1. Hog farms were mostly family farms until the early 1990s. Before then, pork was an important value-added business for farmers. If you have some corn or even table scraps, you can feed it to pigs, and then sell the pigs. But in the 1990's, the pork industry began to restructure to become more similar to the very consolidated chicken industry.
The number of hog farms fell by 70% from 1992 and 2004, whereas the hog inventory remained stable. The average hog operation grew from 945 head in 1992 to 2589 head in 1998 to 4646 in 2004. The share of the hog inventory on operations with 2000 or more head increased from less than 30 percent to nearly 80 percent. Operations with 5000 or more head held more than 50 percent of the hog inventory in 2004. - USDA report "The Changing Economics of U.S. Hog Production," December 2007
Furthermore, the new factory hog farms are concentrated in a few regions. North Carolina, Iowa, and now increasingly western states (OK, CO, TX, and UT) are where they tend to be concentrated the most. (Factory Farm Map) Part of what allowed for the increase in factory farms was commodity policy in the farm bill, particularly the 1996 farm bill, which dramatically dropped the prices of corn/soy, thus reducing feed costs to factory farms and giving them an advantage over a diversified family farm that grows its own grain. Here's a pulitzer prize winning series on the NC hog industry:
2. NAFTA: In the case of Mexico, which saw a similar change in its hog farms over the same period, NAFTA allowed increased foreign investment (i.e. large U.S. companies buying up Mexican hog farms) and also allowed in the cheap U.S. grain that undercuts Mexican farmers.
3. Filthy conditions: I like this blog post that calls out the filthy conditions of factory farms as prime breeding grounds for disease. Hogs in factory farms are more susceptible to sharing germs just like people in the Middle Ages who lived in close quarters with poor sanitation. Total no brainer there.
4. MRSA: Here's the Nicholas Kristof piece on it. Long story short is that the vast majority of antibiotics in the U.S. are given to animals who aren't even sick. That includes drugs in the same drug classes as human drugs, which means that once a bug develops resistance to an antibiotic in animals, it can easily evolve resistance to other drugs in the same drug class. Its not much of a surprise that MRSA is seen in very high numbers in both pigs and workers on factory hog farms. Here's a good statement by Louise Slaughter when she introduced her bill to ban nontherapeutic use of 7 classes of antibiotics in livestock. The thing to note here about the MRSA is that even if swine flu wasn't from a factory hog farm, that doesn't mean they aren't a disease problem for humans.
5. Smithfield and Swine Flu Link: That story came from Tom Philpott of Grist. He cites the Mexican newspaper La Marcha, which in an April 15th article names a likely suspect in the hog farms run by Granjas Carroll, a subsidiary of Smithfield, the largest pork processor in the world and the subject of the 2006 Rolling Stone article Boss Hog (which points to Smithfield, among other things, as one of the worst polluters on the globe.) Smithfield recently merged with JBS Swift, making them also the largest beef packer in the U.S.
6. Swine Flu and Non-Mexican Factory Farms: I don't think that swine flu is a reason to kill a country's entire hog population (as Egypt is doing, tragically), nor is it a reason to avoid eating pork. It's being spread human to human. However, that doesn't make factory hog farms and factory farms in general OK. The FAO report Livestock's Long Shadow says that the livestock sector (globally) is responsible for 18% of all greenhouse gas emissions, a higher share than transport. Furthermore, a recent study found that frequent red meat consumption (including pork) increases one's chances of dying in the next 10 years.
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