presses his hands into the small of her back, simulating sex. He slides a plastic catheter with a rubbery blue tip deep into her vagina until her cervix clamps down on it. The worker attaches a bag of semen to the tube and squeezes the milky goo into the swine's uterus. A few days later, each sow will undergo ultrasound to find out whether the pregnancy took hold.

When the sow reaches the end of her term, workers move her to a birthing area -- a sealed room with two dozen pens. Again the sow is constrained by bars that fan out several inches from her sides. She has just enough room to flop down and offer teats to her litter of piglets, all pink and scrambling around in a space the size of a horse tub. The room is immaculate -- stainless steel and white -- save for the globs of placenta and stillborn piglets swept into neat piles along the wall. By the end of the day they'll be collected, then dried and pulverized and fed to future generations of pigs.

From here, the pigs lead a 31-week life of multistage containment: the weaning room, where they nuzzle nipples day and night; the nursery, where they'll live in a 55-square-foot pen with 24 other hogs; the finishing barn, where they fatten to 270 pounds; and finally the slaughterhouse. The sows will keep giving birth for three years -- about seven litters -- until they're sold to a sausage company that covets their cheap, tough meat.

Trucks haul the matured hogs to Seaboard's massive pork processing plant on the outskirts of Guymon, Oklahoma. It's the newest in the business and the only one Seaboard owns. In addition to being a source of bacon, however, it's brought home division among the people of Guymon. Some of them say the plant has jolted the local economy, that it's made a few resourceful locals into millionaires. Others say the opposite has happened. Businesses have boarded up, per capita income has declined, and crime is higher than it ever was.

The pigs scamper off of trucks and into holding pens, where they're left to calm down from the long drive -- if a pig dies in distress, its meat will be shot through with bitter flavor. Once they've relaxed, they're herded ass to snout into a covered shoot and locked onto a conveyer. Each reacts differently when it reaches the end of the tunnel. One looks around calmly. Another screeches and scratches its feet against the stainless steel, trying to escape. Metal arms swing down and lock against its neck and forehead. In an instant, the pig's body stiffens with electric shock and it's dropped, unconscious but still alive, onto a conveyer. A worker, one of 2,200 in the plant, gores its neck, and out shoots a stream of blood as wide as a nickel. Another worker hooks a chain to a hind foot and hoists the twitching pig a dozen feet in the air so it can bleed to death. It's just one of 16,000 pigs to meet its death each day in Guymon -- more than 4 million every year. From a distance, each is now indistinguishable from the others -- hundreds of them spread 3 feet apart, moving along a far wall like bags of dry-cleaned clothes.