When you put a lot of hogs in the same place, you have to collect and store the waste. If it gets into the ground water or gets flushed into streams, it kills fish, clogs streams and lakes with algae, feeds water born disease organism, and wreaks havoc in the environment. In addition, manure on diversified hog farms normally is spread back onto cropland where the feed grain was grown. Most of the nutrients used to grow the crops are returned to the soil. But, when feed grains from specialized crop farms are shipped to distant hog-factories, the nation's future productive capacity is being stacked up and flushed out into places where crops can't grow.
Consumers have little if anything to gain .
Large-scale, corporate hog production is frequently justified to the general public as a more efficient, lower cost, means of producing higher quality pork. The facts of the situation simply do not support such a claim. The average consumer spends just over 10 percent, a dime out of each dollar, of their disposable income for food. About 10 percent, a penny out of the dime, is spent for pork. The costs of live hogs make up only about 35 percent of that penny.