Lauren Schwab Eyre, who blogs at Farm Girl with Curls, farms full time with her family about an hour north of Cincinnati, Ohio, near Somerville.
She’s combined her love of pigs, country music and bourbon to ignite conversations with consumers online and share important information about raising pigs to the public.
Eyre’s dad began pig farming after high school, so she was born into the family business.
“He started raising showpigs, but really fell in love with farrowing when he had an uncle give him his first sow,” she says. “In the ‘90s, the opportunity came for him to start contract raising with raising piglets for another farmer in Ohio. That’s what we’ve done as long as I’ve been alive.”
The farm is a breed to wean farm with around 1,200 sows.
“We sell about 1,200 to 1,300 piglets every couple of weeks to other farmers,” Eyre adds. “I grew up learning all the farrowing process, and that’s where I spend most of my time is in the farrowing houses. I am on a farm full time.”
Eyre worked on the farm during college while attending Miami University and studying journalism. She had been active in FFA and enjoyed public speaking.
“I really gravitated toward writing and ag communications,” Eyre says. “I had an opportunity to intern with the National FFA Convention and did that from 2011 to 2018.”
At those events, she spent time in the newsroom and behind the scenes writing stories about what was happening at convention.
“There were a few years where I was lucky enough to interview the country singers who were performing at convention,” Eyre says. “I always loved country music growing up and even wanted to be a country music singer. As I got older I realized I wasn’t going to pursue a music career, but when I was interviewing the artists, I thought this is awesome; I could do this forever. I think if I wasn’t farming, I would love to work for CMT or something like that, but I just never made it down to Nashville because the farm kept me in Ohio.”
During an internship in grad school, Eyre was encouraged to start a blog as a way of telling the story of agriculture.
“I didn’t know if I could just talk about pigs, so I decided to incorporate talking to a lot of these up-and-coming country artists,” she says. “When I first got on social media, there were a few artists that came across my blog posts I had written from the FFA Convention. They really wanted their music to be shared.”
Eyre says country music relates to her lifestyle and what she does on the farm. She shares aspects of pig farming on Instagram and YouTube, and her blog mainly focuses on country music.
“I love when I can talk to artists and share their music,” she says. “Especially if they come from a farming background, then I tie in that connection of agriculture, country music and talking about our lifestyle.”
On social media, Eyre shares images and videos of farm life, sometimes incorporating a country music song with it. The music and videos get people’s attention.
“I share a lot of the piglets in farrowing houses because I really want people to see the good care they’re getting,” Eyre says. “I show the piglets comfortable under the heat lamp or nursing on their mothers. I also show footage on weaning day when we’re loading them up on the trailer. People love to see all those pigs.”
While some of her ag friends she’s met through FFA and Agri-Women, and other ag organizations follow her accounts, she says much of her audience are consumers and outside of the industry. In recent years, Eyre became interested in bourbon as she lives so close to Kentucky.
“There is a group called Bourbon Women that I joined,” Eyre says. “I love that agricultural side of bourbon as well, learning about the grains that are grown. I enjoy going on tours of the distilleries and learning that process, and I always love when they talk about the farmers they work with, so I just love the whole culture and the production of it.”
When she shares about country music or bourbon, it brings new people onto her posts and they realize she’s a farmer and see the the agriculture part of it too.
“It’s almost like a subtle way of advocating for agriculture because they’re going to get a good impression of pig farming,” Eyre says. “That’s what I really enjoy, just people being able to see that there are family farms out there caring for pigs, because I’m sure they can come across a lot of negative things on social media too.”
Eyre encourages others to share their story as you never know the positive difference it can make.
“You could be the only farmer that someone comes across that’s going to be able to have that positive image of agriculture,” she says. “You’re opening up farming to people that may never have seen it in their lives. It could be someone in New York City comes across my video, and I might be the only pig farmer they ever come across, and they’ll be like, ‘Oh, that’s a real person. That’s a real family farmer.’ When more people think it’s just big companies that own farms.”
When you give someone a genuine impression of agriculture and are able to show how much you care, that helps promote your business, Eyre says.
“We’re going to be successful if people have a positive image of pig farming in their mind, and they will feel better about purchasing pork when they go to the grocery store,” says Eyre, who wrote her master’s thesis on the importance of food security. “When I tell people the pork from my pigs ends up at grocery stores across the country and across the world, they feel better about purchasing it. They don’t necessarily have to go to a farmers market to get food from a family farmer. They can feel good that whatever their income is, whatever their situation and food availability is, they can feel good about the pork they’re purchasing.”
To follow Lauren, you can find her on Instagram and YouTube and her blog, Farm Girl with Curls.
