The Great Debate

For the past year, I have been taking a class at the University of Illinois on bringing business into pork production.  In my last post, I talked about how farmers need to look at their business as a manufacturing process, although consumers may not agree.  Many farmers look at the role of uneducated consumers in the market and become terribly frustrated.  At my class I talked to two other pork producers who were incensed at the idea of having to convert their gestation stall barns into pen spaced barns.  Another farm in the class just put up a new 1,000 sow stalled barn.  When I heard these things, I immediately thought, have you guys looked at the newspaper, or turned the TV on in the last year?

McDonald's, Campbell's Soup, Burger King, and countless other businesses have pledged to use pork products that come from group or pen housing, instead of individual pen gestation.  The Humane Society is putting pressure on the  Wall Street Journal to influence Tyson packing plants to phase out the purchase of animals from farms with stall gestation.  Whether or not the science condemns or praises the individual pig housing is irrelevant, people have decided they believe the practice is wrong, and that it is important enough to fight for pen housing.  This doesn't mean that farmers should stop fighting to grow their animals the way they see fit, but it does mean that you can't fight it to the point that it clouds business decision making ability.

During dinner, two of my classmates and I were having a discussion about our group project, which will be on the differences in the types of sow housing.  The two men both saw the individual sow housing as the only way they were willing to do business.  The argument they stood by was that we as an industry can not just lay down and let the consumer walk all over us.  I on the other hand, see it entirely differently.  We can produce all the pigs we want any way we want to, but that doesn't guarantee someone will buy them. We have to cater our products to the consumer, because in the end that is where we gain our value.  As farmers we don't consider that we feed pigs certain diets and embrace certain genetics because that is what the market wants, however, when it comes to housing options we just can't deal with it.  Many of the producers in the class talk as if they have worked with the different housing options, labeling one as far superior to the other.  Coming from a farm with nontraditional housing practices, I see that you can be profitable in many different systems.  Most have not had the opportunity, they just hold a bias.

Any switch in the way we practice agriculture gives us the opportunity to innovate.  We shouldn't shy away from challenges, but learn to work through them.  Every step we take will have risks, and costs, but that doesn't mean its not worth taking.  While we need to fight for the right to choose how we produce the nation's food supply, we also need to look at how to make our production more transparent, so we do not have to keep fighting these types of battles over every operating decision. Winning in the sow housing battle isn't the goal, winning over consumers should be.