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We Need Each Other in the Pork Industry

Those five words were just what I needed to hear the other day. Life has felt a little heavy lately, and sometimes it’s hard to even put my finger on why. One thing I’ve learned about being an ag journalist is that you do it because you are passionate about the people you write for and about. So, when the people you write for and about are struggling, you struggle, too. 

When a pork producer sent me that simple text, I admit it got to me. Putting together the outlook stories for 2024 hasn’t been easy. There is no sugarcoating that 2023 was plain awful and 2024 doesn’t look a whole lot better. 

Sometimes we have no choice but to sit in the hard for a while. Good things will come out of the wait for some, but others won’t be so lucky. That is a difficult thing to wrestle with. I’m still convinced by the theme I see woven throughout the stories on PorkBusiness.com, that we have good reason to play the long game and have hope. 

Our industry is filled with innovative, tireless, hardworking people who are advocating up for the pork industry and trying to deliver certainty in uncertain times by opening up new avenues for trade and protecting producers’ freedom to operate, to name a few. 

Researchers continue to open new doors in science, finding answers to some of the toughest questions in swine health and nutrition. Did you catch the exciting breakthrough in feed biosecurity last fall when Scott Dee, DVM, discovered porcine reproductive and respiratory syndrome virus can survive and be transmitted through feed?

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Making budget friendly pig feed on a small livestock farm

Video: Making budget friendly pig feed on a small livestock farm

I am going to show you how we save our farm money by making our own pig feed. It's the same process as making our cattle feed just with a slight adjustment to our grinder/ mixer that makes all the difference. We buy all the feed stuff required to make the total mix feed. Run each through the mixer and at the end of the process we have a product that can be consumed by our pigs.

I am the 2nd generation to live on this property after my parents purchased it in 1978. As a child my father hobby farmed pigs for a couple years and ran a vegetable garden. But we were not a farm by any stretch of the imagination. There were however many family dairy farms surrounding us. So naturally I was hooked with farming since I saw my first tractor. As time went on, I worked for a couple of these farms and that only fueled my love of agriculture. In 2019 I was able to move back home as my parents were ready to downsize and I was ready to try my hand at farming. Stacy and logan share the same love of farming as I do. Stacy growing up on her family's dairy farm and logans exposure of farming/tractors at a very young age. We all share this same passion to grow a quality/healthy product to share with our community. Join us on this journey and see where the farm life takes us.