Jill Appell of Altona, IL, brings a unique background and life experiences to the job of president of NPPC.

Appell is proud to be given the opportunity to follow in the footsteps of other noteworthy NPPC presidents — Donna Reifschneider of Illinois, Barb Determan of Iowa and Joy Philippi of Nebraska.

Unlike her predecessors, Appell wasn't raised on a hog farm. Rather, she grew up on the north side of Chicago in the suburbs of Highland Park and Libertyville.

Her agricultural roots were limited but strong. “My grandfather's family had emigrated from Sweden to Michigan, and one of their brothers had a dairy farm that I would visit when I was young. I loved milking the cows. I'd come home and tell my mother not to wash those clothes because I didn't want to lose the smell of the farm,” she remembers.

Her great-grandparents owned a 200-acre farm bordering Lake Michigan, but lost it all in the Great Depression.

With an aptitude for English, she attended Bradley University in Peoria, IL, achieving bachelor and master's degrees in English literature. Following graduation, she worked as a graduate assistant and then as an instructor in English composition at Bradley.

As fate would have it, she met her future second husband at the Illinois Valley Striders Running Club in Peoria. Paul Appell raised hogs and was a lifelong resident of the Altona area, just northeast of Galesburg.

“I always loved agriculture and the farming life, and the first time I came out to the farm, I thought, ‘this is where I belong,’” Jill Appell recalls.

She attended a University of Illinois farrowing school, where she learned how to care for baby pigs. That became her job on the family's 600-sow, farrow-to-finish operation, which included outside lots for sows and confined farrowing, nursery and finishing units. She also took charge of the finance and bookkeeping chores.

In 2000, a catastrophe changed the farming landscape for the Appells. An early morning fire engulfed the farrowing barn, completely destroying the building and sows and 1,200 pigs.

With Paul and Jill and eight fulltime employees providing the labor, the Appells decided to reduce the labor demands by converting the operation to wean-to-finish. Farrowing barns were converted to finishing. Now they buy 400-450 head of 14- to 16-day-old weaned pigs for three consecutive weeks to fill an existing 1,300-head nursery. No pigs are brought in for the next six weeks, thus putting them on a nine-week rotation, she explains.

All of the finishing sites, including a new 1,200-head barn they built, are on separate sites. They finish 8,000 pigs/year using family labor and two full-time employees.

The pigs are purchased from hog partners Dale McKee and Dave Flack at Rio, IL. Appell says the arrangement has worked out well because the partners provide pigs that are uniform and healthy.

Since converting to wean-to-finish production, her duties have evolved to treating and managing the nursery pigs. But her responsibilities as vice president, president-elect and now president of NPPC have increased demands on her time.

She has been told by previous leaders to figure on half the days of the year to be consumed by trips during her presidency, mostly made up of jaunts to NPPC headquarters in Des Moines, government meetings and hearings in Washington, DC. She says the most noticeable increase in demands on her time since being elected NPPC president in March is the escalating number of phone calls from the media on industry issues. They all want a sound byte from the group's leader, she says.

Her educational background has served her well in articulating points provided by NPPC. And, she says, her urban roots help her relate to the mindset of average consumers.

“You can think about how other people live, but it doesn't resonate the same as with people who've lived it,” she explains. “I think a lot of times we blame urban people for not understanding agriculture, but why should they?”

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