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Pig Business – The Dark Side of Intensive Pig Farming

by Jennie Richards · Published May 25, 2018 · Updated April 13, 2019

“Why is it, when people are in bondage to the government it is called tyranny, but when our oppressor is a multi-national corporation it is called efficiency?” ~ Activist

“We need a new American revolution now to fight for our democracy, to fight against corporate feudalism that is eroding and subverting everything that we care about in our democracy. ~ John Kennedy, Jr.

Pig Business is an investigative documentary exposing the environmental, social, health and animal welfare impacts of industrial pig farming, and the multi-national corporations responsible for these impacts. Four years in the making, the film journeys to Poland, the U.S., the U.K. and South America to uncover how pork is produced today, and the true costs associated with it. Through extensive interviews, undercover investigative footage inside industrial pig farms, testimony from politicians, industry leaders, farmers, academics and citizens—the filmmaker captures the devastating impact industrial large-scale pig farming is having on the land, the air, the water, our health, and on the pigs themselves.

The film has been virtually censored from being released or shown in theaters in the U.S. due to litigation threatened by Smithfield Foods, the world’s largest pig producer and processor, with an annual sales of $12 billion processing some 27 million pigs a year across 15 countries. The 2009 British documentary shines a bright light on Smithfield Foods’ monopolist acquisition of farmland and small independent pig farms across Poland and in Eastern Europe and the U.S.—and the deep disregard Smithfield Foods has shown to local and regional communities, farmers, landowners, and the animals, as it enters and seeks to dominate the market. Pig Business reveals the complete disregard Smithfield’s factory farms have on their animals—dead baby pigs tossed into waste lagoons, pigs crammed so tightly together they cannibalize each other, sick and dying as they are being trampled, female pigs spending their lives in gestation crates where they cannot even move, workers that have become habituated to animal cruelty that they brutalize the animals themselves, chronically sick workers, and waste lagoons on farms that are leaking manure and urine that is dangerously contaminating water tables and water systems, not to mention broken environmental laws everywhere—Smithfield denies these complaints and calls these claims untrue.

“Food has become a major profit generating commodity, food producers, workers and consumers are reduced to pawns, manipulated by giant corporations.”

Film Length: 73 Minutes

Film Released: May 2009

Watch Death on a Factory Farm

Watch What’s For Dinner

Read about the Life of a Factory Farm Pig

The True Costs of Factory Farming

End Pig Pain in Europe – Act Now!

Watch The Film

Buy the DVD

Watch Country-Specific Versions on Farms Not Factories

Watch the Trailer

Watch the Celebrity Trailer

Quotes from the Film

“Smithfield is homogenizing, commoditizing and diminishing the quality of life for everyone in America. It’s not good for America, our food supply, our food security.” (Robert Kennedy, Jr.)

“Pigs are such intelligent, inquisitive animals—they need to be active all day long, searching for grub all day.”

“What we have is the application of industrial systems, designed to build cars and machines, done to living animals, it’s so deeply cruel.”

“Workers in these facilities don’t even see the animals as alive, they become so habituated to the cruelty and eventually they become genuinely brutalized.”

“Pigs are not seen as animals, they are seen as industrial raw materials.”

“American pig farmers followed the industrial chicken farm industry, cramming thousands of pigs together.”

“The concentration of industries which are destructive to the environment, namely the pig farms and factories, disposing of dead pigs.”

“It’s the way they get rid of their waste that is so problematic, all the waste goes out to huge lagoons and then they spray it all over the area, it’s full of nitrogen and it goes right into the streams, creeks, rivers and the ocean—all untreated waste.”

“There are 10 million hogs in this small area in North Carolina, they are producing more fecal waste than 100 million people each day.”

“It’s a toxic brew, there are so many volatile gasses in pig farming, and antibiotics, 300-400 different substances that children and adults are being exposed to every day.”

“I’ve seen small family farms going bankrupt, because of the arrival of giant factory farms.”

“I just get angry because I can’t breathe living here.”

“80% of the farms in the U.S. were in breach of the new regulations. Older lagoons on farms were leaking waste and contaminating the water table.”

“I knew we had to fight back—that we had to stand up—or they were just going to roll over us and take our democracy and our freedom.”

“In Poland, the ‘reclassification’ of pig feces from sewer to fertilizer’ allowed the farms to use manure and sewage spraying techniques that are common in the U.S.”

“I want clean air so my granddaughter can lead a healthy life. We want to live in harmony with nature.”

“Giant Smithfield factory farms start spreading manure all over the surrounding fields from March non-stop until November. This is gradual poisoning. We inhale these gasses every day, so we’re poisoned every day, by hydrogen, sulfide, ammonia, methane and other gases and bacteria and micro-organisms.”

“It seems economic development is not being determined by the needs of people, but by the needs of companies to grow and compete in the global market – and you and I are helping to fund this.”

“Smithfield Foods benefitted by a $100 million dollar loan from the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development, all tax-payer money, that was applied to the expansion of Smithfield.”

“‘Who is driving this economic ideology that is promoting big corporate business at the expense of smaller, independent businesses?’ Professor Bernard Lietaer says, ‘The finanical institutions are running the show, the governments are all indebted to them, a third of all political campaigns are financed by the largest banks, so there is no chance they will change the rules.’”

“There is no way to fight these huge corporations, there’s no one we can complain to because they are so big and powerful. Their impact and influence are so devastating. It’s like they are a huge spider, a parasite that is preying on us, sucking all the juices from the Earth and its people. It feels like an invasion.”

“I don’t know if I should retire, emigrate or hang myself.” (farmer)

“What worries Kennedy is how big business and banks dominate the whole of American life. Will our resources and land be controlled by corporations, or by the American people?”

“70% of imports from the U.S. would be illegal in the UK because of animal cruelty and welfare standards. The gestation crates standard in the U.S. would never be permitted in the UK on animal cruelty grounds.”

“Dangerous bacteria including MRSA, salmonella, E.coli, campylobacter, is spread rapidly on pig farms because it’s so resistant. It can spread on pig farms due to the use of antibiotics and antibiotic resistances. Pork meat that is so cheap is in fact expensive because it can cost us our lives.”

“The consumer ultimately has the power.”

“We need to ban intensive industrial scale pig farming in Europe.”

What You Can Do

Don’t Buy Pork – Stop buying pork altogether. If you buy pork do not buy it from Smithfield Foods or other large industrial factory farm producers, instead buy pork from local high animal welfare farms, free-range and organic.
Ask Restaurants – Only buy pork only from independent small farms with high animal welfare standards.
Lobby Your Politician – Ask your politicians to enforce animal welfare regulations; restrict the use of antibiotics; introduce mandatory method-of-production labeling; and source high welfare pork for public services.
Buy From Farmers Markets – Instead of corporate-owned grocery stores, supermarkets, chains like Walmart, Costco, etc.
Buy Seasonal and Locally Grown – Don’t support food transported from long distances, or is out of season.
Remember – The consumer ultimately has the power. Don’t support animal cruelty.