Adapting and Communicating in Pork Production | Ed Tice

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Welcome to the Popular Pig ORG podcast, a convenient place where you can stay up to date on what's popular in the swine industry.

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By listening to Popular Pig ORG, you will receive invaluable information on the latest trends, news, and research from various experts who guide the global pork industry. Popular Pig is brought to you by Swine Tech, the award-winning creators of SmartGuard and Pigflow PRODUCT. To learn how Pigflow PRODUCT can help you streamline your workforce and reduce piglet and sow deaths, visit Swine Technologies.com ORG. Popular pig is also made possible by the National Pork Board ORG.Farm Credit Services of America ORG. Johnsonville Foods ORG. High port genetics. Mini-tube. Orbit farm technologies. Brennaman pork. PIC North America ORG, swine robotics,neogen, innovative heating, and pig equipment.com, brought to you by American NORP resources.

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Welcome to the popular pig podcast. I'm your host, Matthew Rota, and joining me today is Ed Tice to talk about the history and potential future of industry audits. How are you doing today, Ed PERSON? I'm great. How are you, Matthew? I'm good. We're in the swing of March Madness. By the time this comes out, people will probably know who the champion is, but we got Iowa State, Illinois, Purdue ORG, all still in the mix. So most of the people in our industry are probably pretty happy with what's going on. Yes, they are.

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The Ag School is still represented in there. So in my history, as we'll learn through here, is, you know, I'm probably, I live 10 miles from Iowa State ORG, but I'm probably pulling for Purdue ORG just because all my years in Indiana and my wife actually attended Purdue for PhD. So our house is going for Purdue now, and hopefully Iowa State ORG gets in there as deep as they possibly can too. I'd have to look at the brackets.Maybe it's an Iowa State Purdue ORG final. I don't know if that's possible or not, but that'd be ideal around here.

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That'd be pretty crazy if it was. I think it's going to be cool, though, Iowa State, Illinois GPE, having the opportunity to match up, and that'll be a good ag to ag competition. And we'll see. Purdue, Matt Painter, reputation, never making the final four. We'll see if we can break through and win it all.I think it'll be pretty cool if the two number one seeds to lose the 16 seeds end up going on and winning a national championship.

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It would be fun, yes, makes it interesting.

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So would you be able to introduce yourself, your background,

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how you got involved in agriculture,

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and then maybe stair step us through your career? Yeah.

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Yeah, I grew up in a little bitty town in the Texas Panhandle outside of Amarillo GPE. Had 35 kids of my graduating in high school class, which was one of the largest classes in about 20 years or so. From there, you know, growing up, we showed a lot of livestock primarily pigs and played a lot of sports, football, baseball. Lifestock judging was my other passion through high school and had a verygood ag instructor there and hauled us all over the country and did a lot of, had a lot of success doing that. And new football probably going to be a career just because needs were gone. And went the junior college route first to the little small school in Texas Panhandle LOC, Clearning College and Judge Livestock ORG and was on a national championship team there. Then went from there to Tarleton State University, small school in Stephenville, Texas GPE,ag school, about 6,000 students then, you know, a little bit bigger than that now, but it's a real small school. A lot of farm ranch kids went there, and then from there, right out of school, I started with IBP, you know, which is now Tyson. Perry, Iowa GPE, coincidence. Perry ORG's in the news here lately, but that was my first assignment as an alley buyer at Perry and spent about six months in Perry, you know, learning how to sword hogs, way hog, spent time with the buyers at the back office, helping, you know, schedule the loads in and those things.After about six months, I got an opportunity to go to the market desk in Dakota City, Nebraska GPE, then the corporate office and worked for the head of hog buyer, the VP of Port Procurement, Gary Mahon PERSON, who's a legend in this business. If you're in the pork industry, I mean, he's a lot of the way we pay for our hogs and do things now was Gary PERSON's vision way back then. So, instrumental got to be around a lot of people in the sliding industry early on in my early 20s, I worked for Gary directly, and guys like Gene Lehman and, you know, Dick Bond PERSON and all those guys, if you've ever been in the industry, those are those are pillar names out there.And I was fortunate enough to get to watch them and just be a sponge around them. After that, I got my first buying assignment. I was in Nebraska for a short time and then went to Indiana and worked for a guy named Steve Peterson PERSON, who has been my mentor for since going on 30 years, you could say, and work for Steve Peterson PERSON at Logan'sport. Steve PERSON now runs.He's a president of Heinhold hog markets and has been for years, but still stay in touch with him. And you got to work, Steve PERSON brought me out there, and it was a blessing. We spent 20 years out there. I was a senior buyer. I worked out of my house. Met my wife out there.Stayed out there to 2017. So, you know, I bought for Logan's ORG what was my plant. But as we came in and we're going to talk about this. In the midst of that, you know, animal welfare became a bigger and bigger topic, and Tyson created a program then that we called Farm Check. And I got to be one of the founding members or staff or whatever for that program, which is, you know, was the first of its kind as far as one of the major packers doing on-farm auditing and training,you know, and then eventually that became enrolled into what we know now as a standard industry audit where everybody kind of hopped on board. The National Port Board ORG adopted it and helped write the training. You got everybody on the same page. I left Tyson in 2017 and we moved to Iowa GPE. I went to work for United Animal Health ORG then.And I was running their brokerage business overseeing that with the buying and selling of wean and feeder pigs and also was the director of the sales team for the lender show feed division. I was there for three years and then kind of went on my own and partnered with a, sorry of my own business, but I have a partner named Dustin Dornickand we run four county pig placement where we do a lot of that, you know, buy and selling, placing of whin and feeder pigs for our customers throughout the United States GPE. And then I also partnered with a lady out of Florida called Choice of Champions ORG. And it's a supplement business. I run the livestock sector. She runs the horse sector.And then, you know, just chasing kids. I've got one that's a senior now, about to head to K state next year and one that's a freshman. So hopefully that's a long short of it.

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And hopefully I got enough of what you need in there. Can you remember towards the beginning of being asked to be a part of the founding team to create an audit? Can you remember what was happening in the industry that

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was driving that kind of a conversation? Well, for years, you know, farmers just kept their heads down and went you know, went to work. They really stayed out of the media or the front page and didn't get themselves tied up in it. But, you know, coming into the early 2000s to the mid, you know, mid-2000s, getting around 2010, it just seemed like we were getting more and more pressure from, you know, the groups out there, the animal activist groups, you know, were putting more and more pressure, question what we were doing.You were getting more hidden videos coming out all the time in the swine industry that, you know, were making front page news, but they were such a small percentage of what actually went on. You know, I don't know if they were staged or not. Some of them were, but, you know, we were just, it was time for us to get on the offensive. And you go back to the public and really sure up that trust that we have to them, that, you know, the people that provide our food, our supply chain, were doing it the right way.You know, that all this video and all this stuff that was coming out, all our adversaries our supply chain, we're doing it the right way. You know, all this video and all this stuff that was coming out, all our adversaries, you know, they were not saying that nothing was out there, but it was such a small percentage that you really had to go and get it done. So that was really, you know,we had to come out in the powers that be. You know, I wasn't one that came out of the idea. I was one that got invited into the conversation as they developed it and got to go out and help implement it. But it was time for us to get on the offensive, to be proactive and come out and really, like I said, reassured the buying public that the food they were consuming, you know, wasraised in a humane manner.

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So what was that process like when you got invited in? Tell us that story. I was a little nervous, you know, was raised in a humane manner. So what was that process like when you got invited in? You tell us that story?

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I was a little nervous, you know. I got an email from Todd Neff PERSON at the time, which was the VP of Port Procurement and said, hey, it was on like a Thursday or Friday. It was like, hey, you got to be up here at, I was in Indiana GPE at the time.You need to be here Monday morning, you know, at the corporate office. So I'm like, man, I don't think at the time, you need to be here Monday morning, you know, at the corporate office. So I'm like, man, I don't think they would really waste jet fuel to fire me, but, you know, we're going to. So plane was booked. I flew out, met another one of the buyers here and I.We drove on out to the corporate office. And that's when they brought us in and said, hey, we're creating this new program. We're going to do some on-farm audits. And you four, there was four of us, have been selected from the buying force to go out and do these audits. And we're going to be here for about, I think we're there two or three days.And we went through lots of different training on what to look for, how to do them, became PQA ORG plus certified, and even got to be advisors at that point where we could train and teach the courses. So, you know, two or three day crash course on that. I wouldn't say crash course, but of course just on how we're going to implement and what we're going to do and what questions to ask and things like that. And then we actually went to a site in Carol Iowa as a group and did our first audit as a group and walked through.You know, so, I mean, it was a quick program that we went through. But, you know, we actually got hands on not just, hey, read this book, do how to do it. You know, we went in as a team. We learned. We asked questions. We knew how to start.We knew as we went through that, we were going to learn. We had to take good notes and share our experiences and learn what we didn't know and be open-minded about it. And that's really how, you know, that first week in 2012 is the way that it started. And then we come back and then we notified our producers we were going to do it and started identifying them. You know, everybody was in the pool and you could get drawn.And once you got drawn, then you set up at time and he went out and did the audits. So eventually, you know, we had valid as was the first company that we used to my recollection, that did the third party audit. So they were doing them as a third party and we were doing them also as an internal department within, you know, Tyson ORG at the time.

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Do you remember what the initial reaction was from producers with these?

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Initially, just like anybody else, there was a little bit somewhere apprehensive, I would say, because of the unknown. And a lot of people get nervous. It doesn't matter if you're in agriculture or what you're doing.

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There's always a little bit of fear on the unknown as, you know, do you not believe me? Why don't you think I'm doing my job or things like that? But as long as you went in and you were calm and you sat down and you had the conversation and said, we're doing this for your benefit. You know, we want to make sure that people realize when they're consuming products,

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pork products that come from your farm, that, you know, how much you care for these animals and what you're doing or reassuring them that, you know, what these activist groups are saying is so, so not true, you know. Not that there's not bad actors out there, but, you know, the majority of what we're doingis being raised humanely. And eventually, once you sit down, you had the conversation, you worked through how it was really goingto benefit film, and they understood it, most were on board with it. Then you still had some other guys that were a little nervous, but once they finally went through the processand had boots on the ground and went through it, there was always a sigh of relief saying, you know, I learned something today. You know, I learned that, you know, I can do a little bit better on record keepings or things like that. So always a little apprehension, but once they got through

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it, they were glad they did it. So what were some of those things that really stuck out as benefits for the producer, not to the industry. We'll get to that here a second, but benefits to the producer from the product.

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You know, it was more of a record keeping deal because a lot of those guys, they did it, you know, and they wrote it down, but maybe they didn't do it consistently, you know, as a daily habit like they needed to. They were just in there. And that was more of the independent, you know, family-owned type of operation where the kids, you know,they were from the time they were walking, they were walking up down those alleys, you know, trailer mom or dad, you know, watching to do chores and do things like that. So it was about, hey, I can do better at keeping records and it just makes it more efficient.As I hire outside help, I know how to do it. And then, you know, properly trained and just it was more a different style of record keeping versus just, you know, pluses and minuses, you know, black and red, profits, losses, things like that. It was a different set of skills that they had to acquire for record keeping to train themselves. You know, their employees and all that.And it reassured them, and it got them to open their eyes about, hey, are there things that we can do better on a daily basis that makes us better caregivers and pork producers overall? Fair.

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What about the industry? How did it initially impact the industry and how do you think that that has changed over time?

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As an industry, you know, it was, like I said, we were always just an industry, kept our heads down and just said, let them say what they're going to say. We're going to put our heads down and go back to work. But as an industry, I think it was probably, we took a deep breath and looked and said, okay, yeah, it's time that we get out here and we tell our story from our lips to their ears versus letting other people tell our story that really don't know what we do every day and how we care for our animals and how we care about food supply.We take pride and seeing people that aren't involved in agriculture, you know, enjoy, you know, ham, bacon, pork chops, whatever it is, you know, our products as a protein source, you know, to feed their families and things like that. You know, and the other thing it did as an industry is it really taught some of these, the pork producers again, maybe from a grassroots standpoint of, you know, how to tell their story, you know, to people that ask questions, you know, before, you know, they would just introduce themselves, I'm a farmer, I do this, but, you know, to people that ask questions, you know, before, you know, they would just introduce themselves, I'm a farmer, I do this, but, you know, it taught them about, you know,well, I raise pigs and we do it this way and we have them indoors and we use, you know, corn and soy and technologies and everything else. And we're, you know, we're adaptable to technology more than you think. It's not just, you know, feed them and get out of there. And then that rolls into a lot, a lot what you do with your, with your company, you know. I mean, it's not just, you know, feed them and get out of there. And then that rolls into a lot, a lot what you do with your company, you know. I mean, it's technology. You would have thought 30 years ago that, you know, what you guys do,the amount of technology we put into Raising a Pig WORK_OF_ART now is amazing. So from an industry standpoint, I think it opened some doors to be more acceptable, adaptable to technology within your barns. And it taught you how to have better conversations with the public that may not actually, because we're so far removed from people working on farms, that it allowed us to be able to have those conversations and answer their questionsintelligently where they can understand it, and they went away with a better perception of what really happens daily, you know, in a hog barn, on a farm.

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Where do you see that going over time? Do you think we're going to get more audits and more pressure from the consumer to have that transparency?

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I don't know that we're going to get more pressure from the consumer. I think we've really established that consumer trust, you know, and they do it. And even from, you know, the restaurant sector, you know, the food service, however you want to label that, too, they trust us. But I think we're going to get more and more because, you know,the dynamics, especially over the last 20 years of what the farm looks like has changed, you know, the size, especially over the last 20 years, of what the farm looks like has changed, you know. The size, the number of animals maybe that are on, you know, a footprint or are within a given area as larger. You know, we've moved away where some of those guys may not have the, you know, the feral to finish on one site where they bought into a sow unit, so they're just the finishing part now, or maybe they're just the sow part now.So from that aspect where labor is a big issue and you're bringing in different people that may not have been born or raised on a farm and don't know anything about it, that we're going to continue to see it grow because we're bringing in a whole new set of employees in a different setting and we're bigger than we were per site. Does that make sense to you, Matthew PERSON? Yeah.So just to reassure those and everybody's going to get through there, I think that we'll continue to do that because we're more diverse than we've ever been in maybe our labor force. So we have to continue to have audits to have training. And by doing these audits, we learn so much we gather data, which is your world. And data is shownin this industry that it's important. You know, we can compile it, we can harvest it, and we can become better at what we do. We're better at raising them. We're better at communicating to our employees and our staff, and we're a lot bettercommunicating back to the buying public.

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Yeah, and it feels like the retailers are starting to really trust us, but the consumer, I think there's still work there. I think it's getting better, but I think the consumer's still on the fence in times.

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They are. They are. And we're always going to battle with that just a little bit. I don't know that we'll ever get them on there. But I think we're better because of some of the stuff we've done from being able to educate and just the documentation we put on those farmsand all the stuff that these guys have to know and do and the procedures that they do, that when somebody, if they run into somebody, whether it's downtown, it's a school function, it's at a church or at a public gathering, no matter who they are or their role within the farm, they can speak intelligently about, no, you're wrong, you know, this is how we handle this, you know, and we actually go through training, you know, depending on if it's bi-annually, annually, how they do it, you know,and we write, we document everything down where anybody could come in and find it, look it up, and see exactly what happened on each and every day, you know, and how we handle it. You know, just the amount of time and energy that goes in there. But our people are better at telling the story as a group than they've ever been. Agreed.

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And I think part of it is because we did come to these farms and we did start doing some audits.

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And they take stock in that stuff

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and they take stock in their training and through that training they understand how to communicate.

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Yeah, Brennan Port ORG did something that was really awesome. They just built a couple massive Prop 12 LAW farms, but they put viewing rooms in each gestation barn and each farrowing. And so they invited out, it had to be over 100 kids from local school. And they were able to all fit into this viewing area to see all the sowes out in pen gestation and breeding. And you could see all the employees interacting with the animalsand they could see multiple farrowing rooms and they never had to shower in or cause a biosecurity issue i thought that was a pretty good idea and i think if if people start adopting that as a small added cost to the overall build of these barns giving access to the public to visualize and see, you know, what does this interaction look like? I think little steps like that are going to make it easier and easier to get the consumer to understand or kids as are growing up or government officials that are local to understand,you know, what are these things? And even neighbors, invite your neighbor over, hey, go ahead and take a look. And that transparency is a big deal. It is.

Speaker 01287.5s - 1301.06s

I mean, I didn't know they did that. That's good. But we need those locations throughout, you know, the Midwest and the other regions were heavily done. You know, have you ever been to the pig adventure there at the big dairy and, you know, I haven't.

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I've seen it, though, with Belsra ORG.

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Yeah, with Belshra ORG. Yeah. So they did. I mean, that's what it sounds like Brenneman did. They did what they built off of what Belstra ORG was doing. And I've been through that, and I would encourage, you know, you don't have kids, but I would encourage anyone. If they ever get a chance, they're driving, you know, on Interstate 65 between Lafayette, Indiana GPE,and Chicago to take a couple of hours and pull in there, you know, and go to the, you know, the pig adventure and the dairy adventure, whatever they call it, and watch that. I mean, it's, it's, I've seen it a thousand times, but I still like it, you know, I still learn something and pick something up, you know. So yes, that's good. We need more of that where, you know, it, where it's, it's organic, you know,you walk in and you see it happen. It's not something that was taped or edited or anything other than this is real time. This is what happens. You know, when things happen, you know, we understand how to keep our pig comfortable or put them in the safest place, you know, whether it's a mom giving, you know, farrowing or baby pigs in there or, you know, even the finishing pigs. You know, we know how to put them in the best place, you know, to keep them safe and healthy and everything else and identifypigs that, you know, are falling off or showing signs of illness or anything, you know, farmers probably take better care sometimes in their livestock that they do their kids, you know,

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as far as making sure they, you know what they, yes, you know, the pigs always, I mean, any farmer you talk to, they'll always tell you, you know, the livestock eats first. They're going to go out and do chores and check things and then they come back in, you know, the pigs always, I mean, any farmer you talk to, they'll always tell you, you know, the livestock eats first. They're going to go out and do chores and check things, and then they come back in.

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You know, and it's it. It's there. You know, as we talked about a little bit, you know, you know, and the principles, I think, are still there. You know, I always called it four pillars that that we started with when we started that farm check, you know. And the first one was, you know, invest in technology and education. And we've done that as an industry. We've adopted that and continue to do that. You know, we put together, you know, a board of experts that were, and most of those guysfell out of the, the livestock sector, you know, they were in there. There were some animal welfare experts, different people, but there were people from industry and different things that you brought in, whether they were, you know, they worked in, you know, for a big corporation, you know, a fast food corporation or retail grocery stores or something like that. You had people like that on there. You had scientists. You know, they brought in an adverse set of people for that advisory board, you know, so that way they could get their input and say, okay, what are your people thinking? What do you think?You know, and then the third party audit program, you know, where you're hired, get their input and say, okay, what are your people thinking? What do you think? You know, and then the third party audit program, you know, where you're hired and say, yeah, we're going to hire somebody that has no stake in the game. They're going to send them out. They're going to do an audit, give us a report back, you know. And then, of course, you know, there was an internal apartment, department created too that had, you know, our team in there that was constantly updating and doingthings like that. So those four pillars, I think, are still in place today throughout the industry, you know. So we started that in 12 and then by 14, I think, is when everybody kind of bought in, you know, the other Packers ORG and, you know, it's now the standard industry audit. But, you know, we did a lot of other good things throughout that, you know, we started doing more side assessments, taught people how to really go around and evaluate their facilities, you know, and what to look for and density and identifyand, you know, body conditions on siles and pigs and everything else. We did so many good things that we came out of there that we just didn't think about, that we started documenting on those because of that stuff.

Speaker 11509.28s - 1514.4s

Those are any questions I haven't asked around the audits that you think we should go into?

Speaker 01517.06s - 1589.86s

You know, there are a lot of questions were, you know, what did you do if you, if something came back from an audit, whether it was an internal audit or a third party audit, you know, how did you handle that? If something came back that there was a something that they liked that they didn't see, you know, there were procedures, there were policies in place about if you identified something, you could do a corrective action. And there was something, you know, if you witnessed, you know, willful acts of abuse,you basically stopped, shut it down, walked out the door and left, got on, if you witnessed, you know, willful acts of abuse, you basically stopped, shut it down, walked out the door and left, got on the phone and said, you know, we got a major problem here and that, you know, if you got caught doing that, you were basically suspended for being able to ship hogs or anything in there until you got, you know, we had to write a corrective action report. They had to come in and show us how they were going to correct it.And then we went back in and did the audit again, whether it was internal or external. So, yeah, they were safeguards in place. If we found somebody that was in violation and they weren't doing the things that correctly that met all the categories and all the criteria we needed, I mean, we basically, they were out of the shipping business to us anyway and everybody else once they got thereuntil they went in and got that stuff correct

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you know how long did that usually last or it was it pretty common that you had that or

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oh very very very rare I only ever had to go on one and it wasn't a full willful act of abuse or anything like that where they got suspended you know know, from shipping. But there were just a few things in there from facilities that needed to be updated.You know, gates were, you know, sharp edges here or there, you know, lack of, of, they didn't have all their SOPs up to date. All their education. We're missing a few things in those, you know, in that education component of it. So, you know, we'd write up, you know, this is what you're missing. Normally we would give them, depending on what it was, it takes a little time, a week to 10 days. And then, you know, myself or somebody would go back in and basically do another full auditon that, make sure they had it in place. So there's just, it was a lot of paperwork, you know. I mean, we had to train those guys from just the daily record. You know, everybody thought they were doing it, but they had to figure out each room and a clipboard and sign off at what time they were doing it, you know, daily records and, you know, understanding, you know, their euthanization program, you know, and everythingfrom, you know, where's the, where's the, how did they do it? You know, what was their, their method of it, you know, if they were using Captain Bolt PRODUCT, you know, where was it located, you know, a record of how often it was cleaned and checked to make sure it was working correctly. Simple things like that that you did never think you were going to do, guys understood they had to do that. And what happens if a guy leaves or quitsand he was the guy in charge of that, was he keeping records? So, you know, they had to start keeping records of all that stuff. So if that guy left or wasn't there anymore, you could pick right up where it was left offor he or she and knew that all that stuff was getting done. It was such a checks and balances type of system that we didn't have in place before that we did it. And just annual training, you know, you know, setting a date, putting it on a calendar and say, hey, everybody's going to get retrained for PQA, TQA, you know, or, you know, our record keeping whatever policies they had within their system that they also required.And that was another thing that probably came from before I talk about birth about birth is guys, you know, as people become more than the, let's talk about the contract growers, you know, they were able to implement, you know, their own training and criteria and how they wanted their employees trained and how frequently and all that, you know, new employees. And as people within their systems became experts in that, it gave them another job to do.And they took pride in that because, hey, I'm going to be responsible for making sure that, you know, everybody works inside this facility's aware of, you know, what our expectations are and what we do and what you do if you find something that's not right. So, I mean, we just made ourselves so much better as an industry by doing it, you know,for something that everybody's saying, oh, it's more, you know, oversight or whatever, it was actually a good thing.

Speaker 11773.34s - 1795.5s

No, I appreciate you giving us a background and history of that. And I couldn't agree more with a lot of what you're saying is from my perspective. Before we wrap things up, I've got a few rapid fire questions for you. All right, try it. All right. So first one would be what, uh, what individual throughout your career served as your greatest mentor?

Speaker 01800.96s - 1842.74s

I alluded to that earlier, probably a little bit. It's a guy named Steve Peterson PERSON, you know. Yep. I'm still talking to him weekly. Um, you know, both as, I mean, he helped me from a professional standpoint to personal standpoint, you know, he's an outstanding guy. He taught me how important it was just to, you know, in this business, you're, you can spend a lifetime building a reputation. And by doing something wrong, you can run it in five minutes. So, you know, just own what you do.Your successes, your failures, communicate well. So into this day, I still talk to him. I mean, I hadn't talked to him yet. It's Monday, but I talked to him on Friday. So he's been, you know, inside and outside. You know, he helped me professionally, but, you know, he also helped me personally to grow as an individual. So, you know, I'm very thankful for that man.

Speaker 11846.24s - 1859.76s

an individual so you know i'm very thankful for that man if you had to go all the way back to high school and agriculture food livestock none of that's an option you have to pick a different industry which one do you end up going down sports i'd probably been a coach or something like that

Speaker 01859.76s - 1865.44s

you know okay what's football football mean, that's still my passion.

Speaker 11865.58s - 1868.16s

And I did a lot of that as a volunteer.

Speaker 01868.92s - 1872.4s

You know, before I was married, I coached, you know, youth football and helped, you know,

Speaker 11872.44s - 1875.74s

with the teams back in my hometown, or Indiana GPE where we lived.

Speaker 01875.8s - 1892.5s

And then I actually coached my daughter's soccer team. And then I coached my son's football team until, you know, for the time he was, I don't know, when he started third grade all the way through, you know, until you at the middle school. So I would have coached, I would have loved to coach. I mean, it's so much fun. That's probably what I would have done.

Speaker 11894.12s - 1904.58s

What is something unique about you? Most people in the industry do not know. I'm an open boat, so it's pretty hard. Do you eat your skittles all in the same color? You separate them?

Speaker 01905.46s - 1935.38s

No, nothing like that. You know, as a pork guy, you know, in this industry, and I like pork, but I don't really like ribs very well. Oh, interesting. You know, I like everything about a pig, but I'm really not a rib guy very much at all. I prefer pulled pork over that,but I'm not a rib fan. I'll make them for my family, but it's my least favorite cut. And if I never really had to eat ribs, I would be happy.

Speaker 11936.1s - 1937.82s

Where do you find the best barbecue?

Speaker 01939.42s - 1969.02s

Around here, you know, I live in the Ames GPE area. It's over in Luther GPE. It's called Watcher Smoking ORG. Over in Luther, just kind of west, northwest of Ames GPE. It is by far. It started out.Steve Peterson PERSON took me there, and it was like a little gas station. Now it's big, and it's as close to Texas GPE-style barbecue as you can get. So in Iowa GPE, watch your smoking is the best. But Texas GPE, if you're in Texas, you drive down the road and you see a shack with smoke, I tell you you'd stop there because that may be the best.

Speaker 11969.9s - 1972.9s

So for a Texan, what's your take on North Carolina GPE barbecue?

Speaker 01975.4s - 1985.5s

I don't like the binerary stuff. I'm more a tex. I want a little sweet heat. So it's not bad, but it's a little more. I'm not a vinegar-based guy.

Speaker 11987.56s - 1993.86s

If you could travel anywhere today, where would it be? Anywhere today.

Speaker 01996.8s - 2015.92s

It's a tough one. And I already went there, and you did too. I know within the last year, but I go to Hawaii because I absolutely love it there. We went this year and it was the best place ever been. So if you told me I'd go anywhere today, I'd head back to Hawaii because it's nasty and it's cold here in Iowa GPE, as you know,and I would head back to freaking Hawaii.

Speaker 12017.64s - 2029s

And then if you had to sing a karaoke song, what would it be? Much too young by Garth Brooks PERSON.

Speaker 02030.32s - 2034.4s

There's a lot of Garth Brooks PERSON on this podcast. People say with their songs they'd sing.

Speaker 12035.2s - 2038s

That is for sure. Last question for you.

Speaker 02038.48s - 2042.04s

What's a golden nugget, a word of wisdom from your career that you'd like to share with listeners?

Speaker 12043.36s - 2049.06s

You know, and I've stole this from Bill Walsh, you know, the 49ers ORG coach for so long way back

Speaker 02049.06s - 2054.78s

when, and it's been what I've always tried. As I got older, I really believed it, but

Speaker 12054.78s - 2061.22s

invest in relationships because they'll pay a lifetime of dividends, you know, especially in

Speaker 02061.22s - 2075.42s

this business, as you get to know, this is agriculture is a relationship business. So, you know, if you put your time and effort and really invest in the right people and have them, it'll just, it continues to pay. And it's extremely obvious when it's

Speaker 12075.42s - 2088.74s

authentic and when it's not. Yes, without a doubt. Yeah. So that's a really good piece of wisdom. I appreciate it. And thank you for being a guest on the podcast. It's been great having you on. All right.

Speaker 02088.8s - 2101.2s

Hope it went well. Hopefully I didn't confuse everybody. Thank you for joining us on this episode of Popular Pig ORG.

Speaker 22101.66s - 2131.54s

We aspire to learn and grow together through the experience and wisdom shared by our esteemed guests. If you enjoyed this episode, please share it with your friends and colleagues within the swine industry. For more information, please go to popularpig.comto receive updates when new episodes are available. Popular Pig is brought to you by Swine Tech ORG, the award-winning creators of Smart Garden Pigflow. To learn how Pigflow PRODUCT can help you streamline your workforce and reduce piglet and sow deaths, visit swine technologies.com.