was conventional: he stuffed swine with corn in his own open-air feedlot.
Then calamity led to innovation. An outbreak of hog cholera in forced
Murphy to close his operation.officials ordered the destruction of
infected animals and quarantined others that may have been exposed. Un-
willing to wait out the quarantine, Murphy figured out a way to raise hogs on
others’ property, beyond the quarantine. He contracted with small farmers
to raise his pigs. Murphy supplied fencing, and the contract farmers pro-
vided the labor, for which he paid one dollar for the raising of each animal.
Murphy collected the grown hogs and marketed them.
Shortly he created Murphy Family Farms, which led the national trend
toward confinement and an ever-larger scale in production. By the mid-
s Murphy Farms was the biggest pork producer in the country, mean-
ing it owned more than a quarter-million sows and million pigs in pro-
gressive stages from farrow to what is morbidly called finish. By this time
Murphy himself had served in the state senate (with a particular interest
in environmental regulations) and become known as ‘‘Boss Hog.’’ In
he was featured inForbesmagazine as ‘‘The Ray Kroc of Pigsties.’’^25 Stun-
ning business success by an individual or corporation, however, has conse-
quences.
By the s, Murphy Family Farms, Smithfield Foods, the Cargill agri-
conglomerate’s Swine Products Department, and a few others had made
contracting and confinement virtually theonlyway to be in the pork market.
(In Jane Smiley’s Pulitzer Prize–winning novel,A Thousand Acres,poor
Ty, the ambitious son-in-law of the Iowa patriarch, is ruined in his attempt
to become a confinement operator by himself.) Bankers and agricultural
economists colluded to discourage individuals from entering the business
on a small scale. Persisting family-size hog farmers are driven out of the
market by conglomerates’ low pricing. A few Carolinians and southeastern
Virginians I happen to have heard of—all of them now old—raise a few pigs
for their own and their friends’ delectation. They think hams and barbeque
made from hogs that have trod the earth and seen the sun taste better. One
must doubt, however, that their conviction and tradition will be carried on.
Another consequence is the revolution in pigs’ own life circumstances.
Their fate, of course, has become that of chickens, except it is arguably a
more brutal one, given that swine are mammals with sizable brains and
considerable intelligence. Sows, whose purpose is to drop litters as effi-
ciently as possible, are confined (within confinement buildings) so tightly
they cannot turn or bow to nuzzle and manage their own offspring. (This