Microbial Hog Feed

Another shuttle customer story.

David is a micro-biologist at a local company and he told me that a third of their business is in bacterial supplements for hog feed. Otherwise they service brownfield reclamation and petroleum spill cleanups.

I asked him if he wakes up at night sometimes thinking he has a way to feed bugs off the Fukishima disaster. There's a lot of work to be had there.

"I wish." he said.

Later that week I met CB from Patrick Cudahy again and asked him about the pending sale of their parent company Smithfield to a Chinese company. China consumes the most meat protein of any country in the world and Smithfield raises the most hogs.

CB said that the rising Chinese middle class has discovered pizza and they need to know how to make pepperoni. I don't think he was exactly joking. As far as he has been told Chinese farmers generally have twenty or a hundred hogs.

What they are really after is the total process - farm to fork. They want to get into the CAFO business - Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations.

After a little study I see that China has very little arable land and a large amount of it has been rendered unusable. They have done an amazing job with what they have but it's time to branch out in order to feed their people.

What I did not get to ask him is how the Chinese government feels about GMO's and pesticide use. That was about the same time the EPA increased the allowable limit of glyphosate by 3000% - yes, three thousand percent more pesticide can now be used on some of our food crops because we have to have a way to kill off the super-bugs created by lesser amounts of chemicals.

Currently Smithfield is shipping about 15% of production to China. CB hopes that our government puts a cap on exports prior to the sale or we could see the price of bacon go through the roof.

A week later David, the micro-biologist is back for another trip through service and I mention this hog feed story to him. He listens and does not have much to say.

I do not exactly wish that his car will require service again soon, but I do wonder what study he's done in the interim.

There has been a young woman riding in to work with him these last two times. She's headed to Peru for an archeological dig.

"Cool," I said, "Bring me some bones."
I'll be happy to hear a bit about that story.