Why Are Pig Farmers Still Using Growth-Promoting Drugs?

In recent years, pork producers have found ways to keep the animals healthy through improved hygiene.

M. Spencer Green/AP In recent years, pork producers have found ways to keep the animals healthy through improved hygiene.

M. Spencer Green/AP

It's one of the most controversial practices in agriculture: feeding small amounts of antibiotics to animals in order to make them grow faster.

But what if the drugs don't even work very well?

There's some good evidence that they don't, at least in pigs. They used to deliver a boost in growth, but that effect has disappeared in recent years or declined greatly.

The reason for this is interesting and even paradoxical.

Researchers think the antibiotics used to work by suppressing low-grade infections. In recent years, however, pork producers found other ways to accomplish the same thing through improved hygiene. This has occurred even while swine operations grow. As a result, the drugs have become largely superfluous — yet many farmers still use them.

To understand how this happened, you have to step back in time, says Steve Dritz, a specialist in swine nutrition at Kansas State University.

Sixty years ago, when antibiotics were new, "people started treating animals, and feeding [the antibiotics], and finding that they had increased growth rates and feed efficiencies," he says. Nursery-age pigs, for instance, grew 12 to 15 percent faster with antibiotics. The animals also needed less feed to reach full weight. Other studies showed similar results in chickens and cattle.

In the 1980s, a new set of studies found similar effects. So the growth-promoting effects of antibiotics became standard practice among meat producers.

Fast forward to the 1990s. Dritz was starting his career as a scientist at Kansas State University, and pork production was changing dramatically. "We instituted this thing called multisite production," says Dritz.

Previously, pigs were born and raised in one barn or in several barns close together. This meant infections could easily pass from one generation to the next, the way that kids share germs between their friends on the playground and their parents at home.

Under the new system, when piglets are weaned, they move to a whole different place. That new site is carefully scrubbed and free of disease.

Craig Rowles, who runs a large swine operation in Carroll, Iowa, shows me one such room. There's not a piglet in sight. "This room just got completely washed and disinfected, and now it's going to sit here and dry for a while," he says.

A whole group of pigs will come in here together, and later they will move out together to yet another site. "That group of pigs will stay together until they go to market," Rowles says.

Craig Rowles raises pigs near Carroll, Iowa. The piglets will enter and leave this room as a group.

Dan Charles/NPR Craig Rowles raises pigs near Carroll, Iowa. The piglets will enter and leave this room as a group.

Dan Charles/NPR

The groups are kept strictly separated from each other. If workers move between the groups, they first have to change their boots.

When farmers adopted multisite production, it cut down on disease — and pigs actually grew faster.

So Dritz wondered whether improved hygiene was delivering exactly the same growth-promoting effect that farmers used to get through antibiotics. If so, did they still need to use the drugs?

Dritz carried out some studies on pigs in these multisite systems, comparing animals that received antibiotics with others that didn't. "Lo and behold, in these studies, there wasn't nearly the magnitude of the growth response," he says.

In the "finishing" stage, the effect of antibiotics disappeared. Younger pigs grew a bit faster with antibiotics, but the effect was smaller than had been observed earlier.

Dritz started telling pork producers that most uses of antibiotics for growth promotion or feed efficiency really did not make sense anymore. Many farmers took his advice. But he was surprised and a little discouraged to see how many did not. They weren't convinced by the evidence.

"It's very hard to change people's perceptions," he says. Even among veterinarians, his professional colleagues, there was reluctance to change. Many continue to recommend using the drugs.

Dritz thinks that this is partly rooted in psychology and the professional culture of veterinary practice. Veterinarians "are action-oriented people, most of them. They want to do something. Not doing something just doesn't seem right, as a professional, you know?"

Once upon a time, this would have been left for farmers and their vets to hash out, but the use of antibiotics on the farm now is the focus of intense controversy. Critics of the meat industry say using these drugs to promote growth is irresponsible because it increases the chances that bacteria will develop resistance to antibiotics, and some of these bacteria can infect humans.

The Food and Drug Administration now says that medically important antibiotics should not be used for this purpose. It is trying to persuade drug companies to stop selling drugs for growth promotion. Within a few years, such uses of antibiotics may no longer be legal.

Among farmers, there's some grumbling about this. But at least for pork producers, dropping the drugs may actually save money.

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Heat, Drought Draw Farmers Back To Sorghum, The 'Camel Of Crops'

A test field of sorghum outside Manhattan, Kan., planted by Kansas State University.

Dan Charles/NPR

Much of the world is turning hotter and dryer these days, and it's opening new doors for a water-saving cereal that's been called "the camel of crops": sorghum. In an odd twist, this old-fashioned crop even seems to be catching on among consumers who are looking for "ancient grains" that have been relatively untouched by modern agriculture.

Sorghum isn't nearly as famous as the big three of global agriculture: corn, rice and wheat. But maybe it should be. It's a plant for tough times, and tough places.

Sorghum "originated in the northeastern quadrant of Africa," explains Gebisa Ejeta, a plant scientist from Ethiopia and professor at Purdue University. From there, it spread across Africa, India and even into China. "It's got a lot of characteristics that make it a favorite crop for the drylands of Africa and the semi-arid tropics."

It's an essential source of food in those regions, but it's not typically a big money crop. In Africa, it's grown by subsistence farmers. It's never gotten much attention from seed companies or investors.

But it is nutritious. It can grow in soils that other plants won't tolerate. Above all, it doesn't need much water. Compared with corn, for instance, it needs one-third less water, and it doesn't give up and wilt when rains don't come on time. It waits for moisture to arrive.

It probably arrived in North America aboard slave ships. That traditional sorghum looks like an overgrown corn plant, up to 10 feet tall, with a head of seeds on top.

Today, American farmers grow two kinds of sorghum. Sweet sorghum is tall; you can use it to make a sweet syrup or just feed the whole plant to animals.

But most sorghum in the U.S. is grown for feed grain. That version of the plant is short, with seeds that come in several different colors.

Steve Henry showed me some near Abilene, Kan., on our way to the farm where he grew up. Kansas is the biggest sorghum-growing state. Out here, they call milo.

"You've got white milo, red milo, yellow milo," says Henry, scanning the field. "Basically, you have the little berries, and they're filled with starch, like like corn is filled with starch, and the starch is what we're after."

Sorghum is used for the same things as corn: high-energy feed for pigs and chickens. It also gets turned into ethanol.

But corn is far more popular. Corn produces a bigger harvest, and farmers earn bigger profits with it — at least when there's plenty of water. In the U.S., the amount of land in sorghum has been steadily shrinking.

There are signs, though, of a sorghum revival on the high plains. The reason is water, or the lack of it. From Nebraska to western Texas, cornfields have been fed with rivers of water pumped from underground aquifers, and that water is starting to run low.

Some farmers, such as Mitchell Baalman of Hoxie, Kan., are looking for crops that aren't quite so thirsty. "We're learning a lot about milo," says Baalman. "You know, nobody wants to grow milo out here; it's kind of a forgotten crop. But I tell you what, there's where our money's going to be made this year. It'll be on grain sorghum."

Ejeta, who won the World Food Prize in 2009 for his work on sorghum, says that sorghum's renaissance may depend on the price that farmers pay for water. "If water is given its real value, and you limit irrigation, or people begin to pay for water, it would be economically smarter to grow sorghum in several areas of the United States," he says.

In the latest twist to the sorghum saga, it's actually becoming somewhat trendy among consumers who are looking for something a little different, and maybe a little more healthful.

"Sorghum is naturally gluten-free; it's an ancient grain," says Earl Roemer, who set up a company called Nu Life Market to sell sorghum flour to big food companies. Roemer's sorghum mill in Scott City, Kan., is busy. "Demand is exploding!" he says. "We're seeing 25 to 30 percent increase in demand, annually. We're doing all we can to increase production." His flour goes into gluten-free baked goods and is also used in breakfast cereals containing so-called ancient grains like quinoa, amaranth and spelt.

Every week, he says, visitors from food companies large and small make the trek to western Kansas to talk about new opportunities. Next week, he says, he's traveling to Taiwan to explore international markets.

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