Swine flu, recession put U.S. hog industry in the red
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June 23, 2009 by fluoutbreak
By Bob Burgdorfer, Reuters
Summer is usually a profitable time for America’s hog producers but this year swine flu, recession and high feed prices have even the largest farmers operating deep in the red and some smaller ones on the brink of bankruptcy.
Before things get better, the weakest are expected to fail and even those that survive will need years to recover from the debts they have amassed during this lean time.
At farmer Eldon Gould’s spread west of Chicago, where he has been raising hogs for 40 years, 750 sows nurse their litters in individual stalls as the 67-year-old farmer tours the barns and inspects the baby pigs.
Once weaned, the pigs will be moved to another farm to be fattened into market hogs. But Gould says it’s unlikely the weak market will be faring any better by the time they are ready to be sold.
“It was a combination of the U.S. and global recession. People in the United States are buying less meat in general and I’m sure the same thing is going on globally,” said Gould, who usually produces about 15,000 pigs a year on his Maple Park farm about 50 miles west of Chicago.
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