PRRS Year 3- The Last Year

I wish I could say that the disease issues our herd has experienced over the last three years have passed.  That we have come out stronger, better, and unscathed.  However, the reality is that we are in the worst position we have been in over our 60 year history.  We have exhausted every option we can think of to regain our pig health, and nothing is working.  Even the strategies that have helped feel like a band-aid, masking another, bigger problem by throwing money at it.  Once one health challenge seems to ease up, another problem emerges.  It is hard to meet with our vets and advisors, them showing a mild indifference to our situation, as we are working tirelessly to save our pigs, bleeding every day for the last 1000. 

I wish we had found the cure, the answer, maybe made better decisions, but I honestly don’t know what we would’ve done differently with the information we had at the time.  Now, I am a lot less trusting of “experts.”  I’m weary of easy fixes, and the traditional way of doing things.  Our farm is different, our life is different, and our pigs our different.  My values don’t always line up with those driving our industry, but I do love being on the farm.   Weighing our options, we decided we need to start over; selling every last pig, and then buying new breeding stock.  Maybe we can do something to salvage what we have, but we are getting to the point where we just can’t keep waiting for things to right.  We need to take action.

Big changes hurt, but I don’t want to be the generation that spoils my family legacy, as so often happens in multi-generational businesses, where things get complacent.  I may go down, but it won’t be without a fight. These changes aren’t easy, and there are many places where we will make mistakes.  Our notions of who we are as a company are going to shift.  The solid foundation we have is going to move.  We will lose some people- people I have known my whole life.  That is probably the hardest part for me, but it is another piece of our upheaval. 

While change is hard, it gives me the possibility of going back to “normal.”  Where every phone call isn’t the next disaster, when my weekend travels are the only thing that keeps me sane. When I can look at my work and again be proud of what I have accomplished, or actually make progress and provide better care to our animals.  I look forward to these moments now, as I am sitting nearly paralyzed with fear.  In these times, I can see my support system- it’s not as big as I thought it was, but I can make do with what I have.

My lack of writing over the last year is due to dealing with the challenges that I have experienced on the farm.  I still journal, and I have taken up a side-gig writing for Silent Sports, which gives me a creative outlet.  However, I want to write here, and share my story- the good, and the bad.  I can’t say what my life will look like in another year, but I am excited to see how things unfold. 

First Farm Memories

My first memory of the farm starts with an early morning.  I would wake up, and go sit on the bathroom scale while my parents got ready for the day.  My Dad would let me brush his shaving soap on to his face.  Then we would all go down to the kitchen for breakfast, usually oatmeal or cream of wheat with butter and brown sugar, and watered down cranberry juice. 

After filling up, mom would bundle me up (it must have been fall or winter in my earliest memories) and I would go out to look at the pigs in the barn in our backyard.  I think we were in the process of expanding at the time, and must’ve run out of room for pigs, because we were using the old dairy barn behind the house as a makeshift pig pen.  The tall doors were wide open, and the biggest bay where hay wagons and such must have been stored had been turned into a makeshift pen, with fencing panels strung together.  Straw bedding covered the floor.

I went to see the pigs every day, sometimes multiple times a day, naming them.  My favorite was “Ketchup”, but I also grew fond of “Stuart”, and “Cupcake”.  None of these pigs were discernable from any of the others, and I usually just dubbed the first to come to the fence and nose my hand “Ketchup” for the day.  Sometimes I would bring scraps from the kitchen to throw over the fence as treats. 

After a while, the pigs got so big that I couldn’t go in the pen anymore at risk of being trampled, and finally they were shipped off to market.  We never had pigs in the dairy barn again, but I found a new outlet in the hot nursery. 

The hot nursery is where the smallest pigs of the litter are weaned where it was extra warm and they receive extra care.  Everything is small, and designed to transition the pigs from mom to on their own with as little disruption as possible.  I was also the right size for the hot nursery pens, and I would go and check on the little pigs each day, making sure they had water and food, milk replacer or electrolytes, and that the floor was nice and dry for them.  I named these too, “Sam” being my favorite that I would check each day, to see if he was making a good recovery after his rough start. 

Even though I wasn’t yet four years old, these early visits on the farm narrowed down my career choices considerably.  I figured I could either work on the farm with the pigs, become a fireman, or a ballerina.  I thought the farm was my most likely option for success, although looking at the world now it actually may have been the most unusual choice of the three.  Regardless, there may have been some stumbling blocks on the way, and a healthy dose of self-doubt, but here I am 25 years later, doing the same work as when I was four years old.