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Big Pork Producers Just Can’t Quit Gestation Crates

Industry groups say cost and complexity make change difficult, despite pressure from billionaires, customers and ballot measures to stop confining pregnant pigs

Pigs in a gestation building at a farm in Eldridge, Iowa, in 2012.

Pigs in a gestation building at a farm in Eldridge, Iowa, in 2012.

Photographer: Stephen Mally/The New York Times/Redux

Professor John McGlone of Texas Tech University trekked to Manitoba, Canada, in the dead of winter to warn hundreds of local pork farmers that the way they did business was about to change.

McGlone knew McDonald’s Corp., the world’s largest restaurant chain, planned to say it would only buy pork from producers who didn’t keep pregnant sows in gestation crates — 2-foot-by-7-foot stalls that don’t let the animals turn around and force them to excrete where they stand. Crates were standard for the industry that puts bacon and pork chops on plates around the world, but seen as cruel and unnecessary by a growing mass of critics and consumers.