After waking up the incredible hour of 9:30 Sunday morning in Coon Rapids, we departed for Shenandoah. On the way we stopped at the great Iowa attraction of the huge ceramic bull. It was slightly anticlimactic but still worth the five-minute pit stop. The rest of the day was spent touring the Liljedahl’s farm in Essex Iowa. We were connected with Dennis and Diane Liljedahl because they are distant relatives of Rob. We first chatted a bit with Dennis outside their home, and he filled us in on his life in the agriculture business. He has a hog operation as well as a whopping 2500 acres of farm land. He was gracious enough to allow us to tour his hog barns.

We first went into the sow barn where mom pigs were caged in next to their baby pigs (farrowing crates). This is so that the babies can feed from their moms but run a lower risk of being squished and killed by the sows which would be a problem if the sows weren’t held firmly in place by metal bars. Despite my understanding of that concept, I found the sow barn extremely upsetting. The sows had sores on their sides from the metal rubbing off their skin, and they were looked so unhappy and scared. As we walked down the aisle the little piglet’s climber over each other to get on the opposite side of the enclosure so that they could be as far away as possible from us. There was even a dead sow with its little piglet sadly nudging it as if to try and wake up their sleeping mom.

If I thought that barn was bad, the next was worse. The next barn was just long lines of pigs kept in tight confinements (gestation crates) that did not allow any movement other than lying down and standing back up. They could not turn around or hardly move at all. Many of the pigs were trying to use their snouts to open the cage. It was really hard to see. The conditions were not just inhumane, they were extremely unsanitary. The confinement has slates in the floor so that the feces can go down into a pit below. We had just learned that these manure pits are essentially cesspool pools of disease and harmful bacteria. Not to mention the smell which was just heinous. There are hardly words to describe the feeling in the pit of your stomach when you look into the eyes of a creature that lives such a dismal life. It’s safe to say it will be a little while before I eat pork again.