PHOENIX — Hundreds of young hogs scurried back and forth in pens, snorting and bumping into one another.
"Look at 'em," said Michael Terrill, a veterinarian and Pigs for Farmer John vice president, leading a group of visitors. "They've all got full bellies. They're eating great. … They're playful and curious."
Terrill's tour in the Arizona town of Snowflake was part of a public-relations campaign designed to show that livestock at an industrial farm is treated humanely and that 160,000 hogs can be raised without cruelty or pollution.
Company officials are trying to open another Arizona pig farm in Yuma County, a project stymied at the last minute by an assortment of foes. Some are animal-rights activists. Others are neighboring landowners, farmers and eco-defenders worried that an industrial-size pork producer will suck up water supplies, stink up the county and spread flies.
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Terrill grits his teeth at the accusations. He said Farmer John is an ethical and environmentally responsible pork company with a vested interest in keeping pigs healthy.
"The way animals are taken care of today is light-years ahead of the way they were handled 10 or 20 years ago," Terrill said.
But this spring, just weeks before the first pigs were expected to arrive at the Yuma County farm, the Arizona Department of Environmental Quality reversed its approval. Under pressure from critics, it issued new permit requirements with more detailed reports. Construction stopped, and legal wrangling began.
Thus began the War of the Pigs, a propaganda conflict that is not uncommon when American hog farmers seek new turf.
The National Pork Board ("Pork: The other white meat") boasts a "rapid response team" to deal with image problems.
"What we get into often is rumor and emotion and feelings that may get out of control," said Paul Sundberg, the board's vice president.
The two sides even speak distinct languages: Farmer John refers to pig excrement as an "organic nutrient stream," while critics call it "sewage" or worse. Animals are butchered either at a "processing plant" or a "slaughterhouse."
Farmer John is a brand name used by Clougherty Packing LLC, a Southern California subsidiary of Hormel Foods. The Snowflake farm, with 140 employees, claims $30 million in revenues annually.
Visitors are required to shower before donning sterile clothing and boots. The 3,800-acre compound contains 130 buildings set in clusters according to stages of pig development: birthing, weaning, finishing. Hogs are fed a diet of corn, soy and vitamins until market-ready at about 270 pounds.
Barns are equipped with computer-controlled climate, automatic feeders and watering machines. Excrement spills through slatted flooring into a pit, then flows to evaporation lagoons outside. A pungent odor wafts downwind, and flies are present even a few miles away along Arizona 77. But neighbors in the Snowflake area say neither is overwhelming.
At the proposed complex near Dateland, about halfway between Yuma and Gila Bend, an estimated 28 million gallons of pig manure produced each year would fertilize about 2,500 nearby acres, mostly state lands that are now virgin desert.
Stephen Christian's would-be housing development is across the highway. In December 2006, the farm obtained an environmental permit without problem or protest. Then Christian learned that 52,800 pigs were about to move in.
"They made it sound like it was going to be all great, with no problems. It was a done deal," he said. "But my subdivision becomes worthless raw land. It's downwind from the farm."
Christian rallied others in the area, including local farmer Jon Warkomski. Warkomski said his concern is water use. As a lifelong farmer, he shunned the environmentalists and vegans but joined a challenge against the pig farm.
Arizona
