The Masters of the Pork Industry are a special, hand-picked group of pork industry visionaries.

Their personal stories and business philosophies provide insight into their respective segments of the U.S. pork industry.

They are professionals, entrepreneurs and industry leaders; their visions for this dynamic industry will inspire young and old.

Each shares the life experiences, bumps and bruises and inspirations that have carried them forward in pursuit of excellence.

The anti-nuclear energy sentiments in the early '70s diverted this would-be nuclear engineer to an agricultural economist career — and the U.S. pork industry was the beneficiary.

Raised on a small, diversified farm near El Dorado Springs, MO, Ron Plain says the farm was reminiscent of the sing-along song describing Old McDonald's Farm. “With a moo-moo here, and an oink-oink there; we had quite a few beef cattle, some hogs, a few chickens, one milk cow, and we raised corn, wheat, soybeans, grain sorghum, oats, barley, hay and fescue seed,” he remembers.

Plain's boyhood plan was to become a farmer, but by the time he reached high school, those plans were derailed by several factors, including a bad case of hay fever, the thought that “there has to be an easier way to make a living,” and the fact that the farm wasn't big enough to support another family.

He excelled in high school — named valedictorian of the graduating class — and was especially adept in math and science. “If you were good at math and science, high school counselors nudged you toward engineering,” he explains.

Taking that advice, he enrolled at the University of Missouri-Rolla with a focus on nuclear engineering. But it soon became clear that this career path and job prospects were quite dismal, as environmentalists “basically put the kibosh on building any more nuclear power plants,” he says.

Rethinking his career choice, Plain decided he really wanted to do something related to agriculture, so drawing on the positive experiences he'd had in the Future Farmers of America (FFA), he transferred to the University of Missouri's Columbia campus and focused on agricultural education.

Graduating in May 1974, he accepted a vocational agriculture teaching position at Odessa, MO, where he shared vo-ag teaching responsibilities with Don Nikodim, who has become a lifelong friend and mentor, credited with cultivating Plain's love of hogs.

“I really enjoyed the three years I spent as an ag teacher, but each year seemed to repeat the last; I decided it wasn't something I wanted to still be doing when I was 50 years old,” Plain explains.

While teaching in Odessa, Plain began taking courses for a master's degree in ag education, which he earned in 1976. A year later, he enrolled in graduate school at Oklahoma State University, pursuing a Ph.D. in agricultural economics. In the ensuing four years, he met his wife, Cuba, who received a bachelor-of-science degree in agricultural economics at the same time that he received his doctorate degree (May 1981).

He chose to focus on hog marketing primarily because his major advisor, Joe Williams, focused his research on pigs. Plain's dissertation helped set him on a career path that would inevitably position him to become a widely recognized agricultural economist, specializing in hog and cattle marketing.

For the Ph.D. dissertation, he studied whether or not a farm could adjust the number of hogs raised in response to price forecasting in order to increase profits. “In other words, could you use a forecast of high profits to increase pig numbers, and a forecast of negative profits to decrease pig numbers, to be more profitable than the guy who held production at a constant level?” he explains.

He found that, yes, you can do better if the price forecast is accurate enough. But there's a caveat: “Your price forecast must be more accurate than the futures market,” he says. “And, if I've got a price forecast more accurate than the futures market, I don't need hogs — I can speculate in Chicago (at the Chicago Mercantile Exchange) or from a condo in Hawaii,” he jests.

However, if your price forecasting is not better than the futures market and you operate at 110% and 80% of capacity — trying to adjust to predictions — the result is inefficiencies that will “swamp you,” Plain says.

“My conclusion was that a producer should operate the hog operation for maximum efficiency — regardless of the price forecasts — unless he thinks he has a price forecast better than the futures market, and then he ought to be speculating on the side. Operate for maximum efficiency, not for anticipated price changes,” he emphasizes.

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