Smithfield Foods

Based on Wikipedia: Smithfield Foods

From Squeal to Meal: How One Company Came to Dominate American Pork

Every day, 114,300 pigs die in Smithfield Foods facilities. That's nearly five thousand pigs every hour, around the clock. To put this in perspective, if you started counting those pigs one by one at a pace of one per second, you'd still be counting when the next day's slaughter began.

The company that orchestrates this industrial symphony is now owned by China. It started with fifteen hog carcasses a day.

A Family Business in Virginia

In 1936, two men named Joseph W. Luter—a father and son—worked for a meatpacker called P.D. Gwaltney, Jr. & Co. in Smithfield, Virginia. The elder Luter sold meat; the younger managed the operation. That year, they decided to strike out on their own, scraping together financing from a Suffolk businessman named Peter Pruden and a Richmond investor named John S. Martin.

Their operation was modest. Each day, the Luters would buy about fifteen hog carcasses, butcher them by hand, box the cuts, and sell them to small grocery stores in Newport News and Norfolk. Ten years later, they built their first real plant on Highway 10. By 1959, they employed 650 workers.

When Joseph W. Luter Jr. died in 1962, he owned forty-two percent of the company he'd helped build. His son, Joseph W. Luter III, was a student at Wake Forest University at the time. He joined the family business immediately, working in sales and borrowing money to buy another eight-and-a-half percent of the shares. By 1966, at a young age, he became both chairman and chief executive officer.

Under his leadership, the company grew from slaughtering three thousand hogs a day to five thousand. The workforce nearly doubled, from eight hundred to fourteen hundred. Then, in July 1969, he sold the company to Liberty Equities for twenty million dollars.

They fired him six months later.

The Ski Resort Interlude

For the next five years, Joseph W. Luter III did something entirely different: he developed a ski resort called Bryce Mountain in Virginia. Meanwhile, Smithfield Foods stumbled badly. By 1975, the company had a net worth of under one million dollars, seventeen million in debt, and was hemorrhaging two million dollars annually.

The banks told Smithfield to bring back the man they'd let go. They did.

Luter later described just how dire things were: the company even lost money in December 1974—holiday-ham season. As he put it, that was "like Budweiser losing money in July." It takes a special kind of mismanagement to lose money selling ham in December.

The Acquisition Machine

What Luter built over the next three decades would transform American agriculture. In 1981, he made his first move: buying Gwaltney of Smithfield for forty-two million dollars. This was the very company where his father and grandfather had worked before starting their own business. The acquisition was both symbolic and strategic—eliminating a major competitor while absorbing its capacity.

This was just the beginning. Between 1981 and 2008, Smithfield acquired nearly forty companies in the pork, beef, and livestock industries. The names read like a roll call of American meatpacking: Esskay Meats in Baltimore, Valley Dale in Roanoke, Patrick Cudahy in Milwaukee. Each acquisition made the company larger, more integrated, more dominant.

In 1992, Smithfield opened something the world had never seen: a 973,000-square-foot processing plant in Tar Heel, North Carolina. To understand that scale, imagine a single building covering more than twenty-two acres. By 2000, this facility could process thirty-two thousand pigs every single day.

The late 1990s brought even larger prey. In 1998, Smithfield bought Circle Four Farms in Utah. In 1999, it swallowed two of the largest pig producers in the entire country: Carroll's Foods for roughly five hundred million dollars, and Murphy Family Farms of North Carolina, which at the time was the nation's largest producer. The Murphy deal alone involved 3.3 million shares of Smithfield stock, one hundred seventy-eight million dollars in cash, and the assumption of about two hundred sixteen million in debt.

The acquisitions kept coming: Farmland Foods of Kansas City in 2003, Premium Standard Farms in 2007, along with pieces of Sara Lee, ConAgra, and even Butterball, the turkey giant. The scale of growth alarmed regulators. After the Murphy Family Farms purchase, the Agriculture Department described the new Smithfield as "absurdly big."

They weren't wrong. By 2006, just four companies—Smithfield, Tyson Foods, Swift & Company, and Cargill—controlled seventy percent of all pork production in the United States. Smithfield alone commanded ten to fifteen percent of the nation's hog production.

Vertical Integration: From Birth to Bacon

Smithfield's secret weapon wasn't just buying competitors. It was controlling every single stage of a pig's existence.

In 1990, the company began purchasing hog-farming operations outright. This made Smithfield what economists call a "vertically integrated" company—meaning it controlled the entire supply chain rather than relying on independent suppliers. The industry has its own phrases for this arrangement: "from squeal to meal" or "from birth to bacon."

Here's how it works. Smithfield owns the genetics. In 1990, the company obtained two thousand pigs and the rights to their genetic lines from Britain's National Pig Development Company. These animals became the foundation of a controlled breeding program designed to produce consistent, predictable meat. Smithfield controls conception through artificial insemination. It controls birth in company-owned facilities. It controls diet and growth through contracted farmers who raise piglets to market weight on feed regimens specified by Smithfield. It controls slaughter in its massive processing plants. It controls packaging and distribution.

The farmer who actually raises the pigs? He's essentially a contractor. Smithfield sends him piglets between eight and ten weeks old. He brings them to market weight. But Smithfield retains ownership of the animals throughout. The farmer provides labor and facilities; Smithfield provides the pigs, the feed specifications, and the buyer.

The results were staggering. Between 1990 and 2005, Smithfield expanded by more than one thousand percent. This is what market dominance looks like when you control every variable.

The Vanishing Hog Farmer

Vertical integration had consequences beyond Smithfield's balance sheet. Small farmers couldn't compete with a company that controlled genetics, feed, processing, and distribution. The economics simply didn't work.

In North Carolina, the numbers tell the story plainly. In 1980, there were 667,000 hog farms in the state. By 2005, there were 67,000. That's a ninety percent decline in twenty-five years. Smithfield's rise and the independent farmer's fall weren't coincidentally parallel—they were causally connected.

When American regulations began to bite, Smithfield looked overseas. The pattern repeated itself. In Romania, there were 477,030 hog farms in 2003. By 2007, just four years later, there were 52,100. Poland saw a fifty-six percent decline in hog farms between 1996 and 2008.

This is the reality of industrial agriculture. Efficiency at scale comes at the cost of distributed ownership. The family hog farm, a fixture of American rural life for centuries, largely ceased to exist as an economically viable enterprise.

The Lagoons

When you raise fifteen million pigs a year, as Smithfield did by 2006, you generate an almost incomprehensible amount of waste. In 2012, the company produced 4.7 billion gallons of manure. To visualize this, imagine filling more than seven thousand Olympic swimming pools with pig waste. Every year.

Industrial hog farming handles this problem with what the industry calls "anaerobic lagoons"—open-air pits that can stretch to the size of two football fields and reach depths of thirty feet. The floors of the pig barns are slatted, allowing waste to be flushed down into these massive holding pools.

The system is economical but controversial. The lagoons release methane, a potent greenhouse gas. They produce odors that affect surrounding communities. And there's the question of containment. Smithfield says the lagoons have impervious liners designed to prevent leakage. Critics point out that heavy rains can cause overflow, and that the liners can be punctured by rocks.

The waste itself is a mixture of excrement, urine, blood, afterbirths, stillborn piglets, and various drugs and chemicals used in industrial hog production. Smithfield notes that the distinctive pink color of some lagoons actually indicates healthy bacterial activity—"a sign of bacteria doing what it should be doing," as the company puts it, "indicative of lower odor and lower nutrient content."

In 2018, Smithfield announced a plan to capture some of this environmental liability and turn it into an asset. Working with Dominion Energy, the company committed to spending one hundred twenty-five million dollars over ten years to cover lagoons in North Carolina, Utah, and Virginia with high-density plastic, installing digesters to capture the methane gas and direct it into local pipelines. The waste-to-energy approach represents an attempt to address criticism while extracting additional value from an unavoidable byproduct of the business.

Life in a Gestation Crate

A pregnant sow in an industrial operation spends most of her life in a gestation crate—a metal enclosure so narrow she cannot turn around. She can stand up. She can lie down. She cannot turn.

Pig pregnancies last about one hundred fifteen days, roughly four months. The average American sow produces 4.2 litters before she is slaughtered. When she gives birth, she's moved to a slightly different enclosure called a farrowing crate for about three weeks while nursing. Then she's artificially inseminated again and returned to the gestation crate.

This cycle—crate, farrowing, crate, farrowing—defines a breeding sow's entire existence until her productivity declines enough to make her worth more as meat than as a producer of piglets.

In 2007, Smithfield announced it would phase out gestation crates by 2017. The commitment came under pressure from animal welfare groups, supermarket chains, and fast-food companies like McDonald's. But there was a caveat: Smithfield didn't require its contract farms to do the same, and nearly half of the company's sows lived on those roughly two thousand contract operations.

The 2008 recession provided an excuse to delay. In 2009, Smithfield said it couldn't meet the deadline. In 2011, it recommitted. In 2017, the company reported that eighty-seven percent of sows on company-owned farms were no longer in crates full-time, and announced that contract farms would need to phase out crates by 2022.

The current system, as of 2018, still uses gestation crates—but for shorter periods. Pregnant sows spend about six weeks in crates during insemination, then move to group housing for roughly ten weeks once pregnancy is confirmed, then to farrowing crates, then back to gestation crates for the next impregnation. It's an improvement over permanent crate confinement, but the crates haven't disappeared.

The Chinese Takeover

On May 29, 2013, a company called Shuanghui Group—China's largest meat producer—announced it would purchase Smithfield Foods for 4.72 billion dollars. At the time, it was the largest Chinese acquisition of an American company in history.

The deal made a certain kind of sense. China was one of America's largest pork importers, even though it already had roughly 475 million pigs of its own—about sixty percent of all the pigs on Earth. Chinese consumers ate an average of 85.3 pounds of pork per person annually, compared to 59.3 pounds in the United States. Demand was growing faster than domestic supply could match.

Shuanghui, which later renamed itself WH Group, saw Smithfield as a way to feed that demand with high-quality American pork. The acquisition included not just processing facilities and brand names, but something perhaps more valuable: 146,000 acres of American farmland. This made WH Group one of the largest overseas owners of agricultural land in the United States.

The U.S. government approved the deal on September 6, 2013. When debt was included, the total value reached approximately 7.1 billion dollars.

For decades, Smithfield had run its many acquisitions as essentially independent companies, each maintaining its own identity and operations. But in 2015, under Chinese ownership, the company launched the "One Smithfield" initiative to unify everything under a single organizational structure. Circle Four Farms in Utah, for instance, became "Smithfield Hog Production-Rocky Mountain Region."

The company's leadership began describing its future differently. Rather than a collection of meat producers, Smithfield would become a "consumer-packaged goods business"—selling branded products to consumers rather than commodity pork to processors.

The Return to Public Markets

For over a decade, Smithfield operated as a wholly owned subsidiary of its Chinese parent. Then, on January 28, 2025, something changed. The company listed on the Nasdaq stock exchange, offering twenty-six million shares to the public in an initial public offering.

WH Group retained ninety percent ownership after the IPO. In September 2025, an additional 19.5 million shares were sold, reducing the Chinese company's stake to eighty-eight percent. For the first time since 2013, American investors could own a piece of the world's largest pork producer.

The partial return to public markets reflects a broader trend of Chinese companies seeking Western capital while maintaining control. Smithfield remains, in practical terms, a Chinese-owned company. But now roughly twelve percent of it trades on American exchanges, subject to American disclosure requirements and American investor scrutiny.

The Brand Portfolio

Most consumers have no idea they're buying Smithfield products. The company operates behind a curtain of brand names accumulated through decades of acquisitions: Armour, Cook's, Eckrich, Farmland, Gwaltney, John Morrell, Krakus, Nathan's Famous. If you've bought hot dogs, bacon, or deli meat at an American supermarket, there's a reasonable chance Smithfield processed it.

The company has also moved into unexpected territory. In 2019, Smithfield—the world's largest pork producer—launched Pure Farmland, a line of plant-based soy burgers and meatballs. The irony is intentional: if consumers want to eat less meat, Smithfield wants to sell them the alternative too.

In Smithfield, Virginia, where it all began, the company operates a restaurant called Taste of Smithfield and a retail store called The Genuine Smithfield Ham Shoppe. They share a building on Main Street. Here, in the town that gave the company its name, you can eat a meal from the same firm that kills more pigs than any other enterprise in human history.

What Scale Means

Numbers at Smithfield's scale become abstractions. Fifteen million pigs raised annually. Twenty-seven million processed. Six billion pounds of pork. 4.7 billion gallons of manure. Fifty thousand employees across the United States, Mexico, and Europe. Fourteen billion dollars in annual revenue.

Perhaps the most telling number is the simplest: thirty-two thousand pigs processed daily at a single facility. That's the Tar Heel plant in North Carolina, operating around the clock, converting living animals into packaged meat at a rate that would have seemed impossible to Joseph W. Luter Sr. when he was buying fifteen hog carcasses a day in 1936.

The distance between fifteen and thirty-two thousand—multiplied across the company's operations worldwide—represents the industrialization of a process that humans have performed for millennia. Whether this represents progress depends entirely on what you're measuring. Efficiency? Unquestionably. Animal welfare? The gestation crate debate suggests otherwise. Environmental impact? Those lagoons aren't going anywhere. Rural communities? The vanishing hog farmer tells that story.

What's certain is that Smithfield's model won. The company that emerged from a small Virginia meatpacking operation now shapes how pork is produced not just in America, but around the world. From a family business selling to local grocery stores to a Chinese-owned multinational processing tens of millions of animals annually—this is what modern food production looks like.

Fifteen hog carcasses a day. That's how it started. Everything since has been a matter of scale.