CHICAGO _ The low-slung sheds where some 20,000 pigs grow to market weight each year are unmarked by any business sign or attempt at beautification. Baling wire secures fraying plastic windscreens to the wood and concrete buildings. Everything seems gray, rusted, peeling or patched.
Not far from the entrance, a dumpster is stacked with dead piglets. Farm dogs root stray animal parts from the ground and carry them off, tails wagging.
When Jeff Seabaugh pushes open the door, a fierce, putrid smell stings and immobilizes a first-time visitor, like a hard slap in the face. But the confinement owner has already sprung to work, beginning the physically punishing and low-paying labor that sustains Illinois' $1.5 billion pork industry.
Under the arrangements that now dominate swine production, "contract" farmers like Seabaugh own the confinement buildings, raise the thousands of pigs inside and manage the millions of gallons of waste produced. But the animals are the property of larger companies that pay these growers a "pig space" fee and dictate conditions of care, including supplying the feed and medications.
Some operators have prospered under the contract system, but the agreements also can lock farmers into a life of grinding toil and leave them barely able to make their bank payments. Seabaugh likens himself to an indentured servant, saying he earns just a living wage for grueling workdays 365 days a year.
"If I wasn't in it so deep, I'd never do it again," he said.
The system can also inflict misery on surrounding communities when financially strapped confinement owners fail to control noxious air emissions and poisonous manure spills. Seabaugh is fighting a suit filed by his neighbors over airborne gases they say damaged their lives.
The problems are a disappointment to one central Illinois farmer who helped develop new methods of raising pigs in the years following World War II, moving the animals out of muddy pastures and into automated confinements that greatly boosted productivity. The optimism of those early years dissipated as hog production became concentrated in the hands of a few large corporations, hastening the end in Illinois of small farms where families raise both crops and livestock.
"Simply put, corporations took over the hog business," said 93-year-old Harold Steele, one of the state's hog pioneers. "Where does this put 'we the people'? Into a garbage can."
Seabaugh borrowed millions of dollars to buy or construct his facilities but has struggled to repay bank loans. His hog confinements have generated upward of $2 million in annual revenue, but most of that money goes to the large packing houses and suppliers that own the pigs he raises, court records and bankruptcy documents show.
"The top dollar comes to the guy that owns the pigs, not us that raise the pigs," Seabaugh said. "We are at the mercy of them. You have to go along with whatever they say. You have no voice in it. It is getting worse."
And when aging hog barns become obsolete, the big pork companies can take their pigs and dollars elsewhere while contract growers pay to decommission giant waste lagoons and tanks.
Southeast Illinois farmer Richard Sutton closed his hog confinement in 2014 but said he is still struggling two years later to empty its million-gallon manure lagoon. "The expenses of closing these things down are just tremendous," Sutton said.
Seabaugh allowed a reporter and photographer to spend hours in his grim labyrinth of confinement sheds in Montgomery County in southern Illinois, observing the toll the factorylike system takes on facility operators who raise pigs they don't own.
He's faced all the accusations commonly leveled at owners of confinements housing thousands of hogs. Neighbors of another Seabaugh facility in Macoupin County filed a civil lawsuit in 2012, saying the confinement's sickening air emissions made it impossible to host family gatherings or even to sleep some nights.
Seabaugh told the Chicago Tribune: "There was nothing we could do about the smell. When you live in the country, you got to get used to it."
Shortly after complaining, one family "received the severed head of a sow in their front yard," the pending lawsuit states. That allegation made Seabaugh snort with laughter. "A coyote probably drug it there," he said.
The Illinois attorney general also has a pending suit against Seabaugh, saying waste had oozed from earthen lagoons and from a basement pit under the Macoupin County barns, turning tributaries of nearby Taylor Creek "a reddish-orange color."
Seabaugh said he had leaks but inspections showed the manure never reached the creek, and he is still contesting the case, filed in 2011. He has since shuttered that site.
As Seabaugh straddled a gate and entered the first pen, dozens of piglets clattered away, circling like schools of fish. Stepping gingerly across the slotted concrete floors, he grabbed a bruised-looking piglet by its hind leg and gently squeezed the squealing animal head-down between his knees.
He jabbed its squirming back with an injection of antibiotic _ "it is a little booster shot for the pigs that are falling behind" _ then squirted the pig with a splotch of blue spray paint to mark it as medicated.
Unclenching his knees, Seabaugh gently let the piglet's front legs slip to the floor and watched the animal teeter and then disappear into the drove.
"There's no need to be cruel," he said.
