Meat + Poultry - March 2009 - 40

barns full until the very end instead of
pulling pigs out along the way."
Seaboard's production and processing
facilities manifest sustainability in several
ways environmentally and economically.
Brenneman says he's proud that the hog
farms the company builds today are basically the same as the farms Seaboard
built 15 years ago - "What that tells you
is that we were looking forward 10 years
ago, asking, 'What is a long-term model
that is environmentally sustainable in the
hog-production industry?'" High Plains
Bioenergy, a wholly-owned subsidiary,
operates a biodiesel plant adjacent to
the Guymon pork operation, creating
fuel from animal fat and vegetable oils,
and methane from the Guymon plant's
waste lagoons is captured and used to
fire the facilities hot-water boilers.
Recently, CO2 stunning was installed
at Guymon, part of the "culture of continuous improvement" that Brenneman

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says the company is imbued with. Another improvement made at Guymon:
The boxed pork processed at the plant
is USDA Process Verified, meaning it
meets the USDA Process Verified program's requirements for quality, animal
sourcing and animal handling.
Brenneman sees a challenging period ahead for the pork industry, even on
the heels of record exports, a business
at which Seaboard excels - it exports a
much higher percentage of its production of the pork industry's average for
one company. "USDA is projecting maybe a 9 percent decrease in pork exports
from 2008 numbers, and I certainly hope
they're right. I think the numbers will
go down and I'm all right with that, but
down 9 percent is one thing and down
20 or 30 percent is another. Can some
of these countries - Russia, China - afford to buy like they did in 2008? Right
now that's a big question mark," Bren-

neman wonders. "I'm also getting increasingly concerned about some of the
comments coming out of Washington.
There's been a big push for 'Buy American' protectionism, but my opinion is the
U.S. is extremely competitive in a lot of
areas - in meat production and processing, especially - and we put out the safest, highest-quality pork products of any
country in the world. When you're competitive, the last thing you want to do is
put barriers up. You want to compete in
the world's marketplace.
"Because what goes around comes
around," he adds. "If we take the protectionist approach, other countries are
going to do the same thing. It becomes
very difficult to operate under such restrictions when you're used to operating
in an open world market."
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e-mail at: meatpoultry@sosland.com.

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Meat + Poultry - March 2009

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