merry memes

deadman

OutdoorsSmoke_21191

Great tattoos….

Vision

....yup you guessed who.

Itsfine

MrShrek

peter4jc

OutdoorsSmoke_21191

OutdoorsSmoke_21191

OutdoorsSmoke_21191

CharlieHeis

Yakster

OutdoorsSmoke_21191

@Yakster said:

Those don’t look circumcised

Vision

@OutdoorsSmoke_21191 said:

@Yakster said:

Those don’t look circumcised

Well..... you are the expert......

OutdoorsSmoke_21191

@Vision said:

@OutdoorsSmoke_21191 said:

@Yakster said:

Those don’t look circumcised

Well..... you are the expert......

🍆 whisperer

MrShrek

🩹

CommanderDuke_1

OutdoorsSmoke_21191

OutdoorsSmoke_21191

OutdoorsSmoke_21191

peter4jc

Yakster

Central Hogifornia.

ShawnOL

I can't believe how many there are in New England.

Bob_Luken

I have not properly vetted this article, but it sounds about right.
https://foodprint.org/reports/the-foodprint-of-pork/

In the early 1990s, 87 percent of hogs were sold on the open market, and the top four pork packing companies controlled 46 percent of the market. Huge change swept the industry in the late 1990s. By 2001, only 17 percent of hogs were sold on the open market, leaving even fewer options for small-scale hog farmers to sell their animals. It has only gotten worse: in 2018, only two percent of hogs were sold on the open market. For the other 98%, farmers are on contract with big pork companies and get paid for raising animals according to the company’s strict guidelines.

The pork industry around this time was squeezed by the skyrocketing popularity of chicken, which had exploded, once pioneers like Tyson Foods bought up all parts of the supply chain, from feed companies to slaughterhouses, in a process called vertical integration. Chicken was suddenly cheap to produce and cheap to buy at stores, where it cut into sales of pork. To catch up, the pork industry (led by the Smithfield), imitated Big Chicken’s business model, vertically integrating its supply chain, putting hogs indoors in massive barns, and contracting with farmers to raise them.

So, it is no wonder that independent hog farmers have gone out of business by the hundreds of thousands. Since 1987, the number of hog farms has dropped nearly 75 percent, from 243,000 to 66,000 in 2017. Meanwhile, the number of hogs has steadily increased, from 52 million in 1987 to 72 million in 2017. Today, 61 percent of hog slaughter is controlled by just three companies: Smithfield, Tyson Foods and JBS USA.

In the pork industry, as in many others, these firms got to the top not by being the most efficient, but by simply buying out their competition. For instance, Smithfield, founded in 1936 in Virginia, bought Circle Four Farms in 1997; Carroll’s Foods, the country’s fourth-largest hog producer, in 1999; Murphy-Brown, the largest, in 2000; and Farmland Foods, the sixth largest, in 2003, before Smithfield itself was purchased in 2013 by Chinese-based Shuanghui International, now called WH Group. At the time of the buyout, Smithfield owned not only all of the producers it had been buying up, but also North Carolina’s two largest pork processing plants. With each new asset, Smithfield controlled a larger share of the market, making it even easier to make the next purchase. Tyson and JBS have grown in the same manner, until much of the global meat industry is controlled by these three corporations.

Amos_Umwhat

^^^Yep!^^^.

Around here, many local families used to raise pigs, one family I know of had 250,000 at one time. All gone out of business now. Hog barns are all shut down.

Bob_Luken

@Amos_Umwhat said:
^^^Yep!^^^.

Around here, many local families used to raise pigs, one family I know of had 250,000 at one time. All gone out of business now. Hog barns are all shut down.

Yep, that's the only kind of hog barns I ever see, empty ones.

peter4jc

Took me a minute...

peter4jc

@IndustMech should like this one.

MrShrek

MrShrek

MrShrek