United Pork Americas CEO Flavia Roppa is no stranger to innovation. Working on her family’s pig farm in Brazil, she saw an opportunity to bring students onto the farm and learn – at a time when it wasn’t widely done.
“Students would come and spend a week to a month with us on my family’s farm learning about pork production,” Roppa says. “They had so many questions that I thought we should put it on a website. That was 20 years ago, and we almost didn’t have Internet at the time.”
That was just the start of a career of finding solutions to the needs of the swine industry.
What began as a day in the life of a pig farmer website for students started to interest companies in the industry because of the practical information of how to produce pork. That information wasn’t widely available at that time, and companies were looking for opportunities to increase education. However, many farms still didn’t have Internet, so Roppa decided to start a magazine.
“I invited the best speakers and consulting veterinarians to write articles for my magazine,” Roppa says. “But I was just a person who had a pork farm. I didn’t understand the highly technical language, and I knew others would feel the same. So, I used my website and magazine to change this. As I invited people to contribute articles, I told them I am a farmer and need to understand what you’re saying.”
And her business took off. No one was putting out that kind of content, so there was a lot of demand for what she put together on her website and in the magazine. The content naturally flowed into an event. She had grown up attending conferences with her father, and she credits that experience as inspiration to plan events. But at the time, most conferences were highly technical and focused on veterinarians, researchers and scientists, so Roppa put together something different.
“I was going to events and understood almost nothing,” Roppa says. “I decided I needed to create an event for people to go to learn how to produce pork in a way producers could understand. I launched Pork Expo Brazil, and I tried to make it a unique event. It wasn’t just focused on producers or a scientific person. I wanted it to be in a language to talk to everybody.”
Roppa says this idea is what changed the market in Brazil. Producers started coming to learn how to improve their operation and be more profitable. She also had a focus on marketing, especially the global market, which wasn’t talked about much 20 years ago. The goal was to help the average producer understand the economy, prices, commodities and the global market and then apply it to their farm. Pork Expo Brazil grew so popular that more than 150,000 international swine producers, veterinarians and industry stakeholders from nearly every continent have experienced the event to date.
As the industry becomes more and more global, her original concept continues to be an important one. She decided to leave Brazil and move to the U.S. She chose Orlando, Fla., as a strategic location for a lot of travel, and it provided inspiration for a location of a U.S.-based event – United Pork Americas.
An international conference and tradeshow, United Pork Americas has become an extension of her Brazil-based event. Farm Journal acquired it in 2021, and it’s set for September 7-9, 2022, at the Hyatt Regency in Orlando.
“I’m excited to give another opportunity for the pork industry to come together for everyone to learn from the best speakers in the world in a very nice city where they can come with family.” Roppa says. “They can have a good time and mix work with pleasure. Everybody loves Orlando. We can all come together to have a very nice party to celebrate the pork industry and learn about everything that’s going on and that’s going to change the pork industry the next few years.”
Bringing this type of pork event to the U.S. is important to Roppa because her hope is it will unite the American continents.
“The individual countries in the Americas are doing amazing work,” Roppa says. “They are becoming more and more competitive. So my main idea is to show the importance of all the American continents. We have different production systems than other areas of the world, are very efficient, and the quality of our meat is amazing. We need to be more effective and work together to continue to build the industry.”
For more information about United Pork Americas, visit www.UnitedPorkAmericas.com and register today.
More from Farm Journal’s PORK:
It’s Time to Change How We Staff Pig Farms in Face of Labor Shortage
Think Twice About Feed Biosecurity on Your Pig Farm
We Need You at United Pork Americas
What Can North American Pork Producers Learn from South America?
