Health, labor and high input costs are high on pork producers’ list of challenges heading into 2026.
For Bethany Heitkamp, a veterinarian at Cooper Farms, porcine reproductive and respiratory syndrome virus (PRRSV) is causing a lot of problems and continues to get worse and worse over the years.
“We’ve worked on PRRSV for 40 years, trying to implement vaccines and different strategies,” Heitkamp says. “It always seems to find a work around for us and really plagues the health of our pigs.”
Health is always a big challenge, says Jarred Black, director of transportation for Hancock Pork LLC.
“One thing we are focusing on now, in light of the severity of the PRRSV circulating in this part of the country, is to go back and reevaluate our biosecurity protocols,” Black says. “We break them all down to ensure we’ve got the basics covered.”
Winter conditions complicate some processes such as disinfecting and drying facilities, he adds. When labor is limited, that just compounds the issues.
Labor is one of Brad Heimerl’s top concerns. He serves as senior manager for procurement with Bob Evans Farms.
“Our No. 1 goal is to take care of the pig, and to do that effectively, we need good people who understand our business and show up every day to do the best job they possibly can,” Heimerl says. “We’re definitely seeing support to find ways to make get people on the farm. We try to educate and show off opportunities when they are young in hopes of getting people to come back from college to be a part of an operation.”
As a contract grower in Ohio, Nathan Schroeder says profitability and weathering high input costs is difficult now.
“We are on a fixed payment schedule,” Schroeder points out. “One thing that we can’t really control is the input costs. Between propane and rising utilities, just the normal day-to-day usage of materials in the barn has skyrocketed. We sell and supply some motors and hog barn supplies to local farmers, and the price is just a crazy number. It makes everything very tight.”
One of the best ways to tackle these challenges on your swine operation is to borrow ideas and strategies from others. Four industry leaders and producers share some of their best practices and lessons learned at the Ohio Pork Congress.
What is one way you are growing your operation to be better – not necessarily bigger?
Black: Our company is really focusing on the farm level and growing in areas where it makes sense – where there’s not a super dense population of other hogs. However, keeping that community aspect and focus alive is important to us. Farmers are part of the community, and we want to do what’s right for both the environment while supporting local communities in rural America.
Heimerl: When it comes to sustainable growth, we look toward ways of becoming more transparent to our consumer base. Obviously, we listen to the consumers and want to be transparent. We talk about that word a lot, but many are trying to do that and be more present in the conversations.
Heitkamp: We’ve worked on growth in a couple of different areas. The first one is sustainability. Cooper Farms is approximately 95% landfill free. We also have some alternative energy sources that our contract growers work with such as solar panels. We also put in wind turbines at our cooked meats plant. We are finding ways to use alternative energy sources to try to grow sustainably.
Schroeder: We’re in some tight times, especially on the row crop farming side of things. The hog side has been improving. Being a contracted grower, I am set in my price structures, but we still try to look to every little thing we can do. In our hog barns, instead of hiring people to fix some things, we are looking at how can we figure this out on our own? on the farming, on the row crop side of things, you know, you got to find ways to pinch pennies right now. It’s so hard to, I mean, you know, a new finishing barn, you’ll probably have eight to $900,000 into it’s hard to build right now. So finding unique ways to maintain what you have, and we’re looking at that on our farm as a way of growing.
Have you found any success in reducing costs in the barns lately?
Black: It’s wintertime. It’s cold. Barns are burning a lot of propane, depending on the size of the pig that you mght have in the barn. Evaluate your ventilation systems. Make sure everything’s running at its optimal level. Don’t burn your fans too much or run your fans too hard. It’s a good time to get out and look at the new technology and equipment out there to see if it might be time for an upgrade to a more efficient system.
Heimerl: One of the things I focus on is feed. Sometimes we overlook that, but being more efficient in our feed and making sure we have it rationed properly is important. We want them to be as healthy as possible. To do that, make sure they’re eating the best. Pigs get a perception of being fed garbage, but that perception is quite the opposite. We want to make sure the pigs are in the best health they possibly can to be the most efficient for us. Focusing on your nutrition program is huge. There are a lot of inputs that are very volatile in the price point market, and being able to make sure that you’re focused on that helps a lot.
Heitkamp: In addition to finding ways to reduce costs on the farm, we’re looking for the healthiest animal that we can produce and the most efficient animal that we can produce so they use less water per pound of bacon and require less feed per pound of bacon.
Schroeder: The biggest thing we have found to reduce energy costs is taking time to go through the barn and looking at your ventilation. Make sure your fans are cleaned off. That extra dust and that extra weight on it is astronomical how much more usage of utilities that uses. Take some time and look at your maintenance on your barns, and that can help you out, probably tenfold more you’d ever thought.
What is one thing you wish you had done differently in the first 24 hours after a PRRS outbreak?
Black: In the first 24 hours after a disease break occurs, it’s critical to get on-farm care started and get aggressive with treatments on the individual pig level. Use the access to the amazing veterinary services that we have here in the state, and the information that we get from the pork industry as a whole to be able to aggressively try and get ahead of a PRRS outbreak as best we can. I think it’s important to look after your workers as well because it’s a very difficult time that they’re going through. Obviously, animal care and health is top of mind, but we have to always keep our farmers in that equation as well.
Heimerl: When it comes to a PRRS break, or any outbreak for that matter, communication is huge in the first 24 hours. We’re always thinking about our operation and how are we going to mitigate this? What does our future look like? We’re also worried about our neighbors – pigs that are close by and where that could spread to in the area. Don’t forget transportation and your trucks, as they are just as compromised. Being able to have conversations with your neighbors and being transparent as a collective organization is important. We try to do our best at communicating those issues, but there’s always room to improve.
Heitkamp: In the first 24 hours after a PRRS break, you need to get your team together on farm and explain what’s happening and what their expectations are going forward. It’s going to take a while for the virus to work through the farm, so just having an expectation of what will happen over the next few days, the next weeks, the next months, is important in order to get the team prepared for what they’re going to see on farm. I think another important thing to do in the first 24 hours is getting your outbreak investigation prepared. Basically that is getting all your touch points on the farm organized and all the information about visitors and transportation recorded before that information disappears.
Schroeder: One thing I wish we would have done after an outbreak is be a little more proactive as soon as we heard that information to make sure neighboring barns got that information, too. We always make an attempt to tell everybody, and through the integrators, they do a pretty good job of informing others. We need to make a better effort of letting everybody know that, ‘Hey, we’re sick right now. Let’s watch where we’re all driving so we’re not driving by this barn.’ Every little bit counts as this PRRS virus moves around the
