Economic Impact and Impacts of Continuing to Proceed as We Are Now

With the dramatic increases in concentration in recent years of input supply and output processing firms and with striking increases in the level of vertical integration (the proportion of slaughter hogs sold under some type of marketing or production contract approaching 70 percent for example), it is important to assess the implications for producers. Such a structural transformation of a subsector is not unknown—the broiler industry went that direction several decades ago—but it is a first for the Middle West.