Hogs and people aren't making good neighbors.

Mega producers have ushered in a new era for Midwest agriculture and amplified the growing environmental concerns associated with concentrated animal agriculture. The combination threatens to undermine the Midwest's long-held dominance in hog production and processing.

A new meat industry is rapidly emerging in the United States, as food retailers, meat processors, and farms and ranches coalesce into fewer and larger businesses. The industry’s rapid consolidation in recent years has triggered alarms that the industry’s new giants in retailing and...

Throughout the 1990s, the pork industry has been at the forefront of a revolution in the structure of the U.S. food and agricultural sector. In particular, the pork industry has been rapidly moving away from its traditional structure built on hundreds of thousands of small farms selling hogs at...

Over the past several decades, the beef industry has seen a sharp drop in its share of the retail meat market. While per capita meat consumption has grown, per capita beef consumption has plunged. Explaining the drop in beef's market share has become a favorite pastime of industry analysts. In...

Related link(s): http://www.richmondfed.org/publications/research/region_focus/2009/spring/economic_history_weblinks.cfm