Word: hogs
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...irony that makes Gary Muller's financial troubles that much harder to bear. If the Iowa hog farmer were to hang out at a local supermarket, he might suspect that his business was thriving as never before. After all, there's no lack of customers buying pork chops or roasts for dinner; and in spite of the Asian economic woes that devastated most American farmers in 1998, pork exports keep on growing. But while Americans pay top dollar for their hams or BLTs, Muller and the rest of America's 115,000 hog farmers may as well give their animals...
...pigs, on the other hand, can't be killed fast enough--though 2 million a week are being butchered. And therein lies the problem. Hog farming, until recently the most profitable sector in agriculture, is stuck in the mud. A glut of live pigs on the market, exacerbated by a sudden drop in slaughterhouse capacity, has pushed the price of pigs down to levels not seen since the Depression. "It's a lethal mixture," says Al Tank, CEO of the National Pork Producers Council. Across the South and Midwest, farmers are losing thousands of dollars a day, drifting deeper into...
...help staff its hog-processing plant and farms, Seaboard has re-created the corporate model employed by the coal barons of the 1800s, whose workers lived in company-owned houses and shopped in company-owned stores...
...people never see this money," said Carla Smalts, a rancher who campaigned against corporate hog farming while at the same time waging an ultimately losing battle against cancer. "It comes off the top of their paycheck right to Seaboard," she told TIME in December 1997. "By the time they pay Seaboard their rent and the meals are taken off out at the plant--and most of them eat at least one or two meals out there--they don't have a whole lot left. There's no way these people are going to buy houses." Carla Smalts died in August...
...Argentina; a winery in Bulgaria; other agricultural and business interests in Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, Guatemala and Venezuela; electric-power-generating facilities in the Dominican Republic; shipping companies in Liberia; containerized cargo vessels running between Miami and Central and South America; and, of course, the processing plant and hog farms in Oklahoma, Kansas, Texas and Colorado, along with poultry-processing plants, feed mills, hatcheries and a network of 700 contract chicken growers in Alabama, Georgia, Kentucky and Tennessee...