Do What You Love
“Raising pigs is very complicated,” Poage says. “There are so many things that you’ve got to have right that can go wrong. There’s not any one thing that you can to do to make it all right. You have to get a lot of things right.”
That’s one of the reasons why Poage believes pig farming isn’t for everyone. He believes it is important to do what you love.
“Every Christmas, one of our farm managers in Kansas would invite me to come talk to his team. I remember one year I was telling them the reason that I was doing what I was doing was because I liked it. I said, ‘If you don’t like what you’re doing right now, quit. Go find you a job you like; life is too short to do something you don’t enjoy.’”
His speech resonated so much that three people came in and resigned the next morning. The manager called to let him know he was not invited back the next year, Poage laughs.
“When I got into the hog business, it wasn’t about making money,” he says. “My father-in-law and I got into it because we loved raising pigs. That was the number one thing, we loved raising pigs.”
Over the years, he’s learned not to take everything as the absolute last word. Poage never took an agriculture course, let alone a swine science course. Despite others thinking he was on the wrong track, he stuck to his beliefs and remained focused on his goal to produce pigs that would grow, were prolific and had good meat.
Poage’s methods weren’t well received by everyone at first, but his belief in high health opened many doors to current industry biosecurity practices. Photo provided by Poage.
“We wanted to produce pigs like they should be produced, and we didn’t care how we did it. This farm started with a lot of trial and error,” Poage says. “But we kept going until we proved it would work.”
He believes one of the keys to his success was that he never went to school to learn what he was doing on the farm.
“Things had to change. You couldn’t keep raising pigs in those A-houses outside. You couldn’t get big and have the farms like we have now doing it like they used to,” he says. “It had to be a different system.”
Investment in People
Maybe it’s that open mind that brought students like Jan Archer in to be a part of the DeKalb team. After working in Central America for a short time with cattle after college, Jan came back to the states and needed a job.
“Few people wanted to hire me, but DeKalb Swine Breeders hired me and sent me to Southwest Kansas. It was kind of a halfway house for college graduates. It wasn’t quite the real world, but you could see it from there,” Archer says.
She was introduced to the DeKalb Swine Breeders way of doing things, which included a professional training program that is still emulated today.
“It was okay that I didn’t really know that much about what I was doing, because I was trained on the job,” Archer says. “One of the things that really impacted me was the way employees were treated. We were treated as professionals. We were forced to present to foreign entities that came to look at the breeding stock. We were forced to present to each other, to learn how to be a public speaker. We had to learn the science. We had to learn why we were doing what we were doing.”
The manuals that changed many lives in the pork industry and built the next generation of leaders. Photo provided by Poage.
Surprisingly, Archer does not have a personal relationship with Poage. That’s what makes him one of a kind, she says.
“It’s significant that someone can have such a huge impact on you, and they don’t even know it,” Archer says. “There are a lot of people out there that Roy doesn’t know he has influenced. That is an impressive thing to have on your resume – all these people that you’ve impacted that you don’t know.”
Poage believed in what he was doing, and he believed in giving people the opportunity to recognize their potential in the pork business.
“I believe the thing that is common to every really good producer, is they have well trained, responsible staff. You don’t get that unless you invest time and energy in those people,” Archer says. “Even if you can’t give them more money, if you invest in their advancement, it shows how much you care that they get better. That concept is engrained in so many today because of Roy Poage.”
Read about Roy Poage and Jimmy Dean’s conversations about the hog business.
More from Farm Journal’s PORK:
A Stockman Reveals His Trade Secrets
Everett Forkner: What Does it Mean to Leave a Legacy?
Speechless: The Call That Saved One Hog Producer’s Farm
