Matt Culbertson’s high school graduation celebration was interrupted by a disease outbreak on his family’s farrow-to-finish farm, later confirmed as his first experience with porcine reproductive and respiratory syndrome (PRRS).
“It was surprising and devastating,” Culbertson says. “At the time, we weren’t really sure what to expect over the next two weeks, let alone the next 30 years.”
As the chief operating officer of PIC today, Culbertson can’t remember a day of his life that wasn’t centered around the pork industry.
“I was born and raised in the swine industry,” he says. “My dad worked for George Brauer, one of the original pioneers of the confinement movement within the swine industry in the early 1970s. In the mid-1970s we moved up to Geneseo, Ill., and my dad began to run a farm that was originally built by George’s brother in partnership with him.”
His bedroom window looked out over their farrowing house, Culbertson adds. He started working for his dad by the time he was in first grade – doing any job he could to be helpful on the farm. Although his parents knew their son was destined to work in the pork industry, they urged him to get outside of his comfort zone to make sure he really wanted to land a long-term career in it.
Culbertson pursued an animal science degree at Oklahoma State University, where he solidified his passion to go put his practical swine background to use in a future career. Read on to learn more about his 15-year career with PIC – from his business philosophy to his views on the future of the U.S. pork industry.
Q. Describe your path to PIC.
A. After getting my degree at Oklahoma State, I went to graduate school for swine genetics at the University of Georgia. After completing a PhD, I moved back up to the Midwest and worked for Heartland Pork for five years, where I experienced a rapidly growing swine production enterprise. I then moved my family to North Carolina, where I had the opportunity to work for Murphy Brown/Smithfield Foods for 10 years running their internal genetics, nutrition, veterinary medicine and aligning various integration activities. This gave me a great opportunity to see a bigger slice of the pork chain from start to finish. In 2010, I went to PIC where I’ve held various roles from sales to global product development to technical services. Two years ago, the opportunity arose to be chief operating officer and lead our global PIC business through – what I think – is a pretty exciting and transformational time for our business and for the global industry.
Q. Tell me about your business.
A. I would like to believe when somebody talks about PIC, they say our primary goal is to help make our customers as successful as possible. Obviously, we’re a swine genetics business, and that starts with providing an improving pig from generation to generation. That definition of improving is dependent upon the customer’s targets for success. In some markets, it may be around cost of production, and for some, it might be around carcass yield and value. By deepening our relationship with our customers, we can tailor our product and our genetic improvement to help build the initial foundation for driving their success going forward. We combine that with technical support and a supply chain that strives to meet customer needs for high-health, high-quality animals and on-the-ground customer support.
Q. What is your “why”?
A. My ‘why’ is to make a better, more successful global pig industry going forward. When I think about how to do that – and this goes back to the experiences and motivations I saw from my father growing up – it’s to continue to provide innovation to the industry. For PIC, that’s innovation around creating a better pig and providing technical support that goes along with that to allow people to achieve results they didn’t think were possible.
Q. Describe a typical day on the job.
A. Although there is no typical day, most days involve a mix of interacting with global customers, listening and understanding their needs, and exploring with our team how our business can help them fulfill those needs. My focus is on how we deliver value to customers and continue to innovate through technology and people development for the future.
Q. How does your company work with its customers.
A. We want to be involved in our customers’ operations as much as possible. Genetics is different from other inputs that go into the production system – it’s a much longer-term business relationship. We obviously want to supply great pigs but we also have a true desire to understand how our animals are performing in their system, both strengths and challenges, and then working cooperatively and proactively on the challenges.
Q. How has the swine industry changed since you started your career?
A. There has been a tremendous amount of transition over the last 20 to 40 years. I think one part of that is the structure of pig farming operations. They’ve become much larger in size and more specialized. That increased specialization and increased size has occurred against a changing landscape of the availability and type of labor we see in farms across the globe. My story of growing up on a pig farm and only ever working with pigs is not the story for the majority of the employees coming into the swine industry today. We need to help them understand how rewarding a career in the swine industry is so they have the continued desire to grow and become motivated leaders in the future. It’s also changed the demand for and impact of specialized expertise that fuels innovation across health, production management, nutrition, facility design or other strategies that allow good production practices to be consistently and efficiently implemented.
Q. What are the greatest opportunities in the swine industry?
A. For me, the swine industry is highly personal because I grew up in it, and it’s all I know. But beyond that, producing food for people across the globe is personally motivating. As I travel around the globe and see differences in food availability and security, and the efficiency with which it is produced, I think there’s a tremendous opportunity to have a positive impact.
Q. What are the biggest challenges the industry faces?
A. One challenge that we need to continue to actively recognize and lean into is how we grow and develop the human capital needed for our industry in the future. I think it’s important for all of us to help develop the next generation of leaders so that they can continue to evolve and improve the foundation that hopefully we’ve helped build to this point.
I think the other thing that is increasingly complicated is the global aspect of health and disease. The unfortunate reality is that foreign animal diseases, like ASF, continue to spread across the globe. This is combined with the increasing challenge of many common production diseases, like PRRS, which don’t seem to be getting more predictable to manage. The public has an expectation for their food to be safe, efficient and produced in a way that aligns with their values. We need to continue to invest in an innovation pipeline that enables us to meet the consumers’ demands of the future.
Q. What do you enjoy most about your job?
A. The thing I enjoy the most about my job is the people. We have a tremendous team of intelligent, high-energy, high-integrity people at PIC across the globe and that energizes and motivates me to continue to do what I do. That is multiplied by the wide range of different customers and others within the swine industry who I get to interact with. I tell people that the swine industry, for me, is much more than a job.
Q. Who inspires you?
A. The greatest inspiration I draw from is my dad. He’s the one who taught me the basics of swine production. He’s the one I witnessed walking through a transition from outside dirt lots to inside sows in large groups of pen gestation with natural service to implementing artificial insemination with gestation stalls and large-scale breeding barns. And at the same time, he invested in the community that we lived in, in the team of people that were long-term employees on our farm, and in service back to the industry from cooking pork chops at the county fair to being president of the National Pork Board. He set a tremendous foundational example for me within the pig industry and as a husband and father.
Q. What is your business philosophy?
A. My business philosophy is to set strategic targets for the future and then surround myself with energetic, intelligent people who think differently but are motivated by the belief in doing big things. There will always be ups and downs on any given day. That’s to be expected, and that’s okay. I was drawn to PIC in part by the motto ‘never stop improving.’ That requires a recognition that you’re not perfect when you wake up in the morning. If you were perfect, you wouldn’t need to focus on the ‘improving’ part. That really speaks to me, both as an individual and as a leader aligning our business and team around having the freedom to take chances, to do what’s right for the right reasons and to focus on that from a growth mindset.
Q. What will the business look like 20 years from now?
A. PIC is wrapping up its 63rd year in business. We were started by a group of pig farmers who believed they should be able to use science to make a better pig to improve their operations. What exactly that science looks like has evolved dramatically over those 63 years, from simple weights and measures to large scale utilization of computing technologies to things like genomics and gene editing. In 20 years, I hope PIC is still known for focusing on customer success and keeping an open eye toward innovations that will allow us to develop a better pig at an increasing rate.
Q. If you could go back and do something differently in your career, what would it be?
A. I don’t know that there’s anything I would fundamentally go back and do differently. There were challenges I didn’t expect at certain points, but ultimately, I learned as much from those experiences as I did in the things I enjoyed the most. From a career progression standpoint, I’ve been given dramatic opportunities to do things I wasn’t prepared to do at every stop along the way. Those things sometimes went well but sometimes it took a try or two to get it to the point of going well. I do think they were all necessary to contribute to the perspective and understanding I have today.
Q. What advice do you have for someone interested in doing what you do?
A. When opportunities present themselves, don’t be afraid to take a step. Not every step is straight up a ladder. Sometimes the steps broaden your perspective and allow you to experience new areas of the industry or new areas of the business. This helps you become more balanced as a potential candidate for future roles but also expands your knowledge base.
Q. How does the threat of foreign animal disease impact the future of the U.S. pork industry?
A. I believe we’re at much greater risk of introduction of foreign animal disease (FAD) than the majority of our industry does, and that’s in part driven by my experience watching the spread of FAD across the globe. I believe the absence of FAD across the Americas is a huge competitive advantage when it comes to export markets, predictability of operations and the predictability of supply chains. However, that always has the potential to be disrupted by a bad day. If a FAD outbreak did occur within the Americas, it would be very difficult to fully eradicate it back out within a reasonable period.
