If you’re a hog in East Moline you’d be well advised to make a run for it! Pork processing there is big business. Actually, if you find your porcine self in East Moline, it’s too late. The trail from holding pen to shrink-wrapped bacon is a narrow one, well bounded by fences, a trail from which there is no escape if you’re a hog.
In the old days your hog self would have had at least the illusion of freedom. Life in the pig-pen was a little filthy but nonetheless pleasant–a life with bright sunny days, plenty of garbage to chow down on, the company of other hogs, but not a lot of squealing and crowding. Today the factory farm has pretty much replaced the family farm and that sweet hog heaven illusion of a good life is gone.
Intensive piggeries are the state of the art in pork production. Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations (CAFOs), criticized by environmentalists and humanitarians alike, have come to dominate meat production in the US. They operate at the intersection of big business and agriculture, and they have enormous political influence. CAFOs produce hogs for slaughter at plants like the one Triumph Foods has planned for East Moline since 2005.
In the planning stages five years ago, the company promised to pump millions of dollars into the community, including the payroll for about 1,000 new jobs. Yet until now, the 135 acre slaughterhouse site has remained undeveloped. Now, with Secretary of Agriculture Vilsack in their corner and fueled by $150 million in Federal funds, the industrial food operation seems poised again to take off. The employment projection has tripled. Now 3,000 new jobs new jobs are promised.
Triumph Foods, a slaughterhouse operator that kills five and a half MILLION hogs annually in St. Joseph, Missouri, wants to slaughter another 8,000 hogs a day in East Moline. The slaughterhouse will attract CAFOs like manure attracts flies. Local activists suggest that raising a big stink now may help avert a terrible and persistent stench in the near future.
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Relevant links…
- The Inside Dope (a local news blog serving Northwest Illinois on and off since 2005)
- Huffington Post (article by president of the Humane Society of the United States, a man not above making the obvious play on “pork barrel politics”)
- Prairie Farmer, 2006 story on Triumph Foods quad cities plans
- Quad-City Times, a May, 2010 follow-up story on the Triumph Foods plan
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