Farm Name: Henry Creek Farm
Owners: Doug, Kim and Olin Claassen
Location: Potwin, Kansas
Farm’s Features:
- 1400 sows farm, 4-week batch farrowing
- 8000 finishing places, 220 farrowing places and 15 open housing gestation pens
- Diversified production including 600 to 700 feeder cattle, 3000 acres in croplands and 800 acres in pasture.
- They have their own feed mill. They utilize their own corn and soybeans to feed their pigs.
- 10 full-time farm employees (5 are family members)
- They have the Gestal Quattro for farrowing, the Gestal 3G for gestation and the Gestal EVO for gilt development.
Claassen Family Uses Precision Feeders to Grow their Family Farm
Fifth-generation Kansas farmer Doug Claassen faced the classic family farm problem with their swine production management.
His two sons wanted to come home and work in the family’s diversified hog, cattle and crop operations. But was it even possible for a small family farm to be viable in today’s pork industry and expand its operations?
They had to find a way to increase their pork operations’ revenue while keeping their expenses as low as possible. They found their solution in Gestal’s precision pig feeding system. They are affordable and would help them increase their profitability.
By incorporating Gestal’s smart-feeders for gestation, farrowing and finishing, Henry Creek Farms improved their swine production management, increased efficiencies in labor, saved on feed and improved pig health, welfare and performance.
They decided to nearly double the number of sows in their farrow-to-finish operation and Doug’s two sons joined the family farm operations.
A Pig Feeding System Technology to Grow a Family Pig Farm
The Claassen family goes back generations in central Kansas. Their first relatives arrived in 1876 from West Prussia.
Doug says that, when he was growing up, pigs were always part of the family’s diversified operations. In 1978, after Doug’s college, they had 120 sows. They gradually increased that as the farm focused more on adding value to their cropland by feeding their harvest to livestock. The pig manure was used (and still is) to fertilize their farmland.
By the time Doug’s sons Cody, 30, and Cole, 26, were thinking about returning to the farm and joining their cousins who run the farm’s crop production side, they were at 750 sows. The family knew they didn’t want to buy more farmland. They looked instead to grow their pig production.
Plus, the hog market had consolidated. They used to be able to sell their pigs 30 miles from the farm, Doug says. They’d send a truckload of 35 pigs a week. Now Kansas doesn’t have any packing plants, which means they have to haul four to five hours away. Freight’s expensive. Going to larger groups of finished pigs at a time allowed them to stay profitable.
In 2018, they built a new finishing facility and in 2019, they added a new sow barn and turned their old facility into a nursery. In the new sow barn, Gestal’s feeding systems are used with gestation, farrowing and their Gilt Development Unit (GDU). They keep half of their weaners to finish themselves and sell off the rest, although the goal is to finish all their pigs eventually.
“We can produce 2500 to 3000 pigs every four weeks and that gives us a good batch of pigs to fill a finishing site,” Doug says. “We can go all in and out at and with Gestal, use some of the same technologies that the bigger integrators do, but affordable and at our scale.”
For more on the way Classen’s family modernized their operations, keep reading here.
