Exclusive: How Big Pork takes money from small farmers — then uses it to lobby against them

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Russ Kremer is a longtime hog farmer in the Missouri Ozarks, where his 2,000 pigs have plenty of space to roam on his 150 acres. He doesn’t feed them antibiotics, and you won’t find a single animal in a cage. Kremer is decidedly anti-industrial hog farming.

Whenever he sends his pigs to slaughter, like every hog farmer in the US, he’s legally required to give over a small share of his sales — 35 cents for every $100 — to the National Pork Board.

If you’re not a hog farmer, you might not have heard of the National Pork Board. But you’ve probably seen its ads. Its job is to promote pork to consumers, and it’s the group behind the once ubiquitous slogan “Pork. The Other White Meat.”

The idea behind the National Pork Board — financed with mandatory contributions from Kremer and virtually every other American hog farmer — is that all pork producers should benefit from this kind of prominent marketing to buoy their product. So a dollar or so from each pig should be worth it.

The group’s funds, by law, are limited to advertising and research. They specifically can’t be used for political lobbying to influence legislation. There’s a good reason for that: While boosting pork consumption should help any pig farmer, when it comes to laws and policies, some benefit certain types of producers over others, such as more industrial producers. And because virtually all farmers have to pay into the fund, it seems only fair to keep it policy-neutral.

It’s essentially a tax, one that consumers indirectly pay each time they buy any kind of pork, too. “I’m not opposed to paying a tax if the tax does us some good,” Kremer told me. But Kremer and many of his fellow anti-industrial hog farmers believe it is not doing good. That’s because the National Pork Board has moved millions of their dollars to the largest industrial pork lobby in America.

For every pig that a farmer sends to slaughter, about 70 cents to $1 is collected for a semi-governmental group called the National Pork Board. The board can only use the money for pork research and promotion (they’re behind the once ubiquitous slogan “Pork. The other white meat”). The money cannot be used for lobbying.

However, in an exclusive analysis obtained by Vox, financial records reveal that $66 million has moved — via trademark and real estate deals — from the National Pork Board to a lobbying group called the National Pork Producers Council. Almost half of this money has not been previously reported by the news media. Some critics say the groups are exploiting loopholes and, in their view, violating the law.

As a result, some smaller farmers — many with more humane and sustainable operations — feel their money is being diverted to lobby for the interests of industrialized meat corporations.

It’s called the National Pork Producers Council, and over the last 70 years, it has emerged as the loudest advocate for factory-farm style hog production.