The Big 4 Stole The Only Market Small Farmers Ever Built

Forty companies own 70 percent of the hogs in this country. Fewer than 100 plants slaughter 99.7 percent of them. Small farms running their own processing account for 0.3 percent of the pork on shelves, 2 percent of the beef. So when a menu names a farm, the math says it almost never is one.

Greg Gunthorp is a fourth generation pastured hog farmer in Indiana, 400 sows on 275 acres, with a USDA-inspected plant on his own farm and pork sold by name at Rick Bayless restaurants, including inside Disney. In 1998 hogs were bringing 8 cents a pound minus trucking. He maxed his credit cards, pulled pennies out of his daughter's piggy bank for a school field trip, and drove a pig packed in ice in the back of his wife's Suzuki Swift into Chicago, where Wine Spectator had just named the restaurant he was selling to the best in the world.

Then the big packers noticed. He calls it winning a few battles and losing the war, shadow brands priced 25 to 40 percent over commodity, selling the same conventional product the independent farmers built their name on. Until January of 2026, foreign meat repackaged here could legally say Product of USA on the label.

Also in this one: why farmers get 14 cents of every food dollar, the JBS bribery scandal and the 97 day pause on Brazilian imports, why he ranks solar grazing above his own kill floor, why 70 percent of the lamb sold in America is imported, and the same four point reform pitch that landed the same way with a MAHA crowd and an antitrust crowd.

His line on what these farms actually export: the topsoil and the kids.

What should we dig into next week? Put it in the comments.

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THIS EPISODE IS BROUGHT TO YOU BY:

● Propane Farm Research Program ➱ propane.com/farmfunding

TIMESTAMPS:

00:00 Cold open and guest introduction04:45 In '94 his dad said the little guy was done05:29 40 companies own 70 percent of America's hogs06:20 600 acres, woven wire fence, hogs on pasture10:14 172 dollars an acre, and a 17,000 dollar silo that same year12:07 A home equity loan, a foreclosure notice, a piggy bank14:01 1988, an exchange trip, sheep farms selling straight to restaurants16:24 Sponsor break, Propane Farm Research Program17:04 Purdue, 1994, buying the family sow herd20: