Paul Willis likes comparing hogs to tomatoes. Given the choice, which would you rather eat: a fragrant, vine-ripened tomato, or a tasteless, perfectly formed hothouse facsimile? A taste comparison of a pork chop from one of Paul’s hogs with one from a hog raised in concrete confinement prompts him to dub the latter “hothouse hogs.”

Fewer than ten years ago, Paul—as well as most like-minded farmers—was struggling to make a profit from his farm-raised hogs. “We were raising the best pigs and being paid the worst price,” he says. Today, the “best” pigs are rapidly gaining popularity, and farmers are receiving significant bonuses for raising them.

Paul’s practices are hardly revolutionary. “We raise pigs the way they used to be raised in the state,” he explains. A visitor to Willis’s seven-hundred-acre farm comes away with an understanding of the old-fashioned term “hog heaven. “These pigs are happy. Here, approximately one thousand hogs are kept in seven different locations. A pickup ride through one of the hog pastures (which soon will be rotated to grow crops) is instructive and pleasant. Piglets race through the grass, and birds swoop overhead. A half dozen young pigs curiously approach the pickup. Odor is minimal.

Paul frowns and jumps out of the truck. “These guys need to be sorted,” he says, noting an older pig that is out-of-place with his younger piglet comrades. He pulls a larger pig away from a suckling sow to make room for the smaller feeders. “We know our animals are raised for food, but in a way, they’re almost like pets. They deserve a certain level of respect. They should be allowed to be pigs.”

Paul’s pigs do piggy sorts of things—wallowing in mud, foraging for roots, and pushing straw around to make soft beds in the small, portable huts. “If you look at their bodies, you can see what they’re designed for,” Paul says. “Their noses are little plows, and their tiny feet are made to walk in soft ground. They’re not meant to live on concrete.”

Because Paul’s hogs live outdoors, and because of the particular genetics of the animals he chooses to raise, they are fatter than confinement hogs. They are also healthier—a result of more fat, more exercise, and less stress than their confinement counterparts. Willis uses neither growth hormones nor antibiotics. He doesn’t need to, he says.

“If you take good care of your pigs, they aren’t going to be stressed, and they aren’t going to get sick. Some pigs are constantly fed antibiotics their entire lives. They’ve been abused environmentally and genetically to the point that this is the only way some operations can keep their animals alive.”

The result of stress-free living and more fat makes a flavorful, “sun-ripened” taste, Paul explains. In contrast, confinement hogs, which are bred to be lean, can be flavorless. “It is a common practice to inject meat from hogs raised in confinement with brine after slaughter to make the meat palatable. So packing plants get a 56 percent lean carcass, inject it, and sell you a lot of water.”

Regardless of the taste of the product, packing plants pay a premium for lean pork. “When it came time to sell my hogs to packing plants, I was being penalized rather than rewarded for my practices,” says Paul, who is unconvinced that the consumer really wants lean pork at the expense of taste. “When people go out and order a pork chop, they’re not ordering it as diet food. They’re ordering it because they want something that tastes good. Consumers aren’t getting their extra calories from a couple of ounces of fat from the pork they eat.”

Early in 1995, Paul learned of an exciting market for his free-range pigs when he was visiting his sister in California.
Bill Niman, a California rancher and distributor of free-range meat, had made a name for himself among the chefs of the finest restaurants nationwide. These chefs have learned what Paul has known for years: animals that are treated humanely yield the most delicious meat. One taste of Paul’s pork, and Bill Niman asked him to provide thirty hogs.

Paul Willis is just the sort of farmer Bill Niman’s company, Niman Ranch, seeks out. Niman Ranch is committed to providing consumers with the highest quality meats and believes those meats come from farms and ranches where animals are treated humanely, fed the best natural feeds, and never given growth hormones or antibiotics.

Gourmet aficionados from coast-to-coast would agree. Niman Ranch sales top $20 million annually, and the critics pour on the praise. “One taste of Niman’s pork, beef, pastrami, ham, or bacon at some of this country’s top restaurants (or at your table via his online meat market) is proof that he is truly ahead of the herd,” raved Bon Appetit, which in 2001 awarded the rancher the magazine’s fourth annual American Food and Entertainment Award. “Last week is only the second time in my life I tasted pork so delicious it needed no seasoning beyond salt and pepper,” wrote the food editor of the New York Times.

After less than four years, Paul Willis’s initial supply of thirty hogs to Niman Ranch has grown to more than two thousand hogs per year, shipped on a weekly basis. Paul now contracts with more than two hundred farmers (70 percent from Iowa) and pays them a fifteen-dollar per hog premium over what they would receive in traditional markets. These farmers, like all Niman farmers, follow the humane husbandry standards developed by Diane Halverson of the Animal Welfare Institute.

Returning to yesteryear’s hog-raising practices may save an industry that is coming under fire, says Paul. “In the past, the money, the manure, the hogs, and the labor were spread throughout the countryside, and it didn’t really cause a problem. Hogs in concentration controlled by a few large integrators is not a sustainable system. I can’t think of anything worse that could have been designed to drive people out of the state of Iowa.”

There’s no question that managing a diverse farm is hard work, and no question that hands-on attention to free-range animals is time consuming. But there are a growing number of Iowa farmers ready to return to sustainable practices. “I’m always looking for farmers,” says Paul. “And I’m finding new, interested farmers on a regular basis.”