By Cara Jepsen
Jim Sorenson bought the Atkinson Market in 1975. He sold it and retired 20 years later, but he can still be found at the counter of the Branding Iron Cafe, a bustling restaurant in the same building as the market. Most mornings it’s hopping with locals who come for coffee and social hour; even the mayor of Atkinson (population 1,000) is in attendance. Most of the customers are over 40, and everyone seems to know everyone else.
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“There aren’t any hogs around Kewanee anymore,” says Varnum Dana. For 45 years he and his brother Richard were two of the area’s most successful hog farmers. Until last year, they’d been raising 2,500 to 3,000 hogs annually on 20 acres and selling them at the Atkinson market. They did it the old, labor-intensive way, out in the field where the animals are exposed to the elements. “I just got tired,” says Dana, who has lived in the same house for all of his 61 years (and whose family has raised hogs there for the past 100 years). “It seemed like we went and got them raised, and went to sell and got jacked around with the markets. It seemed like the feed man and the vet were making the money and we were doing the work.”
“The packinghouse has influence from the sow to your table, from conception to kill,” says Zeien. “I’m not sure it’s for the better. Maybe it’ll go like the chicken industry. You can’t pick up a piece of chicken in the grocery store that doesn’t say Tyson on it. The hog business seems headed that way too.”
“Nobody took the markets from the farmers, the farmers gave it away,” says old-timer Merle Le Sage of Chicago Order Buyers. He sits in an ancient office overlooking the ring. He wears square glasses and a hat advertising feed; he’s been in the hog business 47 years (including a stint as a flack for the Union Stockyards). His paneled walls boast plaques, awards, and quaint drawings of nuzzling pigs and grazing cows. “The farmers won’t take credit, but they did it to themselves. Now there are less farmers, and they have to scrabble to get on top.”
