Dr. Melissa Hensch didn’t grow up on a livestock farm; she was raised in the Chicago suburbs with the typical childhood dream of becoming a vet. But a summer project at Iowa State University changed everything.
She got her hands dirty working with pigs and cattle during a summer project and quickly figured out that she preferred the outdoors and large animal health.
“I loved the people. I loved the project. I was just flat-out grunt labor, but it showed me where I wanted to go from a vet standpoint,” Hensch says.
She spent the rest of her undergraduate years working in barns and feed mills, embracing every gritty task she could find to better understand production from the ground up.
“I think it’s important to keep your mind open — go work on the farm and the feed mill and go run production,” Hensch says. “Go do those things that feel uncomfortable that you don’t have the training to do. By exploring different avenues, I learned a ton and it has made me better in what I do today. I can think at a different level and understand where somebody might be coming from because I’ve done those things.”
When she entered the ISU College of Veterinary Medicine, she was randomly paired with renowned swine expert Dr. Locke Karriker.
“I got in front of him on day one at vet school,” Hensch recalls. “He was probably used to a whole lot of small animal kids, and he goes, ‘What do you want to do?’ And I said, ‘Pigs.’ He was like, ‘Great, you got the right person.’”
She did, and she hasn’t looked back since.
Today, Hensch serves as technical services manager for Phibro. She opens up about finding her “why,” navigating modern swine health challenges like PRRS, and why slowing down might be the smartest career move a young professional can make.
Q. What drives your work as a swine veterinarian?
A. I work for a company that has a really broad portfolio of solutions and that was really important to me when I came to Phibro. I wanted access to a portfolio that was effective, offered broad solutions, and that ultimately brings me right to my why. I took an oath as a veterinarian to do what’s right for the animal – which in my career is the pig. If I’m doing what’s right for the pig and what’s right for the producer, that impacts the bottom line of the food supply. Getting to play a role in helping provide safe, nutritious protein to families — not just in the U.S. but across the world – that’s huge. I not only get to fulfill my oath as a vet, but I get to help people.
Q. What does a typical day look like for you?
A. Although it looks different every day, it ultimately boils down to matching the portfolio of solutions to what is right for that set of circumstances. One day I may be at home in Fenton, Mo., in front of the computer looking at diagnostics, comparing flu sequences, or formulating vaccine. On another day, I may be with veterinarians and producers, asking lots of questions to better understand what makes sense and what doesn’t make sense for their herd. And some days, I’m out in the barn with them, observing, troubleshooting or helping teach how to collect diagnostic samples. I don’t do the same thing every day, but I have the same goal in mind to understand goals and opportunities and match those up with the portfolio to help pigs and producers thrive.
Q. How does your company help and work with its customers?
A. Phibro doesn’t want to be a transactional company selling products. We can do that, but that’s not really where our sweet spot is. We want to be a solutions provider. Once we understand the needs of a herd, we tailor solutions to that. For example, I’m not a nutritionist. But we have fantastic resources within the company, so sometimes part of my job is to work with that customer to connect them with our nutritionist and then we do some mineral nutrition testing. Another example would be autogenous vaccine. If we’ve got a customer needing one, it becomes my job to not just manage the isolate bank and the diagnostics, but also to help understand flow-specific challenges and bring together a manageable approach.
Q. How has swine health changed since you started?
A. There are some things that have changed and some that have not. Take PRRS as an example. It was here when I graduated and it’s still here. And it’s still going to be here 10 years from now. I hate that, but I think we’ve continued to grow and revolutionize on how we might address that. I see old tools getting repurposed and used in different ways. The virus itself is changing. The data surrounding it is changing, and how we track and adapt different things that we’re trying to do with it is changing. I could take that across many other examples in swine health.
Q. What concerns do you have about the swine industry?
A. One concern I have is the disconnect from the general public’s knowledge and experience with how their food is produced. As our younger generations are not growing up on as many small farms, we tend to have less animal husbandry knowledge and perspective on the swine industry as a whole. That leads to a lot of challenges, especially in having labor who want to work on farms and have experience in it.
Another concern on my mind is the amount of world conflict going on right now. We export a large percentage of pork. Maintaining that throughout all of the changes occurring worldwide and the conflicts going on could have a huge impact on the U.S. pork industry.
Q. Where do you see the biggest untapped opportunities in swine production?
A. One of the big opportunities I see is technology. We’ve just started to crack the code on getting simple internet connectivity at farms. If you look at where technology is in many other industries, there’s so much opportunity to adapt more on our farms. The challenge is, how do we adapt it to survive in a dusty barn environment where we’re going to have feed dust, manure and power washers? How do we get some of that technology to adapt? I don’t believe technology is going to replace true animal husbandry, but having it can help us make better decisions and react faster.
The other opportunity near and dear to my heart is just health innovation. Phibro has lots of custom tools to manage PRRS, for example. That said, we’re still adapting those and figuring out how do we use them differently? I think that’s got to be across the industry, across all the companies. What tools do we have today that we can use differently, more creatively, or combine to get a synergistic effect? New tools are hard to come by. These viruses aren’t going away; they’re getting smarter. We’ve got to continue to get smarter, too.
Q. What do you enjoy most about your job?
A. It’s the puzzle. I love puzzles, and every scenario, every customer, every account is a different puzzle for me.
Q. What do you enjoy most about your job?
A. It’s the puzzle. I love puzzles, and every scenario, every customer, every account is a different puzzle for me. I get to work with a portfolio that covers prevention, disease treatment, nutrition and production performance. I get to put all the puzzle pieces together. Let’s say I’ve got a custom vaccine. How can I manage this to the health of the barn and the flow, but also make labor simpler and let the farm veterinarian choose the dose? Maybe that’s bottle size. Maybe that’s just simple color of the seal of the bottle coming into the barn. I work all the way down to that detailed level putting the puzzle together, and then I get to sit back and see its impact on the pigs and the people.
Q. Who inspires you?
A. God is my No. 1 inspiration. A habit that I’ve started, and it’s the habit I try not to drop every day, is to read something out of the Bible. That might be a chapter or a verse in the car with my children on the way to the bus stop. It’s always inspiring. I don’t know anyone else who could ever compete with that from a simple human standpoint. It is timeless and the inspiration comes in ways that I never see coming.
Q. What is your business philosophy?
A. Do what’s right for the pig. I was in production for a long time and have a very production-oriented mindset — the positive ROI has got to be there. At the end of the day, if you do what’s right for the pig and follow important business concepts like integrity, ethics, people, and finances, it all falls into place. It’s pretty rare that doing what’s right for the pig doesn’t align with those other things.
Q. What will the business look like 20 years from now?
A. I wish I knew. I’d be floored if artificial intelligence (AI) goes away, and I’d be floored if AI doesn’t revolutionize us in some way. I think technology will end up being a big piece 20 years from now. The other thing that I believe could happen within the next 20 years, and no one likes to hear this, is foreign animal disease. I’m exceptionally proud of what the swine industry has done to prepare for and keep it out. But there’s such a high risk globally. If it does, I suspect that’s going to revolutionize things like biosecurity, health status tracking, reporting of disease. I hope it doesn’t.
Q. What’s the biggest business lesson you’ve learned at Phibro?
A. Phibro has grown at a really rapid pace. I’ve been here for four years and it’s grown a ton. We took on a new portfolio of medicated feed additives from a competitor a couple years ago, and I think that growth will continue. My focus there is we get big, we have a great portfolio, but don’t become a mile wide and an inch deep. It’s easy to get big, but don’t get too narrow and fail to understand what you have.
Q. If you could go back and do something differently in your career, what would it be and why?
A. This is going to sound simple, but if you know me, you know it’s not simple for me. I would slow down. Slowing down in some scenarios certainly would have aided my growth. I might have caught some of the harder lessons that I’ve learned myself sooner or faster. Funny to think that I would have caught them faster by slowing down. But that’s the truth. I’m a fast-paced, driven person, and oftentimes that drives me to forget to slow down, look around and take that time.
