Do you know what happened to family hog farms starting in the 80s? If you don’t, you should read up on it so you’ll know what they plan for farmers nationwide… - ThreadSky

piperformissouri.bsky.social • 6 days ago

Do you know what happened to family hog farms starting in the 80s?

If you don’t, you should read up on it so you’ll know what they plan for farmers nationwide…

Comments

marianneneal.bsky.social•6 days ago

Yeah, they were put out of business!

texasippihippie.bsky.social•6 days ago

Yes ma’am and it is definitely happening here in cattle country too.

timherrin.bsky.social•6 days ago

Do you know what industrial hog farms do to the environment?

If you don't, you should read up on it so you know what they're planning for our environment.

againstfacists.bsky.social•6 days ago

You reallybreally shpuld
Love, #Iowa

Home of cancer water

clintrdavis.bsky.social•6 days ago

The banks are coming to snatch up farms when they foreclose due to Trump’s policies, and then they’re going to sell them to mega corporations.

makemineblue.bsky.social•6 days ago

Just read it for the first time. Terrible for small farms, environmental, social impacts and waste management issues.
Mega wealthy wins the moment.

rickvandeven.bsky.social•6 days ago

My family lived through it.

mark81952.bsky.social•6 days ago

That’s simply part of their plan. They intend to destroy everything at our expense and rob every last cent we have. They are something out of a bad sci-fi movie and if they get their way it will end bad for us and the world! That’s why it’s time to bring it to the streets and them! Fuck them royaly

fessorfrink.bsky.social•6 days ago

I'm not an expert but I remember Reagan ruined agriculture by causing all the farm bankruptcies and John Mellencamp was one of the few who spoke out about it (Willie Nelson, too).

shadyskoomadealer.bsky.social•6 days ago

It's always fucking Reagan.

bluethedonk.bsky.social•6 days ago

Agreed. And followed.

sandeedees.bsky.social•6 days ago

Yep. Began this shitshow.

cantfixstupid2.bsky.social•6 days ago

I remember it well. Knew of a farmer through my grandfather that killed himself when he lost the family farm. I'm willing to bet he wasn't the only one.

againstfacists.bsky.social•6 days ago

I am so sorry, that is tragic.

againstfacists.bsky.social•6 days ago

Enough that I did a project on it for grad school.

stevemccroskey80.bsky.social•6 days ago

Yep. Had a guy nearby that killed the president of the bank, his wife, a neighbor and himself. The neighbor was the dad of a friend of mine in school.

padremiguel.bsky.social•6 days ago

Suicide was a farmer epidemic.

selenawrites.bsky.social•6 days ago

One site of many with info on this …

lawrencegraham.bsky.social•6 days ago

Thanks for posting. Our world would have been far better off without Ronald Reagan and Milton Friedman. If I had to choose between the two, Friedman was worse for the country than Reagan.

selenawrites.bsky.social•6 days ago

You're welcome. 👍🙂

deliver23.bsky.social•6 days ago

They haven’t existed in decades. 🤬

sjseidel.bsky.social•6 days ago

Read Wastelands to understand hog farming. It’s focus is on nuisance lawsuits in NC, it but provides a fascinating look at hog farming at scale.

lunalore.bsky.social•6 days ago

I'm not familiar with this, can you give us some context? When I tried googling "family hog farms 1980s" I just got a bunch of articles about FarmAid.

piperformissouri.bsky.social•6 days ago

Factory farms moved in and caused smaller family operations to fold. Now, almost every pork product you eat is grown on a factory farm.

againstfacists.bsky.social•6 days ago

Chickens too

tacosalazar.bsky.social•6 days ago

What if the farmers all got together and just killed the owners of the big pork? Would that solve the problem?

padremiguel.bsky.social•6 days ago

And is dry and tasteless.

sandeedees.bsky.social•6 days ago

Why I stopped eating pork.

jtcool.bsky.social•6 days ago

Ain’t no more independent hog farms, an no chicken farms neither. Only factory farms 😢

lt2797.bsky.social•6 days ago

Here's a good article about it from 2023 https://missouriindependent.com/2023/09/05/history-of-the-hog-industry-shows-how-to-save-the-cattle-industry/

lunalore.bsky.social•6 days ago

Thanks!

padremiguel.bsky.social•6 days ago

🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣
John Mellencamp redux

hqreality.bsky.social•6 days ago

Yes and I'll never forget it. I had relatives that were ruined by what happened in the '80s. Everyone lost their farms.

revbrown.bsky.social•6 days ago

Same thing with poultry farms, which is why bird flu is hitting us harder than other countries.

padremiguel.bsky.social•6 days ago

“Efficiencies of scale” have downsides.

gaigreat.bsky.social•6 days ago

I do and i don't have time left to remember...I'm just so sad I'm too old to fight against this tyrant .

clemsongamecock.bsky.social•6 days ago

We need new business models that allow cooperatives — of normal people — to help family farms. I have stopped buying meat from grocery stores and go to our local producers.

seppy72.bsky.social•6 days ago

My grandparents had pigs when I was super young. We bottle-fed a runt named Arnold. Then they didn't have any pigs. I bet this is why.

playasharon.bsky.social•6 days ago

And then check with Eastern NC farmers about the horrible damage the urine/feces lagoons are doing to the land that soaks it in. Weird cancers being kept quiet.....

latiathia.bsky.social•5 days ago

I heard about this. Nothing is insurmountable, we can farm and keep our land clean. Unrestrained and unrestricted capitalism is toxic.

unicorn64.bsky.social•6 days ago

Watch this. The takeover of our food and water resources. Making the rich richer, foreign entities richer and in control and Americans poorer and hungrier.

okkthenh03.bsky.social•6 days ago

Thank you so much for posting this! I made a post about The Grab last month. It puts so much of what is happening now, in perspective. It provides a framework for who is involved in the global resource & power grab. I wish they would have shown exactly how that map of Africa was to be divided.

latedaysun.bsky.social•6 days ago

If I am not mistaken, last I recall China owned some of our largest pig farms now. They bought the largest, Smithfield in 2013.

debteachky.bsky.social•6 days ago

Happened to dairy farmers in Kentucky too.

marvstanly.bsky.social•6 days ago

And in upstate NY too

am-mccarthy.bsky.social•6 days ago

Republicans like to talk about "family farms," but they are interested in helping agricultural monoliths.

plugrocks.bsky.social•6 days ago

Big business went whole hog and prospers mightily of the backs of immigrant workers.

madgemlaments.bsky.social•6 days ago

Dairy in the 90s. Wisconsin bled milk.

They want the family farms. All of them.

toastdnflipflops.bsky.social•6 days ago

Wendell Berry's The Unsettling of America is a good read on the onset of Big Ag and it's effects.

dangfine.bsky.social•6 days ago

All I know about hog farms is it’s a good place to hide bodies….

piperformissouri.bsky.social•6 days ago

You don’t have to hide them. The hogs will eat them.

criticalskills1.bsky.social•6 days ago

One-stop murder and body disposal. Very convenient.

mantreaus.bsky.social•6 days ago

Willie and Farm Aid. It seems no one listens, even those that it will happen to as it repeats. History is boring they say, hell instead of living, they have sat and watched reality TV for decades.

v-ron.bsky.social•6 days ago

Like this

https://youtu.be/Fg3HcSyfQq8?feature=shared

texasippihippie.bsky.social•6 days ago

I live near a Tyson plant my mother was injured and permanently disabled working in one. They human traffic undocumented workers and have for literal decades. I have watched them bus in Hispanics since I was in high school. No one else will or physically can work those jobs.

lunalore.bsky.social•6 days ago

Ah, thank you!

raxileigh.swifties.social•6 days ago

So infuriating! Great coverage.

chris10b.bsky.social•6 days ago

That was excellent. Thank you for sharing! 🐽

tophburns.bsky.social•6 days ago

I’m from the Midwest, saw this happen to past generations in MN, SD and Iowa. Now people working 3 part time jobs w/o benefits. Yet they consistently vote republican and blame DEI for their suffering. DEI wasn’t even a term back when their family lost the farm. It’s terrible but also 🤦‍♂️

on-tannhausergate.bsky.social•6 days ago

At least they’re getting what they voted for, always voting their shitty fucking bigotry. I hope they get wrecked.

rationalsapien.bsky.social•6 days ago

Get out of here with your "facts" . . . we know what's real when Trump says it.

cynthiakrueger.bsky.social•6 days ago

We raised thousands of hogs in the 1970s-1998, but lost so much money at the end I was paying Smithfield Foods/Tyson/Hormel $20 in addition to every pig I literally gave to them. No more hogs on our farm. Once the multinational companies controlled the entire pork industry we were forced out.

blueraven68.bsky.social•6 days ago

Who owns Smithfield now? Foreign interests, IIRC
How many states has fish and water wildlife (and people) killed by listeria from contaminated runoff by factory farms ?
This is bad.
No inspectors to test the food supply, no regulations for food safety,no agency to warn us about poison food.

regv.bsky.social•6 days ago

🎯🎯🎯

beth-sue.bsky.social•6 days ago

Farmers established this country!

kalidream.bsky.social•6 days ago

Give me a staring point and I will be looking it up.

againstfacists.bsky.social•6 days ago

See above

bookscoffeedogs.bsky.social•6 days ago

I remember the suicides.

nellieblue.bsky.social•6 days ago

I understand it’s not the point, but factory farming needs to be stopped. It destroys the environment and our health. The animal abuse is horrific. Boycott animal abuse! Farms need to be saved and transformed into healthy sustainable businesses.
https://thetransfarmationproject.org/other-farmers/jerry-steve-carroll/

bubs1.bsky.social•6 days ago

Fuck them all, buy up the shambles, and have mega-corp farms all over. No one owns anything, just a country full of indentured servants.

regv.bsky.social•6 days ago

That’s the Stalin manifesto and Putin and Trump are following it off the cliff!

tippedbeaker.bsky.social•6 days ago

Dad turned over to goats.

regv.bsky.social•6 days ago

It’s called vertical integration and they did it to poultry too.
Beef farmers and ranchers are terrified of it coming to them next.

againstfacists.bsky.social•6 days ago

It's already here for beef too

regv.bsky.social•6 days ago

Not in the same way pork and poultry are vertically integrated.
The chicken farm is owned by the company, the farmer is a renter who has to buy all his starter chickens and all his feed and supplies from the company and then he has to sell his product through that company.
Cattle aren’t there yet.

againstfacists.bsky.social•6 days ago

https://smallbusiness.chron.com/vertical-integration-beef-industry-14614.html

Except packing

regv.bsky.social•6 days ago

Yes, the meat packing industry has taken control of everything from the feedlot to the slaughterhouse to the shipper to the grocery store shelf.

pixiethenafopup.bsky.social•6 days ago

Our county made a big push to get some independent meat processors instead of the monopoly. It worked, took some incentives, but doable.

wnjeffers.bsky.social•6 days ago

Sounds a lot like share-cropping.

regv.bsky.social•6 days ago

Exactly, it’s the old system of tenant farm sharecroppers that made the landlords butt loads of money while the farmer was basically an indentured servant.

wnjeffers.bsky.social•6 days ago

Debt peonage. It was also used here in Appalachia to keep mine workers under the thumb of the owners. Same game; different playing field. Mine owners had the advantage of hiring immigrants off the boat in NYC, etc., then bringing them to a remote place where they did not speak the language.

piperformissouri.bsky.social•6 days ago

I think they are right to be concerned.

latiathia.bsky.social•5 days ago

How do we unite them?

lunalore.bsky.social•6 days ago

"Vertical integration" is a funny way to say "corrupt AF monopoly" 😩

el-intrepido.bsky.social•5 days ago

More than ANYONE; farmers are F U C K E D
Every single thing that tRump “promised” affects them DIRECTLY

AND YET - “the #Land, it #votes #RED”
#ENJOY #Agriculture!

meltedplasticman.bsky.social•6 days ago

Reagan was a corporate whore. Don’t get me wrong. I love ladies of the evening just not the corporate.
Willie Nelson, Neil Young and John Mellencamp organized the first Farm Aid concert in 1985 to raise awareness about the loss of family farms and to raise funds to keep farm families on the land.

sass-n-pants.bsky.social•6 days ago

My ex husband’s family were those farmers. They voted for Trump again. I want to repeat EX, again.

jsnyder000.bsky.social•6 days ago

My father in law was a stock farmer. I can still hear the sound of hog feeder lids clanking shut in the evening.

I remember him saying the two biggest lies politicians tell are "I'm for the family farm" and "I'm for the environment". If they took care of the first one, they'd help the other.

criticalskills1.bsky.social•6 days ago

That sound woke me up more mornings than I can count.

prairiewave.bsky.social•6 days ago

Today Wheat down 15 cents and soybeans down 33 cents at our local Coop. Paying fertilizer and seed bills will be anxiety ridden.

duwamishgirl.bsky.social•6 days ago

My
Mom always said, Reagan was a lousy actor and an even worse president

rainbowsnglitter.bsky.social•6 days ago

Oh can we please do dairy farms too!!!

agperiurban.bsky.social•6 days ago

Bless you Jess Piper.

Signed: Tasmania, Australia.

#agsky #auspol

goaskalis.bsky.social•6 days ago

Whatever they are doing, it's a heist of some sort

goaskalis.bsky.social•6 days ago

Jack up property taxes, fertilizer is up due to tariffs, buy up all the land at bargain barrel prices. Archer Daniels Midland is probably involved

melaniej49.bsky.social•6 days ago

Nationwide, farmers still support Trump. Knowing he will bail them out again while they get the hate they love against marginal minority groups. Prayers and thoughts.

againstfacists.bsky.social•6 days ago

Many, not all. As with other professions

criticalskills1.bsky.social•6 days ago

There’s a tiny pork operator down the road from me here in NH. 10 acres. Processed in VT because no one here will do it. Reminds me of how I grew up.

lforte26.bsky.social•6 days ago

Please post a book, article or someplace where we can find this information. I so appreciate you providing a perspective from rural areas I would so much rather my food came from a small family farm and more of us city folks need this info…

jorek1original.bsky.social•5 days ago

Yes, a book.🤔

newblue25.bsky.social•6 days ago

There have been serious problems in NC with Smithfield.

jrkovach9.bsky.social•6 days ago

One of the reasons I went vegan.

ash1987.bsky.social•6 days ago

Lived it. Saw it. CAFOs took over, wages dropped, farms folded/consolidated. Seems the trend for small farms today with this tariff stuff and loss of markets.

latiathia.bsky.social•5 days ago

And when wages drop they exploit immigrants.

vzctxdems.bsky.social•6 days ago

For those interested to rural county census data.

https://www.nass.usda.gov/Publications/AgCensus/2022/

juliancrossonhill.bsky.social•6 days ago

I remember watching Food, Inc. and learning about how the chicken farmers were basically serfs for the corporations.

grammalizard.bsky.social•6 days ago

My small Iowa hometown began its decline under Reagan. Now, 40 years later, it's a shell of what it was. In the 1970s it was booming. Now, not so much.

rosegardenerwi.bsky.social•6 days ago

💯 Name your small IA hometown and it's the same story. Truthfully Clinton and NAFTA didn't help. It wasn't just farmers who got slaughtered. In community after community manufacturers picked up & left.

My folks raised 6 kids in an IA community. ALL of us had to leave to get jobs in larger cities.🤷🏻‍♀️

rosegardenerwi.bsky.social•6 days ago

Can you blame folks for their anger and pain after multiple generations of children leave small communities? Effectively leaving older folks to fend for themselves.

jillrenee.bsky.social•6 days ago

Many, many small Midwest towns suffered the same fate. The only ones somewhat bouncing back are the ones within 45 minutes or so of a city - essentially becoming a less expensive suburb.

melindalove.bsky.social•6 days ago

Vertical integration = take it up the a$$

dolorosasantos.bsky.social•6 days ago

JD has a stake in an app which sells American farms to foreign buyers.

The great looting and sell off of America has begun.

foxford.bsky.social•6 days ago

Yes. It’s called Acre Trader

montanahuntress.bsky.social•6 days ago

We are so screwed here

lynnebaybee.bsky.social•6 days ago

I went to a few farm sales n bought a few antiques. Eastern Iowa.

pr3vgen.bsky.social•6 days ago

Keep yelling it out!!!!!! Love and Respect!

twixicat.bsky.social•6 days ago

I know there was talk, maybe still is, that some of Iowa's 99 counties should consolidate as family farms have been depopulated and replaced by confinement operations.

(Turning your farm into a confinement operations is a losing proposition for the farmer).

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