It’s hard when sows die, says Luis Lopez, breeding team lead at New Fashion Pork’s 1,400-sow farm in Thorp, Wis.
“It’s hard when you care for a sow the best you can and she can’t recover and ends up being euthanized,” Lopez adds. “You want her to thrive and live for as long as she can, but you don’t want her to suffer either.”
The reality that you can do everything right and still lose sows is a hard thing to deal with day in and day out. It’s hard to expect the unexpected.
Sow farm manager Danielle Voelkel says she’s concerned about the heavy load Lopez and other employees face.
“You can’t help but get attached to the sow and it’s not easy having to the call the shots on when is enough,” Voelkel says. “We try everything possible before we say, ‘OK, it’s time.’ Employees always blame themselves and that’s where I come in and remind them that they can’t know when a sow is going to slip and hurt her leg. They can’t know when disease is going to strike. It’s not their fault when bad things happen.”
Health challenges that result in mortality is a reality sow farm workers face every day from pre-wean mortality to sow death, says Stacey Voight, Technical Service North America PIC.
“After being exposed to those challenges, it is typical that depression can set in. Retainment of employees is becoming more difficult because those individuals are not prepared mentally for mortality situations,” Voight says. “It is important that owners and managers of farms understand the emotional health of their employees is their most important asset.”
Pushing Through Doesn’t Work
The swine industry can’t ignore the reality there’s a rising need to step up emotional support for employees, especially on the sow farm. Athena Diesch-Chham, a farm girl and now a clinical social worker and owner of Restorative Path Counseling and Wellbeing, says she understands the “keep pushing through because at some point things will turn around” mentality, but it concerns her.
“We can’t dismiss every time we are disappointed and frustrated by the loss of another litter or another sow. When we dismiss those feelings, we reinforce for our brain and body that how we feel doesn’t matter,” Diesch-Chham says. “If it doesn’t matter, we wouldn’t care. And that’s not a thing in pig farming.”
Animal caretakers care deeply about the animals they are caretaking for, so she says they must allow themselves that negative emotional experience and then figure out what to do with it.
“Dismissing your feelings is an option,” she points out. “But every time we dismiss our own feelings, we make it easy for everybody else to dismiss our feelings. Don’t wallow in those feelings, but acknowledge it is painful. It hurts.”
Then, use those feelings as motivation to keep moving forward and keep showing up because it’s important.
Photo source: Lindsey Pound, Farm Journal
Conflict Isn’t Bad
Working side by side with the same people every day is not a bad thing, Voelkel says. She often refers to her team as a family. They spend a lot of time together and work toward common goals. But it’s not without challenges.
“Some of the most dysfunctional family dynamics happen in work families,” Diesch-Chham says. “When there are so many interrelated relationships within the work family, we are inevitably asking people to prioritize which of those relationships is more important in a conflict and that is a lose-lose situation.”
Add a layer of grief loss and it’s easy to see why conflict happens on the sow farm. When employees are in emotionally vulnerable spaces, conflict is natural. Everyone handles it differently, too. This makes the role of a sow farm manager even more complicated.
“Because you feel like you are part of a family, you don’t want to step on anyone’s toes but it’s natural to get frustrated at times,” Voelkel says.
The key is addressing it, Diesch-Chham explains. The “Midwestern-nice, passive-aggressive” is not helping your farm’s productivity.
“Conflict has such a negative connotation. Everybody thinks conflict will result in a big old blowout. But it doesn’t need to,” Diesch-Chham says. “We can approach a situation and discuss what happened. How do we feel about it? What can we do about it? What can we learn from it?”
She’s intentional about the next part of dealing with conflict: move forward. Recognize that moving forward is key – not pretending something didn’t happen. It’s also wise to recognize within conflict, even though it feels like it needs addressed immediately, it’s always beneficial to take a moment to breathe and let your adrenaline wear down.
“I used to get so worked up over the littlest things,” Voelkel says. “One of the best lessons I learned was if it’s not going to matter to me in an hour, it should not bother me this bad right now. I’ve learned to take a step back and think before I speak, especially when there’s conflict.”
She’s also learned to really listen to what her employees are saying.
Photo source: PIC
Counteract Compassion Fatigue
It’s often that simple act of acknowledging what employees are experiencing that makes the difference. One of the problems Diesch-Chham is seeing on the farm is compassion fatigue or the fatigue that comes from helping others (pigs included).
“It’s walking into the sow barn and feeling the heaviness of what’s happening in there during a disease break, for example, and feeling defeated because we aren’t where we want to be,” Diesch-Chham says.
One of the challenges with compassion fatigue, she explains, is that it causes people to isolate, keep their head down and keep moving.
“When we start landing there, we need to connect to people who are important to us, who see us for who we are, who can acknowledge the heaviness that we’re facing,” Diesch-Chham says. “We need someone to say, ‘I can hear how this is really hard. I can imagine that going to work every day feels like a losing battle.’”
Ignoring the fatigue of caretaking doesn’t work. Eventually, the frustration and exhaustion show up in the daily routine. When employees are struggling, the barn will struggle, too.
“When an employee is having a hard time, I feel it, other employees feel it. Not only do we feel it, but the sows know it, too,” says Voelkel. “The sows know when you are mad and then you get more worked up because they don’t want to move.”
Photo source: Jennifer Shike
You Can’t Survive Without You
Looking out for your employees’ emotional health is key to your farm’s success. Diesch-Chham says she recognizes that when someone is in an “emotionally fried” space like compassion fatigue, the “self-care” solution is a hard sell.
That’s why she recommends mutual care.
“Mutual care can look like a lot of things. If you have a garden, and your garden is plentiful, mutual care can be bringing vegetables from your garden to share with your team,” Diesch-Chham says. “It could be cooking. I like to feed massive quantities of people – it feels good and allows me to nurture people and gets to that caretaking need.”
The trick is before she caretakes for anybody else, cooking allows her to do something that is really beneficial for her.
“Multiple people get benefit from one act of what seems like selfish self-care, but actually falls into that mutual care spot,” she adds. “Finding ways to take care of ourselves that also allows us to support others.”
In addition to mutual care, she recommends purposeful, intentional breaks. When someone experiences compassion fatigue, breaks often feel like less of an option, she says.
“As much as they’re apathetic about the work, they’re also hyper-focused about them having to be the one to do the work. ‘They can’t do it without me’ sets in,” Diesch-Chham says. “Guess what? You can’t survive without you either. That’s where you’re headed if you don’t take a break.”
She says it’s important to consider the long game versus the short game.
“So many of us approach stuff in that short game mentality of ‘I just have to get through this and then it will be better.’ If COVID taught us anything, it doesn’t necessarily get better as quickly as we think it does,” Diesch-Chham says. “Sure, you can work a lot, but if you push that limit, how much time will you need to take off to get back from that?”
Photo source: PIC
Recognize What You Don’t Know
At the end of the day, Voelkel and others in a sow farm manager role weren’t hired to be mental health professionals. There’s a point where we all have to recognize what we know and what we don’t know. But Diesch-Chham says everybody can do some work around mental health first aid – to be able to grow in that knowledge.
“Mental health first aid training is a free, easy thing you can do online,” she says. “The basics of the program is learning how to ask questions, acknowledge what you are seeing and engage, instead of doing what so many of us are more comfortable doing – keeping our head down and blinders on.”
The livestock industry is full of hardworking, high-achieving people who strive for perfection like Luis Lopez, the breeding team lead on Voelkel’s crew.
“I feel valuable by working with my team and giving them my best self every day,” Lopez says. “I work by example to keep my team on the right path.”
But Diesch-Chham points out that while this is what makes our industry the success it is today, it’s also something we need to keep an eye on.
“When we don’t feel like we’re at our best – when our best is not getting the results we want – there is a little voice inside of us that reinforces that we’re not doing enough, not trying enough, not pushing hard enough. And that is the thing that will grind us into a pulp,” she says.
We have to recognize that what we are doing is what we can do today, Diesch-Chham says.
“If I take care of myself, if I take care of my team today, maybe all of us can show up and give a little bit differently tomorrow, maybe. But if this is all we have today, and this is all we have tomorrow, then we’re going to work with that,” she says. “Pushing to that next level doesn’t always have to happen because most of the time there isn’t a next level to push to.”
Learn more about mental health first aid here.
More from the Synergy on the Farm Series by Farm Journal’s PORK:
Lameness: The Leading Identifiable Reason for Sow Mortality
Study to Investigate Potential Mechanisms that Control Uterine Prolapse Susceptibility
Can Genetic Selection Lower Incidence of Uterine Prolapse in Pigs?
What’s it Worth to Reduce Your Herd’s Stillborn Rate?
Ease Your Gilts into Electronic Sow Feeding Systems
