How hog farming has changed North Carolina
Thursday, August 20th, 2009While you are waiting to read our exposé on factory farming and swine flu (which should finish final editing in the next 24 hours) you can watch this video from the Pew Commission on Industrial Farm Animal Production.
As we hope to show in greater detail over coming weeks, the trend in agriculture toward large farms has changed our rural landscape and is affecting not only our national health, but the health of humans globally along with their environment.
According to the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA), 40 percent of people in rural areas lived on farms in 1950. Now USDA statistics reveal that less than 10 percent of the rural population lives on farms and that only 14 percent of the rural workforce is employed in agriculture.
Some rural areas thrive as they become home to commuting professionals, but some just sink deeper into isolation. This helps to explain why in 2003 14.2 percent of the population living in rural America were poor, while the poverty rate in metropolitan areas was 12.1 percent, a disparity that has been constant for several decades.
As for the farming trends themselves, in 1980, approximately 65,000 farmers in the state of Iowa raised hogs, with an average of 200 hogs residing on each farm. By 2002, the number of farms with hogs had fallen to about 10,000, but the average number of hogs per farm had risen to 1,400. Similar trends toward industry concentration have been in effect in North Carolina, which is the second largest pork producer in the U.S. As early as 1993, 13 percent of the producers in North Carolina were responsible for 95 percent of that state’s total swine production.
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