The collaborative nature of the pork industry is one of the reasons why it’s such an exciting and fast-paced place to be. The ability to share ideas and learn from others’ experiences helps the greater industry achieve more in a shorter amount of time. Here are four ideas for your farm from the experts featured each quarter in the State of the Pork Industry Report.
1. Post the score.
The first six months in a pig barn can be challenging for new employees. It’s easy to take things for granted and expect them to know things they don’t, says Adam Annegers, sow production manager at JBS. After all, he adds, everybody has a first-day or first-year experience.
One of the opportunity areas that Annegers and his team is focusing on at the farm is doing a better job of posting the score and sharing information with his team.
“Our teams want to know the goals and where we want to go,” Annegers says. “We are trying to post the score to show here’s where we’re at now compared to where we want to end up. I think there was a lot of disconnect from boots-on-the-ground caretakers understanding what our targets and opportunities are. The more information we can share, the better everybody understands what we’re after.”
He also believes it’s a benefit to not get more buy in, but for the team to understand the why in farm decisions.
“Being able to explain our protocols are here for a reason, and if we follow these right every day, here are the results that we expect, you to get is pretty powerful,” he says. “Then, when the team can reach and exceed those goals, they buy into the process and grab onto it.”
2. Celebrate the wins.
For Randy Kuker, director of swine production for The Equity, one of the best things he’s done with his team lately is hold a percent-in-the-box competition.
“We gave them access to the data when we were actually receiving that data,” Kuker explains. “Quarterly or annually, we reward the top marketer, whoever got the best close-out for percent in the box.”
Kuker points out that his team doesn’t own any of the pigs that they sell. They raise them for other people.
“But when you make it a friendly competition and something to go after, there’s a pride factor,” Kuker says. “We went out and purchased a cheap WWE championship belt. The winner gets to walk around with the belt and take pictures. We also take them out for pizza or something like that. It’s just something fun that everyone rallies around.”
3. Measure animal welfare.
“When I think about interesting, innovative things in the barn we’re doing, one thing that comes to mind is that we’ve been pushing for welfare metrics,” says Cara Haden, DVM, director of animal welfare at Pipestone. “We improve on the things that we measure. We don’t do a lot of measuring of welfare metrics, so we’ve been tracking treatment success rates, trying to benchmark how many sows you’re treating, for what reasons and what your success rate is.”
She says this opens the door to really good conversations.
“It’s hard to just tell people, ‘Hey, treat more.’ It’s much easier to have the conversation of, ‘Hey, you’re benchmarking lower than some of the other farms in the system. How can we get you so you’re more competitive with everybody else?’” Haden says. “To me, that’s a direction our industry needs to go.”
4. Take advantage of technology.
Mobile data entry makes tracking data so much easier when you are entering your treatments into a record system, Annegers says.
“It’s very quick and easy to run a few reports and sit down with the team to discuss,” Annegers says. “I’d highly recommend a mobile entry record system for treatments as well.”
Brad Eckberg, account executive at MTech Systems, says he’s had several conversations recently that were focused on technology needs in the wean-to-finish side of the grow-out phase.
“There are tools out there today from a sow farm perspective that will say, ‘Here’s some tasks you need to do,’” Eckberg says. “I think that’s been very helpful for the industry and producers. It’s cool some of those tools are out there.”
But the wean-to-finish side needs more love, Eckberg says.
“That’s where the money is really lost or won,” he says. “Obviously the sow farm side is important because of the trickledown effect of what happens in wean-to-finish. We need a tool or a scoreboard, if you will, to help answer the question of ‘where should I put my immediate focus?’”
Eckberg believes a tool that could help point out what needs to be done, upcoming events, and vaccination protocols would be helpful in the wean-to-finish barn.
“As well as real-time checklists, some comparisons against flow sites and giving some of that real time feedback to the caretakers, as well as from the support staff, to help communicate and create more visibility,” he says.
Watch or listen to their entire discussion ranging from health issues on the farm to what’s happening in Washington, DC, on YouTube. These experts share their perspective on what’s been happening on farms in Q1 2025 and what’s coming this summer.
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