The Big 4 Stole The Only Market Small Farmers Ever Built

About this episode

Forty companies own 70 percent of the hogs in this country. Fewer than 100 plants slaughter 99.7 percent of them. Small farms running their own processing account for 0.3 percent of the pork on shelves, 2 percent of the beef. So when a menu names a farm, the math says it almost never is one. Greg Gunthorp is a fourth generation pastured hog farmer in Indiana, 400 sows on 275 acres, with a USDA-inspected plant on his own farm and pork sold by name at Rick Bayless restaurants, including inside Disney. In 1998 hogs were bringing 8 cents a pound minus trucking. He maxed his credit cards, pulled pennies out of his daughter's piggy bank for a school field trip, and drove a pig packed in ice in the back of his wife's Suzuki Swift into Chicago, where Wine Spectator had just named the restaurant he was selling to the best in the world. Then the big packers noticed. He calls it winning a few battles and losing the war, shadow brands priced 25 to 40 percent over commodity, selling the same conventional product the independent farmers built their name on. Until January of 2026, foreign meat repackaged here could legally say Product of USA on the label. Also in this one: why farmers get 14 c