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Truly, for Malcolm DeKryger, there is no such thing as an average day at the bustling offices of Belstra Milling Co., DeMotte, IN. Supervisor of five swine complexes that serve as gilt multipliers for PIC across the nation, DeKryger is also general contractor-manager of an innovative project dubbed “The Pig Adventure,” which includes a working hog farm (Legacy Farms) that consumers can visit, see pig displays, farm activities, and visit a restaurant tied to the popular Fair Oaks Farms dairy adventure at Fair Oaks, IN....More

The National Pork Producers Council will celebrate the silver anniversary of World Pork Expo in June. Being a bit of a pork industry history buff, I decided to thumb through some old files to help jog my memory of how this “world’s largest pork-specific event” came about....More

The Canadian hog industry is back to recovery mode. Those who have weathered the drought are ready to take on new markets.“When you look at the big picture, the industry has been incredibly resilient,” notes Kevin Grier, senior analyst with the George Morris Centre, in Guelph, Ontario. The Canadian pork industry is about 25% smaller than it was in 2004, but the industry that survived is very competitive....More

An education in the hog business can take many forms. For Jeff Hansen, founder and CEO of Iowa Select Farms, the tutorial began at the end of a pitchfork. Growing up on a farm near the company’s home base in Iowa Falls, IA, Hansen and his two brothers were what he calls “Dad’s skid-steer loaders.”...More

With deep-seated roots in the pork industry, Jim Meimann has taken a decidedly low profile in his responsibilities as senior vice president of governance and operations at the National Pork Board. “I’m a behind-the-scenes kind of guy,” he explains. But don’t let his mild manner fool you; he is passionate about making sure pork producers get their money’s worth from their checkoff investments. He serves as the National Pork Board’s point person in their dealings with the USDA Agricultural Marketing Service (AMS), the government arm that oversees Pork Checkoff programs and spending....More

USDA’s Crop Progress and Condition report for May 13 indicated that 28% of the corn had been planted, compared to 12% last week and 85% for last year, according to Illinois blogger Stu Ellis. This year’s corn planting is the slowest planting pace for this date since the flood year of 1993 when only 27% of the crop was planted. Emergence is at 5% vs. 52% last year and 28% on average. Soybean planting is at 6% complete vs. 43% last year and 24% on average. Only 5% is emerged, compared to 52% last year and 28% for the five year average....More

As a service to Swine Management Services (SMS) subscribers, we continue to look for production numbers or combinations of numbers that have the greatest influence on farm production levels. We have written a new Executive Summary and Production Index for SMS subscribers that includes more parity performance data....More

A group of meat, poultry and retail associations are asking Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack to delay the implementation of the proposed country-of-origin labeling (COOL) rule until the World Trade Organization (WTO) determines whether the final rule brings the United States into compliance....More

The May World Agricultural Supply and Demand Estimates (WASDE) report released today by the Agriculture Department shows that a record corn crop is still reachable despite a slow start to planting season, according to American Farm Bureau Federation (AFBF) analysts. The report forecasts a corn yield of 158 bushels per acre, implying a record crop of 14.14 billion bushels, up 3.36 billion bushels from 2012 when much of the nation was overtaken by severe drought. The current record corn crop was produced in 2009 at 13.09 billion bushels....More

  The American Farm Bureau Federation (AFBF) has joined with a diverse group of 44 conservation, environmental, crop insurance and agricultural organizations in distributing a position paper that outlines a common-sense compromise to linking conservation compliance and crop insurance premium assistance and to opposing means testing, payment limitations or premium subsidy reductions for the crop insurance program....More

Choose about any negative word you want – awful, dismal, disastrous, whatever – they can be used to describe the state of pork exports in March. Only Canada and the markets labeled “other” were higher this March year than last, +7.4% and 16.2%, respectively. All others were lower. Some a lot lower!...More