Of all the lessons Fredrik Sandberg has learned over the past 14 years in his career, probably the most important is to listen more than he speaks.
“It’s a simple thing that most of us know,” says Sandberg, who works primarily in the U.S. and Canada but also Europe. “But it’s really about developing the ability to listen so that we don’t just hear what people say, but that we truly understand what they’re saying.”
The pork industry is incredibly diverse, he points out. To really get down to the “nuts and bolts” of what someone means requires a lot of conversation.
Spending time with producers throughout the Midwest in his role as senior director of monogastric ruminant research and commercial product development for Furst-McNess has helped Sandberg develop important skills.
“As a young Ph.D., when you come out of school and you go into the industry, I would say we might have a little bit more ego than we should have,” he says. “After 14 years in the industry, you learn very quickly that animals will make you humble in a hurry.”
A key realization has been understanding that people might share things in different ways.
“People may not use sophisticated language, but they can still explain and develop complex processes,” he says. “It’s being able to communicate with everybody through the chain, including the guy working at the farm who left high school at 16, but may know animals better than you ever will. It’s learning to have respect for everyone within the system and hearing what they are saying. That skill took me many years to develop and some pretty painful errors along the way.”
Read on to learn more about Sandberg’s career with Furst-McNess, from his business philosophy to his views on the future of the pork industry.
Q. How did you become interested in the swine industry?
A. I grew up on a small, mixed farm in southern Sweden. In the early 1980s, my dad had a finishing barn that had computerized liquid feeding. I was very intrigued by the technology and that side of raising pigs. I wanted to go to veterinary school but did not make it, so I ended up doing animal science. I attained my bachelor’s degree in animal science, and I got a Ph.D. in computer modelling of swine nutrition during disease, both at the University of Edinburgh in Scotland. Joined Devenish Nutrition out of school and worked with them as a swine nutritionist focusing to baby pig nutrition for a couple of years. Then, with Furst-McNess, I started off as a field nutritionist, and then I moved into management roles. Today, I’m working in a director position, but I’ve focused on nutrition and health throughout my entire career.
Q. Tell me about your business.
A. Furst-McNess serves those who feed the world. That means we try and help producers wherever they are, across the different species. We have mills that make everything from complete feeds to the really, really tiny inclusion trace and vitamin premixes to some of our more specific dry and liquid technologies that are primarily focused on efficiency and health.
Q. What is your why?
A. I enjoy working directly with clients to support them in their needs, whatever those needs are. I also really like the development side of things, trying to develop new solutions and figure out what producers’ problems are and then developing solutions to those things.
Q. Describe a typical day on the job for you.
A. I serve a core set of customers where I am the primary nutritionist, some of those I’ve worked with for more than 10 years. I also coordinate research, analyze research, write up research and communicate it with our marketing teams. I do a lot of interacting with our field staff and serve as phone-a-friend on various issues and opportunities. I also support our manufacturing plants in different ways to help them be more efficient and to function well. Communicate with vendors and review new offerings and opportunities. I also have a support role within the company regarding the direction that we take for serving those who feed the world through nutritional solutions.
Q. How does your company work with its customers?
A. Furst-McNess is unique in that we have staff on the ground across the whole country. One of the primary ways we serve people raising livestock is that we have people who are locally available, who understand the local region as the regions of the U.S. are vastly different. We have infrastructure around them to be able to manufacture what they need but through that local service. We have an extensive centralized support system of Ph.D. nutritionists, livestock feeding consultants, formulators, research scientists and even in some areas, business support in general. We have a traditional business structure, but I think it’s unique because it is implemented at a face-to-face level. Our staff are working directly with our customers, and in some areas, even with their livestock to deliver nutritional solutions.
Q. How has the swine industry changed since you started your career?
A. When I first came to the U.S., porcine epidemic diarrhea virus (PEDV) was taking off, and we were trying to fight this new virus. We still have PEDV, but we have ways of managing it, and it’s obviously no longer a new pathogen. I think one of the big ways our industry is changing, and I would say it’s somewhat concerning, are the highly virulent porcine reproductive and respiratory syndrome (PRRS) strains. Diseases normally evolve from more virulent to less virulent, because if it doesn’t kill its host, it increases the chance of spreading to other animals — the goal of that virus. Some of these PRRS L1C strains are very virulent. PRRS has always been there, but to see that PRRS in some cases is becoming even more virulent is one of the things that has been very concerning. Another big change is the extent of antibiotic resistance we see in E. coli and Salmonella and several of the other bacterial pathogens. I often work closely with veterinarians, and as we sit down to look at the resistance/susceptibility profiles from the vet labs to our primary antibiotics, there is an extensive amount of resistance out there. I think the key area we have to be much more purposeful about is how we attack to even try and reduce resistance.
Q. What are the greatest opportunities in the swine industry today?
A. Our industry has a great opportunity to escalate its approach to biosecurity. A lot of people are using feed mitigation, for example, and some are using water sanitation. There are some people using air filters and we have recently done work with environmental fogging. I think taking a more holistic approach to biosecurity in terms of people, feed, air and water is something our industry needs to take to another level. If you can keep the pathogens out, the performance and livability come with it. Livability drives feed efficiency and all the key financial parameters. A holistic biosecurity program is no longer optional; it is absolutely essential, and the technologies are there to do it.
Q. What concerns do you have about the swine industry?
A. I think the greatest challenge we have today is PRRS, because we don’t have a way of managing PRRS. It’s far too easy for PRRS to go through the air, especially with lower temperatures and water droplets carrying dust particles in the air. That’s a factor we have to develop a system for addressing, not just in sow farms, but also in finishing barns. Filtering finishing barns is not financially feasible today. We need to work more broadly together as an industry to reduce the risk of that transfer across farms. I think the second part of that is developing ways of helping the animals if they do get sick. The options we have today for PRRS-affected pigs are very modest. We need to develop more.
Q. What do you enjoy most about your job?
A. Outside of the people, I love developing and testing new technologies for the industry. The first part of any development process is understanding the issues that need to be solved and communicating and understanding that is exciting. As with any development process, we have many failures because everything doesn’t work. But when something does work, and when something works when we scale it up in large commercial development testing, that is truly, incredibly rewarding. It has happened a few times in my career, and hopefully a few more times before I am finished.
Q. What’s something people might not know about you?
A. Occasionally I will preach on a Sunday.
Q. What advice do you have for someone who might like to do what you do someday?
A. Being a nutritionist is not just someone who formulates diets. Being a nutritionist today covers everything from business consulting to support to coaching to developing staff to building teams. Pig production is fast-moving and involves so much technology, science and types of people, from veterinarians to nutritionists to bankers and all the staff within an organization. Being a nutritionist is a very rich job. It’s a challenging job, but it’s rewarding, and I would encourage anyone that has a mind for numbers and is interested in biology and economics to look into it because it is a very exciting career.
Q. What is your business philosophy?
A. My philosophy is to listen more than I speak and truly understand the problem before I start developing solutions. I think we should always be building paths toward solutions, because in animal agriculture, there are no such things as silver bullets. Whenever people take the approach of a silver-bullet solution to anything, as opposed to a path to process approach toward resolution, we will always fail. One of the ultimate ways we do that as a company is that some of our internal conversations are as much ‘iron sharpening iron’ as it will ever get. But that is good, because we hold ourselves internally accountable before we work with our external customers and other companies that we are influencing.
Q. If you could go back and do something different in your career, what would it be and why?
A. I spent a lot of my career working on farm, and I still work on-farm today in many areas. With such a large Spanish-speaking group of staff in the swine industry, being a technician supporting these farms, I always felt that it was a failure on my part not to be able to speak fluent Spanish.
Q. How is the growing threat of foreign animal disease impacting the future of our industry?
A. I see the issues that go on in the European mainland, where many countries like Germany and others have had to deal with African swine fever (ASF). I think it is a make-it or break-it situation that should not be left to chance. I have been a big follower of Scott Dee’s work for a long time, and the reason for that is because a lot of people would think that getting a virus through feed into a farm is a really silly idea, and he proved that it was not. Then, we look at ponds or water sources like aquifers; they can be sources of pathogens. We also know people bringing sandwiches onto farms and all those types of things are risks. ASF is not something we can get lazy about. I think that as a country, the U.S. produces incredible amounts of very high-quality pork. We need to protect that through a much more aggressive stance in terms of biosecurity. Attack is the best form of defense. I think with foreign animal diseases, we must take that approach, and if we don’t, we’re going to lose.
Q. Who inspires you?
A. Zig Ziglar says, “Help enough people get what they want, and you will get what you want.” It’s really taking the servitude approach. Whatever we’re doing, we need to serve others. There are two men in my career that I have interacted with, competed against and been challenged by that have had a huge influence on me personally: nutritionists Wayne Cast and Tommy Shipp. Their focus toward the bigger picture of any problem, whilst looking at the really small details and integrating that with practicality has really been fundamental in terms of how I think about nutrition. They’ve given me some good lessons over the years, which I’m very grateful for. Some have been pretty humbling, but that’s good for you.
Q. What will the business look like 20 years from now?
A. Twenty years ago, many people would have said that the swine sector would look like the poultry sector now, but it does not. There is still a large number of independents within the swine sector. It is consolidating, but what we see specifically on the swine side is when we model the economics, average isn’t good enough. You have to be in the top 25% of performance if we compare it to MetaFarms benchmarking data, to be sufficiently profitable in the good years and to break even or have minimal losses in the bad years. I think that’s where swine production is unique because it is a big battle between scale versus efficiency. Ultimately, I think the success of swine farming is return on invested capital (ROIC). Many people look at margin over feed or feed cost, sometimes return on investment, but I believe it’s really ROIC. Large systems can lose an awful lot of cash very quickly if performance is not good, and smaller systems can sometimes have higher levels of performance, allowing them to be at that safer area in terms of cash in, cash out. I don’t know where the industry will go, and that’s a very good question whether scale will beat efficiency. We’ll see. I expected it to be a lot more consolidated today than it is.
Editor’s Note: PORK Perspectives is a recurring column that provides business and leadership strategy tips from some of the pork industry’s finest.
