update (3/29/07): From NYTimes article "Burger King Shifts Policy on Animals":
And in January, the world’s largest pork processor, Smithfield Foods, said it would phase out confinement of pigs in metal crates over the next decade.
"America's Top Pork Producer (Smithfield Foods) churns out a sea of waste that has destroyed rivers, killed millions of fish, and generated one of the largest fines in EPA history. Welcome to the dark side of the other white meat."
* "Smithfield Foods, the largest and most profitable pork processor in the world, killed 27 million hogs last year. That's a number worth considering. A slaughter-weight hog is 50% heavier than a person. The logistical challenge of processing that many pigs each year is roughly equivalent to butchering and boxing the entire human populations of NY, L.A., Chicago, Houston, Philladelphia, Phoenix, S.A., San Diego, Dallas, San Jose, Detroit, Indianapolis, Jacksonville, San Francisco, Columbus, Austin, Memphis, Baltimore, Fort Worth, Charlotte, El Paso, Milwaukee, Seattle, Boston, Denver, Lousiville, D.C., Nashville, Las Vegas, Portland, Oklahoma City, and Tucson.
* "Hogs produce three times more excrement than human beings do. The 500,000 pigs at a single Smithfield subsidiary in Utah generate more fecal matter each year than the 1.5 million inhabitants of Manhattan."
* "The excrement of Smithfield hogs is ... probably closer to radioactive waste than organic manure." ... "Smithfield's pigs live by the hundred or thousands in warehouselike barns, in rows of wall-to-wall pens." ... "Forty fully grown 250-lb male hogs often occupy a pen the size of a tiny apartment. They trample each other to death. There is no sunlight, straw, fresh air or earth. The floors are slatted to allow excrement to fall into the catchment pit under the pens, but many things besides excrement can wind up in the pits: afterbirths, piglets, accidentally crushed by their mothers, old batteries, broken bottles of insecticide, antibiotic syringes, stillborn pigs - any thing small engouh toe fit through the foot-wide pipes that drain the pits."
* "Factory pigs are infused with a huge range of antibiotics and vaccines, and are doused with insecticides. Without these compounds - oxytetracycline, draxxin, ceftiofur, tiamulin - disease would likely kill them. Thus factory-farm pigs remain in a state of dying until they're slaughtered. When a pig nearly ready to be slaughtered grows ill, workers sometimes shoot it up with as many drugs as necessary to get it to the slaughterhouse under its own power. As long as the pig remains ambulatory, it can be legally killed and sold as meat."
* "The drugs Smithfield administers to its pigs, of course, exit its hog houses in pig shit. ... Each gram of hog shit can contain as much as 100 million fecal coliform bacteria." This shit makes it into holding ponds or lagoons. "The area around a single slaughterhouse can contain hundreds of lagoons, some of which run thirty feet deep. The liquid in them is not brown. The interactions between the bacteria and blood and afterbirths and stillborn piglets and urine and excrement and chemicals and drugs turn the lagoons pink." This shit has the ability to seep through the liners and spread and ferment. This can seep into nearby waters and kill fish. ... "A river that receives a lot of waste from an industrial hog farm begins to die quickly. Toxins and microbes can kill plants and animals outright; the waste itself consumes available oxygen and suffocates fish and aquatic animals; and the nutrients in the pig shit produce algal blooms that also deoxygenate the water."
* The 67yo Chairman of Smithfield Foods, Joseph Luter III, lives on Park Avenue in Manhattan.
* "The industry has long made generous campaign contributions to politicians responsible for regulating hog farms. ... North Carolina "has consistently failed to employ enough inspectors to ensure that hog farms are complying with environmental standards."
* "Studies have shown that lagoons emit hundreds of different volatile gases into the atmosphere, including ammonia, methane, carbon dioxide and hydrogen sulfide. A single lagoon releases many millions of bacteria into the air per day, some resistant to human antibiotics. Hog farms in North Carolina also emit some 300 tons of nitrogen into the air every day as ammonia gas, much of which falls back to earth and deprives lakes and streams of oxygen, stimulating algal blooms and killing fish."
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