Fifteen plants slaughtered two thirds of the hogs killed in the United States in 2025. USDA counts 786 federally inspected hog plants. The 15 that each handle 4 million head or more took 82 million of the 128 million hogs. Pork is a big-plant business owned by a short list of companies, and most of that list is not American.
This is the pork side of the Big Four story. Beef is more concentrated at the company level. Pork is nearly as concentrated at the plant level, and the gap has been closing.
How concentrated pork packing is
USDA's Economic Research Service tracks the share of animals bought by the four largest packers. For hogs it was 34 percent in 1980 and 67 percent by 2019. For fed cattle it was 36 percent in 1980 and 85 percent today. So four companies buy two hogs in three and more than four fed steers in five.
The plant side moved faster than the company side. By 1997 nearly 90 percent of hogs already went through plants handling at least a million head a year, against 38 percent twenty years before. Hog packers built very large plants early, and the industry has run on them since.
The 2025 plant count, by size
USDA's annual slaughter summary sorts every federally inspected plant by how many head it killed in the year. The hog table for 2025 reads like this.
| Plant size, head a year | Plants | Hogs slaughtered | Share |
|---|---|---|---|
| Under 10,000 | 694 | 445,000 | 0.3% |
| 10,000 to 999,999 | 62 | 9.3 million | 7.3% |
| 1 million to 3,999,999 | 15 | 35.5 million | 27.8% |
| 4 million and more | 15 | 82.4 million | 64.5% |
| All plants | 786 | 127.6 million | 100% |
Thirty plants of a million head or more handled 92 percent of the hogs. The 694 small plants, which is most of the plants in the country, handled a third of one percent.
Beef for comparison: 937 cattle plants, and the 11 that handle a million head or more took 47 percent of the 29 million cattle. Beef plants are smaller than hog plants because cattle are bigger animals and the kill runs slower, which is one reason beef concentration lives at the company level, where four firms own most of those 11 plants, rather than at the plant level.
Who owns the big plants
USDA publishes the plant sizes, not the names. The names come from the companies themselves and the trade press.
Smithfield Foods is the largest. It is about 90 percent owned by WH Group of Hong Kong, which listed a slice of it on Nasdaq in January 2025 at $20 a share and kept the proceeds. Smithfield raised 14.6 million of its own hogs in 2024, about half of what its fresh pork plants needed, and says it wants that share nearer 30 percent, buying the rest from independent farmers.
JBS USA is owned by JBS S.A. of Brazil, the same parent as the beef packer in the Big Four article.
Tyson Foods runs the third large pork network. It closed its Perry, Iowa plant on June 28, 2024, a single-shift plant that killed about 9,000 hogs a day, and kept its other Iowa plants.
Hormel Foods slaughters hogs for its own brands at Austin, Minnesota. It sold its Fremont, Nebraska plant to Wholestone Farms, a company owned by hog producers, in December 2018 for $30 million, with a long-term agreement to keep buying pork from it.
Seaboard and Triumph are the other large network. Seaboard runs Guymon, Oklahoma; Triumph Foods, owned by hog producers, runs St. Joseph, Missouri; and the two share Seaboard Triumph Foods at Sioux City, Iowa, a $300 million plant that opened in 2017.
The rest of the big fifteen includes Clemens Food Group (family owned, Pennsylvania and Michigan), Prestage Foods (a $350 million plant at Eagle Grove, Iowa, opened 2019), Indiana Packers at Delphi, Indiana (owned by Mitsubishi and Itoham of Japan), and Wholestone at Fremont.
So of the names on that list, the largest is Hong Kong owned, the second is Brazilian owned, one is Japanese owned, and three are owned by the farmers who supply them. That ownership pattern is why pork comes up every time Washington talks about foreign control of US meat.
What changed since 2017
Between 2017 and 2019 the industry added three large plants in two years: Sioux City in 2017, then Eagle Grove and a second shift at Sioux City by 2019. That was the capacity wave that let the hog herd grow into the record kills of 2019 and 2020.
The wave is over. Perry's closure in 2024 took 9,000 head a day out, and an industry economist quoted at the time put national weekly capacity near 2.65 million head on a five-and-a-half-day week. The 2025 kill was 128 million head, 1 percent under 2024, with hogs averaging 289 pounds live. The plants are not the constraint today; the hog supply is.
What it means for a pork buyer
Three things follow from a market of 15 big plants.
One plant is a national event. When a plant stops, the hogs meant for it have nowhere close to go, and the cuts that plant specialises in go short at once. The JBS cyberattack of May 2021 shut pork plants as well as beef. A single large plant down for a week is more than 2 percent of the national kill.
Most hogs are not bought on a daily bid. With this few buyers, packers own or contract most of their hogs, and the negotiated trade that sets the daily price is a thin slice. The hogs page shows the live split by purchase type, and the negotiated versus formula article explains why the thin slice still sets the number everyone else is paid on.
Packer margin is a structure, not just a spread. A packer that owns its hogs, as Smithfield does for half of its needs, takes the hog price and the pork price on both sides of the same ledger. The packer margin page covers how the public margin is estimated and what it misses.