Wendell H. Murphy

Wendell H. Murphy is an American farmer and businessman who built Murphy Family Farms into one of the largest hog production companies in the United States. Raised in a tobacco farming family in Rose Hill, North Carolina, he earned a degree in agricultural education from North Carolina State University and taught vocational agriculture before going into business with his father raising hogs and running a feed mill beginning in 1962. After a cholera epidemic among his hogs in 1969, Murphy shifted his company toward contracting with local farmers who raised hogs supplied with Murphy's equipment, feed, and piglets, a model that by the late 1990s had grown to house hundreds of thousands of sows and market millions of hogs a year, making Murphy one of the most influential figures in the history of American swine production.