Small-Scale Hog Farming

Acre for Acre: Heifer Helps Tobacco Growers Switch to Small-Scale Hog Farming

Warsaw, North Carolina — It may not be as pretty as a cornfield, but a wooded hog lot on Fred Dobson's North Carolina farm it looks just fine to him. Thanks to a program supported in part by Heifer International, this former tobacco farmer's animals command a premium in the pork market.

Dobson and his hogs are part of the Golden LEAF (Long-term Economic Advancement Foundation) Small Scale Hog Producers Project, a program supported by tobacco settlement money and Heifer International.

Download the Case Study for this project, produced by the North Carolina A&T School of Agriculture and Environmental Sciences in partnership with Heifer International.

As the market for tobacco shrinks, farmers like Dobson are scrambling to find profitable alternatives. One way: Replacing acres of tobacco with corn, soybeans and, now, hog pens. Started two years ago, the Small Scale Hog Producers Project was designed to help limited-resource tobacco farmers set up environmentally friendly, small-scale hog operations. Niman Ranch Pork Co., a specialty sausage company based in Iowa, has agreed to pay top prices for hogs raised according to its rigorous standards.

Unlike the massive factory farms endemic to eastern North Carolina, which crowd animals in tight spaces and produce enormous quantities of waste, these operations are low impact and hog friendly. Farmers keep their stock on uncleared (and otherwise unusable) land, where the trees offer shade, or move them from pen to pen in pastures that get fertilized with the manure. Raised this way, hogs are unfussy, resourceful tenants, happy with a little earth to roll in and root around in for grubs.

Size of Farms Soars
Mike Jones, Golden LEAF Program Coordinator, says small farms like Dobson’s were once the fabric of American agriculture, part of a network of local commerce that linked even the most rural farmers with resources and markets. But in today’s system small farmers get short shrift. After World War II, farming was rapidly mechanized, and farms, run by distant corporations, grew to enormous size.

“The industrialization of farming just sucked the jobs out of rural areas,” says Jones. Dobson, like the other farmers in the Golden LEAF program, was insulated from some of this because he grew tobacco — “’baccer”—a reliably top-dollar crop. But then demand for tobacco fell, and farmers struggled to fi nd adequate replacements, unable to gain a foothold among the corporate-owned farms that monopolized the food and grain markets.

“It’s hard for these farmers to get plugged in to the resources and markets they need,” Jones tells me as we drive to the farm of David Whitman, a Golden LEAF project participant who was recently named Golden LEAF Farmer of the Year. As coordinator, Jones spends much of his time acting as a resource for his farmers, many of whom have a limited education and have never raised hogs before. On his visits, Jones helps set up equipment, gathers data on each project’s hogs and provides a little gentle coaching.

A Lower-Risk Investment
Part of Jones’ goal on these visits is to determine how profitable, in comparison to tobacco, small-scale hog farming can be. While tobacco farming is the gold standard for per-acre income, it’s also labor intensive. As with any crop that requires a lot of attention, there is also a lot of risk, many more opportunities for the whole endeavor to swing off course.

Success for a hog farmer, when it comes, is not as dramatic as the windfall from a bumper crop of tobacco, but it is success all the same. Sows farrow — produce piglets — twice a year, up to 15 or 16 in a litter, and income from hogs is predicated on how quickly farmers can fill out their hogs and get them to market — in five months, if hogs are fed a lot of high-quality feed, longer if they’re fed less. How quickly hogs turn feed into pounds is called the conversion ratio, and Jones spends a lot of time with his farmers explaining how to maximize it. It can be an uphill battle—the farmers aren’t natural risk-takers, and have no money to experiment with; most are reluctant to pour a lot of expensive feed into their stock without some proof that it works.

In some cases, the income from the hogs has given the farmers the confidence to do more. Daniel Pearsall, who in addition to running his farm worked full time as a heavy-equipment operator for 36 years, last year scraped together the money to open a small restaurant on his land in a building he built by hand. Four days a week, the Davis and Pearsall Family Restaurant (Davis is his wife’s family name) serves pork, of course, and yellow cake Pearsall bakes himself, from scratch. His wife, his children and his grandchildren help in the kitchen. “People come from 25, 30 miles away,” he tells me. “We don’t need no sign.”

One of the Golden LEAF program’s most important benefi ts may be that it provides these farmers, whose paths might not otherwise cross, with a reason to organize. Several of the farmers have begun taking a computer class together in the evenings, and Dobson, Whitman, Cole and others in the program have formed a cooperative of area farmers. Feed and equipment are cheaper when bought in bulk, and farmers can lend each other labor and time. On a recent weeknight “about 30 heads,” by Pearsall’s estimate, met at the Davis and Pearsall Family Restaurant to talk about potential joint ventures.

A Substantial Boost
Jones’ preliminary calculations conclude that while hogs may not be as lucrative as tobacco, they can provide a substantial boost for a low-income farmer, and require far less outlay of time and other resources. The farmers, for their part, seem open to persuasion, and though they get nostalgic for tobacco’s golden age, it is something they are not entirely sorry to see go.

“We had to crop it and tote it,” remembers Johnnie Frank Williams, another of the program’s farmers, when we stop at his farm. “The juice would get all in your face and on your hands and just poison you. The money — well, those were the times,” he admits, waving a hand at his acreage, now a patchwork of corn and soybeans. “Nothing like this here now.”

His brother, standing next to him, shakes his head in disagreement. He says softly, “If I had it to do over again, I wouldn’t mess with no tobacco.”

This article, in its entirety, was originally featured in the September/October 2004 issue of World Ark, Heifer's bimonthly magazine.