Harvesting ingenuity to feed the masses: from the Piedmont to the coastal plain, large Tar Heel farms leverage economies of scale to cultivate global markets.

• Position: CASH CROP: LARGE-SCALE FARMING

Every week, about 2,000 piglets leave Bundy Lane's Gates County farm. They're among roughly 115,000 born each year to the 48,000 or so sows at Lane's Sarem Farms Inc., a cog in the well-oiled machine managed by Warsaw-based Murphy-Brown LLC, the livestock-production subsidiary of Virginia-based Smithfield Foods Inc. and the world's largest pork producer. The newly weaned pigs are trucked to another Tar Heel farm under contract with Murphy-Brown where they eat until they're big enough to be slaughtered and processed at a Murphy-Brown packing plant.

Murphy-Brown owns the pigs and provides feed and medicine to the 1,200 independent North Carolina farmers it contracts to raise them. The farmers make the capital investment in barns, utilities, water and labor to house the pigs. The company assumes the market risk, so the farmer doesn't lose money if the price of feed rises or the market price of hogs falls. It also reaps the reward if hogs fetch a better-than-expected price.

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But the contracts provide farmers a guaranteed revenue stream, something that's welcome in a business where hail, drought or a hurricane can wipe out crops and a good chunk of the farm's annual income. Companies such as Murphy-Brown also provide veterinarian support and the expertise of Ph.D.-level animal nutritionists. "Farmers don't have the resources to take care of those costs themselves," says Mitch Peele, senior director for public policy at the North Carolina Farm Bureau Federation Inc. "Margins across the board are very small. It usually takes farm operations getting larger to generate more income for themselves."

That business model makes it possible for North Carolina to be the country's second-largest pork producer, behind only Iowa. Besides Murphy-Brown, the state is home to four more of the nation's top 25 pork producers. Efficiency-oriented, large-scale farming practices have increased production and helped North Carolina build the nation's ninth-largest farm economy, with between $10 billion and $1 I billion in cash receipts.

Nearly all the state's hog and poultry farmers work under contract. North Carolina is No. 3 in poultry production nationally and No. 2 in turkey production, with poultry ranking as the state's No. 1 farm commodity by revenue. The contracts have helped family farmers remain profitable, Peele says. "They're able to stay on the farm and have some level of income they can rely on."

The transition of Lane's farm is...