Homesteading families in the Panhandle commonly kept a pig or two for personal consumption. The pork industry on the Oklahoma Plains advanced dramatically in 1992, when Seaboard Farms announced plans to build a pork processing plant in Guymon. By the early 2000s, 4,000,000 hogs a year were being raised in Northwest Oklahoma and the Panhandle for processing at the Guymon plant, and the pork industry had become an integral part of the economy of the Panhandle and the entire state of Oklahoma.