About half way up a lonely highway between this town in the far northwest corner of the Texas Panhandle and the New Mexico state line, a gigantic city that will hold 1 million residents is taking shape.

The residents are pigs, and they live in metal buildings spaced far apart to prevent disease. The high-tech city has automated feeding, an elaborate sanitation system to carry away manure, disinfection checkpoints, health-care services, and computerized monitoring.A similarly huge hog farm is planned for the high desert region of southwest Utah. It will rival in size this 53,000-acre farm, which may be the largest in the United States at a single location, when Missouri-based Premium Standard Farms completes a $200 million expansion 18 months from now.

The Utah farm, located in Milford, Beaver County, has the potential to be larger. Four corporations - Carroll's Foods Inc., Murphy Farms, Prestage Farms Inc. and Smithfield Foods Inc. - have formed the pig farm cooperative that will house nearly 119,000 sows within the next five years. The sows are expected to produce up to 2 million pigs a year, with sales of more than $335 million annually.

Lately, it hasn't been unusual for such farms to sprout in locations far from Iowa, still the nation's No. 1 hog state. The High Plains has become a magnet for massive hog farms during the past two years, mainly because it is high, dry and thinly populated.

Giant hog farms are sprouting in the Oklahoma Panhandle around Guymon, about 75 miles up the road from Dalhart, and in the Greeley area of northern Colorado. The companies building them are pouring an estimated $850 million into pork.

The Seaboard Corp., better known for transportation, plans to invest $500 million in the hog business around Guymon, including a $55 million slaughter plant, which has been under construction since July 1.

A Spanish company named Vall, the largest swine raiser in Europe, plans to invest $100 million during the next three years on a hog farm near Texhoma, on the highway between Dalhart and Guymon on the Oklahoma side of the state line.

Until now, this almost treeless expanse of prairie grass has been known as cattle country, going all the way back to the 1880s when the XIT Ranch had 3 million acres under fence. The XIT is gone. Now the Dalhart pig farm sits on a portion of that land.

The newly arrived hog industry isn't as noticeable from the ground as it is from the air, said Roy Ehly, executive director of the chamber of commerce in Guymon. "You would be amazed. You can see those barns all over," he said, "and it is just starting."

The barns are the signs of industrialization of the hog business, which, experts say, bears some similarities to changes in the chicken business 30 or 40 years ago.

There are good and bad sides to the transformation. The good side is better pork for consumers.

"What they bring to the table is a higher quality and more consistent product - fat, color, texture, marbling, size of the cuts," said Steve Meyer in Des Moines, Iowa, economist for the National Pork Producers Council.

But smaller farmers who have been hit hard by falling hog prices say the corporate pig farms are bad news. Clay Pederson, of the National Farmers Union in Denver, said they tend to displace small, independent producers.

"Look at broiler production," he said. "There are not a handful of independents left."

Some enterprising people tried raising pigs in sizeable herds during the late 1950s but failed, because they didn't have the vaccines, the antibiotics or the management skills. "They just couldn't handle it. Five hundred to 1,000 sows, and disease just wiped them out," said University of Missouri economist Glenn Grimes, an expert on the swine business.

Now, people know how to break the cycle of disease, and the farm near Dalhart shows the extremes that can be employed.

All new breeding pigs coming onto the farm are quarantined for 30 days and given blood tests. Areas for breeding, farrowing (giving birth), and fattening are isolated about one-half mile apart. When one batch of pigs moves out, the building is disinfected before another batch moves in.

Employees must take showers before they enter the hog houses. This is to protect the pigs from the people. The workers could be carrying salmonella or the feared pseudorabies, also known as mad itch.

Visitors are not welcome. A big white sign on the private road warns: "Secured area. Only authorized persons beyond this point."

View Comments

All vehicles entering the premises, even tractors, must drive through a tall building resembling a car wash, where they are sprayed with disinfectant solution.

With good health and all the feed they can gobble, pigs grow from birth to the slaughter weight of around 245 pounds in the brief span of 5 1/2 months.

The sows are bred artificially, with sperm from boars boasting high-powered genetics. Every three months, Premium Standard purchases a small number of what it terms "seed stock" females from a specialized business in Kentucky called the Pig Improvement Co.

In a break from the old days, these animals are not even a breed. They represent genetic lines, "like hybrid corn," said Harold Meyers, the farm's general manager of operations.

Join the Conversation
Looking for comments?
Find comments in their new home! Click the buttons at the top or within the article to view them — or use the button below for quick access.