For decades, Hord Family Farms operated with confidence knowing they were in a historically healthy region of Ohio where devastating porcine reproductive and respiratory syndrome (PRRS) outbreaks happened “somewhere else.”
Even so, they prioritized biosecurity. Admittedly, they weren’t sold on filtering barns at first. They raised their own replacement gilts internally, ran their own tightly controlled transportation loops, washed and baked their own trailers, and used advanced sanitation protocols. They weren’t cutting corners.
Then came 2021.
A highly virulent, aggressive new variant of PRRS popped up in their region. Almost overnight, the red “positive” diagnostic reports began flashing on computer screens — a sight that Phil Hord, co-owner of Hord Family Farms, says still triggers a sense of PTSD.
“At first, you think it’s an anomaly. You think, ‘Oh man, we must have walked it in,’” Hord recalls. “But then it happens again. And again.”
Between 2021 and 2025, the virus tore through their unfiltered sow farms. They tried closing herds. They waited. In one case, a herd remained closed for over a year, yet the virus stubbornly persisted, forcing them to make the difficult decision to depopulate.
For Hord, the crisis was deeply personal. He was in the barns, shoulder-to-shoulder with his team, executing the depopulations.
“It was one of the hardest things I have personally gone through,” Hord says. “When you watch your team’s morale get completely destroyed by a virus they can’t control, you realize you have to do something. It sucks. And we can’t forget that.”
Breaking the Cycle of Insanity
As Hord and his father, Pat, looked at the wreckage of consecutive outbreaks, they came to a stark realization: “Having hope that the breaks wouldn’t continue wasn’t a strategy.”
Breaking, cleaning, depopulating and re-breaking – they finally had enough.
“We were up against things that felt too big to fix,” Hord says. “But doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result is the definition of insanity. We were sitting on the sidelines saying, ‘Filtration is too expensive,’ or ‘Does it really work?’ while the virus kept punching us in the gut. We decided we were done taking punches.”
The Hords decided to bring filtration to Ohio—a region where filtration was virtually non-existent.
“Part of it was for my own sake of wanting to do something more and it was the only thing I knew we could do that we weren’t doing,” Hord says. “I wanted to help our team not be in that place again.”
They took a hard look at their Ohio assets and weighed the advantages of negative-pressure vs. positive-pressure systems. They had older barns with settling foundations and aging structures. In a traditional “negative-pressure” filtration system where outside air is pulled in, every microscopic crack in a concrete foundation or emergency exit door becomes a gateway for unfiltered, virus-laden air.
To bypass this hurdle with their older barns, the Hords opted for a positive-pressure system. By installing massive blower fans behind banks of high-efficiency filters at the end of the barns, they forced clean air into the attic and rooms, keeping the static pressure positive. If there was a crack in the foundation, clean air pushed out of it, preventing outside air from seeping in.
The $3-Million Gamble
Hord is quick to caution other producers: filtration is not a silver bullet. They used filtration as the last tool in the toolbox of an already strong biosecurity program.
“Filtration changes the odds, but it doesn’t eliminate the risk,” he explains. “If your basic biosecurity isn’t already sorted, don’t waste your money on filters. You won’t execute the details.”
The total capital cost of their investment was roughly $1,100 per sow space. The breakdown was about $1,000 per sow space for positive pressure retrofit, including new fans/controllers, loadout room, mortality room, exhaust louvers and wind wall boxes, etc. Approximately $100 per sow pace was for the actual M15 filters, he explains.
The total investment to add filtration to a standard 2,500-sow farm was about $2.5 million to $3 million. But Hord says the alternative was worse: low-quality pig flows, buying replacements, broken downstream finishers, lost market margins and a defeated workforce.
“The technology is the easy part,” Hord says. “The hard part is the culture shift. You have to train your team to treat every single minor operational detail—from empty feed bins to a crack in an emergency door—as a potential catastrophe. It requires active, daily, ongoing attention.”
The Hords learned this lesson the hard way. In their filtered systems in Minnesota, they analyzed a recent break to find the root causes. The findings were humbling. In one negative-pressure barn, a feed bin ran completely empty, he recalls. Because the feed line was empty, the powerful exhaust fans sucked outside, unfiltered air directly down the feed pipe and into the barn. The first pigs to break with PRRS were in the pens under the first feed drops.
Hord believes it helps to bring in fresh eyes to take a look at your farm’s biosecurity protocols. They also have one person on staff who oversees biosecurity all the time.
“He obviously can’t be at all the farms all the time, so he’s focused on creating ‘champions’ for biosecurity on the farm team,” Hord says. “Then, it’s a lot of training and retraining and keeping it a part of the conversation.”
The team buy-in has not been a problem. However, understanding all of the biosecurity steps and how they complement each other is key. Hord says that’s where the power comes in.
Don’t Wait for the Virus to Change
How do you know if the gamble is paying off? Hord Family Farms’ Western operations are 100% filtered, and their Eastern footprint is approximately 80%. While PRRS has run rampant through Ohio and Indiana over the last year, their filtered farms have stood strong.
“I don’t know how else to explain why the farm across the road from a positive site hasn’t broken, other than we are trying our best to mitigate it through biosecurity and now filtration,” Hord says. “That’s the thing about biosecurity. You may never know what all you stopped from coming in. But doing everything we can helps me sleep better at night.”
As a younger owner in an industry currently battered by tough economic cycles, he views the massive investment as a commitment to future of their family operation.
“We talk a lot about generational businesses,” Hord says. “When we invest in this kind of technology, it’s because we actually believe in this industry and we want a sustainable future. We are building a system that can wean healthy pigs consistently, protect our contract growers and protect our team’s mental health.”
It’s also a commitment to the entire pork industry – something that doesn’t get talked about enough.
“When we have less PRRS in our system, we have lower chances of breaking other production sites,” Hord says. “It’s really a compounding effect when we think about putting less PRRS out into the region and how much better that sets us up as an industry.
Hord learns something new every day in his role as a producer-owner. He says filtration has brought greater focus within their sow production system. Production numbers are up again, higher than they’ve been in the past. It has made pig farming fun again, he says.
“I think we can always make a lot of excuses about why the tools won’t work or can’t be implemented,” Hord days. “I am a very practical person, so I understand that may be true at times. But sometimes we like to look away from things that we should have been using that could have prevented some of the issues that we’re in today as an industry.”
For producers standing on the sidelines, waiting for absolute certainty before they act, Hord has a simple piece of advice: “Don’t wait. If you have older assets that need renovation anyway, build filtration into the plan. Stop waiting for the virus to change and start changing how you fight it.”
