WEST BRANCH, Iowa (AP)--Life for Ray Slachs hogs is different than for other hogs.

They live in buildings that, from the outside, look like any other hog barns. But inside, gates are open and hogs roam freely from one end to the other.

They eat at a central food court, rather than being served a feed ration delivered to points throughout the building.

Slach, 52, raises special Hog Works hogs that produce redder, more marbled meat. They are raised for Cargill and are not typically consumed by Americans.

Slach changed his production methods when he began working with Hog Works in 1996. He has adopted some innovations that allow him to raise happier hogs and improve his life as well. Slach had been working hard at running a 1,400-sow, farrow-to-finish operation that wasn't making money.

"We went backward pretty fast. We were using old facilities. I had pigs everywhere, scattered everywhere, from Monticello to Muscatine to Tiffin to Washington," Slach said.

He had contracted 12 farmers to help raise his hogs and had eight employees.

"I had the crops on top of that. It was pretty hectic," he said. "I couldn't keep control of the profits and loss and PRRS (a reproductive disease) was taking a toll."

In 1996, Slach needed to buy some pigs and "the Cargill guys said, 'Try these,"' Slach said. "Life began after Hog Works. You know how people say life begins when the children leave home? For me, life began with Hog Works."

Now he raises 24,000 hogs a year in Iowa and 8,000 hogs in Illinois and has only two employees.

The pigs he bought through Hog Works for the first few years were lean, heavily muscled pigs.

Two years ago, Hog Works switched to DeKalb genetics to produce the redder, more marbled meat favored by the Japanese. The switch provided an opportunity for Slach and other Hog Works producers to visit pork processors in Japan on a tour coordinated by Cargill.

"It was to show them that we wanted to give them what they want. It was interesting to see how they do their work. I think we have a better way of humanely killing the hogs," Slach said.

When his hogs are ready to go to the packing plant, Slach loads hogs from his buildings onto a truck without using hot shockers. At the Excel plant in Ottumwa, the hogs are gassed to sleep before they are butchered.

The calmer the hogs are before slaughter, the better the quality of their meat.

Eric Berg, a University of Missouri meat scientist, said a pig's fight-or-flight mechanism kicks in when it becomes stressed.

A pig's body temperature, blood pressure and hormone levels all increase, and then when it is slaughtered, all that heat and energy is trapped in the muscle. The result is PSE (pale, soft and exudative) pork, which tends to be tougher, drier and less appetizing to the consumer, Berg said.

PSE pork costs the industry hundreds of millions of dollars in lost quality each year, he said.

Slachs hogs are happier since he removed the gates from the small pens in his hog buildings. The hogs don't fight with each other, he said.

Sorting hogs also can be a stressful time, for both the hogs and the sorter. Slach solved that problem by placing a sorting scale in the center of each hog building. Hogs can reach the food court by passing through a couple of open gates or by going across a scale, which briefly holds the hog and then trips open a gate allowing the hog to go to the left or to the right, depending on the weight of the hog.

On sorting day, Slach closes the optional food court gates and all the hogs pass over the scale. Those that weigh 272 pounds, the optimum weight for Hog Works hogs, go in one direction that leads to the truck. Hogs that are lighter are turned into the food court.

Slach buys 50-pound feeder pigs from Cargill and then sells the 272-pound hogs to Excel, a Cargill-owned processor. He remains an independent producer, he said, who buys pigs priced on a matrix based on the cost of raising the pigs.

"There are still some ups and downs with the prices," Slach said. "Cargill tinkers with it. I get roughly $16 per pig profit. That $16 goes toward my costs and my buildings. You still have to raise a lot of pigs to make money.

"Used to be 250 sows made you a good living. When I started farming in 1971, we had 90 sows and we were big farmers."

Date: 4/28/05

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