 Ladies and gentlemen, it's my pleasure to introduce Kelly Clover. He is a sustainable farmer for many years that he cares to admit. He's the author of A Guide to Raising Pigs, Dirt Hog, Talking Chickens, and is the small acreage management columnist in small farm today. He is actively promoting and participating in the River Hills Farmers Market in Silux, Missouri, and it's also booth number 214. So please stop by and visit him during the trade show after the talk. Well, thank you and good afternoon. Well, this is an interesting size crowd. This is either a big lynching or a small revival meeting. And I don't see anyone holding a rope or marching toward me. So we'll think about a revival meeting. I kind of heard a pretty good tale yesterday. I see them in much of friendly faces. Do you know how many extension agents it takes to change a light bulb? Three, one to keep flipping the switch up and down hoping something will happen. One to make a picture of strawberry daiquiris to wow away the time. And the third one to call a farmer to find out how to do it. This is kind of an annual event for me, this hog talk. And it's changed over the years, very much so. To the point where I'm going to make a point right now and bear with me, it's time to get out of the pork business. Quit it cold, get out of the pork business. But do get back into producing hogs the way they were meant to be. Pork as a commodity has been a 50 year road to ruin for my generation. They boiled it down to a commodity and they push it out of these big steel buildings. Out of one income, pork is a commodity and out of the other income, it's a sea of manure. And with each passing year, it gets harder and harder to tell which end is which. But pork is something very special. It was the table meat of kings. It is one of the most distinctive meat products that can be produced in the world. And it is eaten around the world nearly as much as chicken. But we have taken it from what was its traditional role on America's farms and tried to make too much of it. On the farm 50 years ago, hogs were one part of a diversified array of livestock ventures. They were kept in small numbers. They were kept with a seasonal pattern of production. And they were kept with an image of a specific field of endeavor. People were out to work with hogs for a purpose. The thing is, hogs started to follow chickens into the vertical integration eddy. More and more they were moved indoors into buildings. The gene pool began to narrow. Right now, the swine industry relies on essentially three big breeds of hog. The Hampshire, the Yorkshire, and the Landrace. Essentially, they're trying to build a white pig producing machine. And we're paying a terrible price for it. As you well know, if you go into a store now to buy pork product, you're seeing some real issues, pale pink color, watery content, and irregular sizes and positions on some of these items. Pork chop is a wonderful product. But you take a two pound, three pound bag of package of pork chops coming out of a store now. They're burying the little ones down at the bottom. And all that blood that's run out into the package, and all that pale color. And the fact that if you cook them two seconds long, you've gone from fried pork chops to jerky, and another two seconds, and you've got saddle leather. We have lost what a hog should be. And I feel kind of bad about that. Because we started out with a pretty good product, and we had it in a pretty good role. Then we decided to become specialists. And you can lay that pretty square on my generation. Came out of high school in the 60s, we had a plan. I see some young people here, and it's kind of encouraging. I was 18 years old out of high school. You could rent or buy five rough acres in Missouri for less than $1,000 an acre. Ten gilts were going to cost you 90 bucks a gilt, pretty good bore. 30 year old pickup, a pair of rubber boots, half a dozen plastic buckets. You were farming. It was up to you however you went with it, and how far you went. And some of us went a long, long way. I've been on the seats where boars have bought $100,000. And in 1994, I saw the reserve champion Yorkshire Boar come back from the Missouri State Fair and sell for $20 at the Mexico sale barn. That same day at our farmer's market, I saw a trio of chickens sell for $35. We're coming back. We're coming into a new role. There are people coming back into the hog profession, like that word, profession. And that's what we should be about, fitting them in on the farm with other products. I raised Durrock hogs, but we had a season. We had spring pigs and fall pigs. Well, I don't know what prompt them to call January, spring pigs in Missouri. But January, February, and March were the spring pigs for the shows. August, September, November were the fall season. Well, we were more country than that, so a lot of us, we dropped down to, we would feral March and April, and again in October and November. We fit the hogs in around the cropping season when the weather was mild. And we didn't have a lot of dollars into hog equipment. And you need to remember that, folks, is, well, I have a brother-in-law. And he took a set of hogs to the buying station a few years ago, and pretty good boy ran the buying station. He said, you need to work on these hogs. You need to do something better. Well, my brother-in-law was pretty typical of the industry at that time. His idea to make his hogs better was to put $60,000 in a brand new firing house. The guy at the buying station told me, he said, all I wanted to do was go to town and buy a better bore. And we've kind of forgotten this. It's the hog business. I've been on the farm since 1959, never made a dime with a building. Made my money with what came out of the buildings. And that's how you have to think about it now. So maybe you were in the marketing talk yesterday, and we made a big display about quality. And that's where we're redeeming ourselves as hog producers now. We're coming back with a quality product. We're coming back with an identity to our product, and we're doing it primarily with purebred genetics. Now we know for a fact that hogs of different breeds produce different kinds of pork. We have got enough studies right now that they tell us that the Durrock, the Berkshire, the Tamworth, and the Chester White produce a very distinctive meat. There's only one other breed right now that's trying to crack into that area, which is the red waddle, and they're working pretty hard. But they need to do a little more. Folks, you can't run off of one or two good results. You've got to do shear test, taste test, composite. We know for a fact that a Berkshire pork is different than any other pork in the world. It's darker, it has internal muscle, it even has a different pH. I've got a neighbor back home that as long as he produces half Berkshire butcher hogs, he's got a guaranteed price of 50 cents a pound. Now that's not a lot right now, but he had a guaranteed price of 50 cents a pound back when they were 12 cents a pound at the buying station. And those hogs aren't staying in the Midwest. They're riding the Montford Road to California. How many of you old enough to know what the Montford Road was? It's highway 80 going west to California. And it was called the Montford Road because of all the pack meat that went down that road to go to California. Only these hogs are going to Japan and the Far East because they're good and they're distinct. And that's what you need to be doing now. Part of what I want to tell you today is kind of an old fashioned pitch for the importance of purebred genetics. We hear a lot of shortcuts hybridization, crossbreeding, did a lot of that back home. I actually cut my own throat because I got into the hybrid bore business. We bought some Hampshire gills, put a Durrock bore on them and we got a lot of nice, pretty good crossbred hemp mark pigs with drooping ears. A lot of boys took them back home, thought they could combine the genetics a little easier. Well, there's one thing I couldn't answer the one question. Why were they better? The quality came from the fact that they were out of good purebred Durrock and Hampshire. But what my generation did by playing that game was we made an opening for the factory farmers in the bore stores. And we let them in. It was short-term gain that left us wide open for challenge. Now, there's something I'm pretty proud of here and I want to show it to you and pass it around. I talked about breed differences. Anybody know about International Boar Seamen Company? The biggest provider of boar seamen in the world, supplying the confinement industry. Eighty-five percent of the hogs in the United States now are produced with artificial insemination. Well, we killed the bore market. And like I told you, they're relying on hams, yorks, and land race. This is their new advertising campaign. Heritage breeds for those who want better and know the deference. Aren't any Hampshire's, aren't any Yorkshire's, aren't any land race on that list? I tell you, this list is a lot like Obama endorsing Romney. That painful. Come up and pass that around. You're going to see a pretty good example right there of what a pork chop cannon should be. So, like I say, we've been in this for essentially since I was 10 years old. My 10th birthday present was a Hampshire sale. Bought for $35. My junior year in high school, we bought the first purebred gill. Took my entire share of the soybean money to get her bought. And we got into the hog business. But we fell in a kind of a little trap. And I want to share that with you. We started out with one gill, Dad and I. We'd been hit hard with a drought. We had to sell a cow herd. Well, we got the numbers fascinated in our head. We thought, well, we needed 25 good duroc sales. Well, we bought one and within three years we were to 25. But what happened is I had an epiphany one night. Not a religious one, but an economic one. I was sitting at a major breeder's auction. And the man had 500 head of hogs for sale. But the five highest selling hogs in the sale came out of one litter. The 20 highest selling were half our full brothers and sisters. And they were chalking up to two sales. He had put the money into the good genetics. And that's the key to this, folks. We can't slug it out with premium standard for volume. They want us to try because then they'll know we'll go away. What we have to do is go after a niche that is ours. Now, a niche market by definition can be small. It can be limiting, but it generally pays a premium. But it has to be tended. And that's what we found out. Our bore business was to other farmers the same size we were. We had our presence in eastern Missouri, the buckle of the hog bell. And I can tell you, I mean, I was there for the glory days. And it was exciting. I had an FFA brother. Was in on the first five-figure bore bought in the United States. $25,000 for a pig named Liberty Bell. But I also learned a little bit of that else as I went along. There was another pretty famous bore back then named Waterloo. Waterloo had cleaned up in Iowa at the test station up there. Waterloo Iowa test station, they named the bore Waterloo, had the best performance figures ever achieved by a Durock bore at that time. Went to the breeder's sale. They'd used Waterloo for about six months. Trotted him out. He was thin as a whipper whale, poor as a snake, all head and tail. And they were saying, this is the big bore. Two old fellas sitting behind me while the auctioneer proceeded to tell all the great how fast he grew, how big he's loin eye was, who his parents were all. And one old fella turned to the other and he said, you know you'd think somewhere when they was doing all this reading in the catalog, at least one of these boys would have thought to look up and look at the pig. And that's the thing, folks, we've got to start looking at the pig again. You know, God made a pig to be a pig. He didn't mean for him to be a 500-pound mini-beef. He didn't mean for him to be this NASCAR looking thing and they're driving around in the show pig arenas now. It was meant to produce pork. In the 20th century, we went through by exact count 20 different changes in swine type. One every five years. We went from big old thick chubby hogs that were producing grease and were called cob rollers because their bellies were so low to the ground when they walked across the hog lot, the cobs rolled out from under them. Race horses. These super thin pigs, you saw at the fair this summer? They ain't the first time these babies come to town. Back in the 1970s, every buying station in the state of Missouri had a manure spreader and a front-end loader on an international tractor. And you did not want to go over looking at manure spreader because they were all dead hogs, died of stress, couldn't make it up the ramps into the butcher pins. They tried to take all the fat off of them. They tried to make them super long. And that's not what it's about. Pork has been eaten for 6,000 years. 6,000 years. What more could we make of it than it's already been? We're going to put the head where the tail is and the tail where the head is. Dad used to talk about Maggie and Jigs in the old funny paper back in the 30s. Jigs was quite an inventive man and he tried forever and ever to develop a four-legged chicken because he liked drumsticks. Well, he didn't get a four-legged chicken and we can't make anything of a hog but a hog. And we have to respect that animal. Well, there's something the PETA folks like you to hear. Respect the animal. Put him to work for what he was bred for. Get him outside. I wrote a book called Dirt Hog. Because that's how I was taught to raise hogs in the dirt. I have to tell you a little story. Fred Waters called me up and said, I want you to write a book for us. And I asked the two important questions to every writer. How big was the advance and how soon would the check get here? Gene Logsdon told me one thing a long time ago. He said, Kelly, if you're ever approached with a writing deal and there's at least one library left open in the world somewhere, you take the job. He said, research is always going to pay your profit. Well, anyway, we did Dirt Hog. Then we had a chance to work on another book for them. And that was Talking Chicken. Well, Phyllis and I, we took, when I was writing that book, we were calling it Dirt Chicken. And we had an idea. We were going to do Dirt Chicken. Then I was going to write one about being a small farmer. We were going to call it Dirt Farmer. And then I was going to write one about all the money I'd made righty. And we were going to call it Dirt Poor. But back to what happened there, folks. We got to $25,000. Which proved to be $15,000 more than we needed. And the thing is, to get to $25,000, we sacrificed quality. We had, and we were a long way from being competitive. That was back in the day when you supposedly needed $75,000 to be competitive. But what we found out was we could go to $10,000 and then we could go to $8,000. And if we kept the quality up, we were there at one time, we were there at one time, we were there at one time, we were there at one time, we were there at one time with seven sows averaging 3.5 boars of keeper quality every year. And in a 12-month span with five-week weaning, we were producing three liters per sow on the early Farad, late Farad sows. And they worked for us. Another thing, back in the 1960s when I graduated from high school, we were producing a lighter weight hog. We were sending them to town at 225 pounds. Well Kelly, what was the special about that? Well they were only four and a half months old. They were young, they were naturally tender, they were lean. The longer a hog stays alive, a meat hog, the slower he grows. And it costs more to put fat on him than it does to put lean. Now I know the packers want to pull as much meat off the killing floors as they can. But those little lean hogs, it was fresh, sweet pork. We didn't have a lot of money in them, we felt good about them. And a lesson we learned real fast is nine 250 pounders hit the market as hard or harder than 11 225 pounders. We were digging a hole for ourselves with improved efficiency. And we're coming to a time now, and something I recommend to all of you. We don't like to admit it, but if you're in the livestock industry, you better be watching what's going on in Great Britain. Because those boys are 10 to 15 years ahead of us. And they're good stockmen. They've got a hog farmer over there, a pretty good old boy named Prince Charles. Folks, they're killing butcher hogs at 180 pounds. They have outlawed castration in Great Britain. You kill them at that age, you don't have to castrate. They're not producing any secondary sexual traits. There's no bore tank, it's super lean. It's a wonderful, clean, sweet pork product. Now, you're saying, Kelly, you're going to turn back the clock. You're looking backward. Well, there's expression the French people have. When you come to an abyss, the only safe step is backward. And I'll tell you, I'm not the hogman dad was. And dad would tell you he was not the hogman that his grandfather was. Actually, I'm not even a farmer anymore. According to the university, I'm a food science practitioner. After you turn 60, you start, I've been a farmer. I've been an agrarian. I've been an agribusinessman. And now I'm a food science practitioner, but I'm still the one that has to pay my bills and nowhere on them do they give me a credit for my titles. Matter of fact, like my wife likes to say at her job, she said, when they can't give you a raise, they will give you a new title. That's what we're coming into now. And it's scary to us to think we're going to have to change and go back. But it's back to what we know. It's back to what we've always done. It's back to what has been good to us. I have a hobby. I collect old farm magazines. I have some from the 1880s. And what you encounter there, folks, is page after page of hogmen and women with pure breeds. 10, 12 sows. And they were making their way in the world when the whole country was farmers. And it's what we're needing now. There is a restaurant in the city of St. Louis, where their primary featured item is a 2-inch thick duroc pork chop. The plate that that chop is on costs more than what my wife and I spend for all our groceries in a week. They're having trouble finding those duroc hogs because they don't want them out of confinement. They can tell the difference. You can smell the difference in confinement hogs. You get behind a truckload of butcher hogs coming out of confinement. And like I always like to say, the smell is enough to make a Texan a vegetarian. I didn't know it, but I learned the other day. Vegetarian is from the Latin for lousy shot. That's kind of the point there. We're carnivores. And we have the good product. And the thing is, there's some people out here with enough moxie that are making it work now. I told you yesterday about a lady up in the Chicago area getting $6 a pound for pork sausage. Several years ago, I sold two little spotted pigs to go into a little girl's Easter basket. I was happy to take $35 a piece for those little guys. And purebred hogs, every marketing option is open to you. Seed stock, pork is meat, roasting hogs, 4-H and youth project work. Don't close your door by becoming too narrow in your focus. Specialization is not the way farming was ever meant to be run. There's just no way around it. And I was guilty, I fell into that trap. I took a lot of identity from being a hog farmer. Too much. Too many of my generation did. To the point where, well, there's no other way to tell it. In the state of Illinois today, every accidental death of a farmer under direct orders of the Illinois Highway Patrol is to be investigated as a suicide. Think about that one for a minute, folks. I've seen that. One of the best friends I'll ever have sits by a window and looks out on a farm that he inherited, but he's no longer mentally able to take care of it. So I said it was over in the pork business. Well, how do we get into the hog business? Okay, this is what Kelly likes to do is tell you how to do things. I'll tell you what. I tried that on Ron the other day telling him how to write writer's checks. So that didn't work. All right. A lot of people are going back into hogs. Actually, that's pretty hard right now. Because there's not a lot of good genetics available from a lot of places. They've been bred now for probably 25, 30 years for confinement. And there's another problem. And as you all well know, I won't back away from controversy. You folks with these rare and exotic hogs, nothing wrong with it, but get your head screwed on right. Because someday you're not going to have a breeder's market. And every hog to justify being owned must be eight. And I don't care how little they are and how cute they are and how spotted they are or how rare they are. What matters is how well they stand up under barbecue sauce. Now I'm going to give you a fair warning. I'm going to tell you a pretty gory story right now, but I make no apologies for it. We rewrote the book for story, Guide to Raising Pigs. And a little insight into publishing. I had four editors and three technical reviewers. One of the technical reviewers raised Cooney Cooney pigs. So for 16 weeks I got hundreds of pictures of these little spotted pigs born in litters of four. And I kept sending them back and rejecting them. Well, the lead editor finally called and said, Kelly, what's going on there? This lady is beside herself. Why aren't we using more of these pigs? She said, they're adorable. They're cute. I said, yes, they are. I said, ma'am, in my faring house back home, there's a doorway. And I said just about knee high in that doorway, there's a red line. And she said, okay. I said, ma'am, that's blood. Because when we had pigs born looking like those, we knocked them in the head on the way out of the faring house. Because they were not going to perform. They were not practical. And they were probably going to get three or four good pigs killed because they walked around squealing all the time. I didn't gain more pictures of little spotted pigs. But like I said, I'm kind of proud of that. And you folks that are going this route, don't fall into this stupid high tech trap. The boar in the bottle killed the breeding stock industry. Artificial insemination. I don't care how rare your breed is. If you start breeding artificially, your gene pool is just going to keep getting narrower and narrower. And it's going to reduce your chance to make sales. Well Kelly, isn't that how we make progress? Isn't that how everybody does it? No. The most valuable livestock on the face of this earth cannot get a pedigree if it's produced by artificial insemination or embryo transfer. And point of fact, thoroughbred horses must come from witness natural matings. Let's talk about practical. Ladies and gentlemen, if they'll lead a ten million dollar stallion into a breeding barn in Kentucky tomorrow and risk having him kicked in the genitals by a bulky mare to make sure that they're maintaining the integrity and the purity of the line and the quality and the worth of their animals. How can we stand up and say they're wrong? Or better still, how can we defend what we're doing trying to factory farm these animals? And trust me on that, you cannot register an artificially sired thoroughbred horse. You'll pardon some of the language I've used right here, but it's something that kind of touches me pretty deeply. You make your start with what you have and you begin by selecting primarily for growth and vigor. When I was in the hog business, we could bury you in numbers, feed efficiency, growth rate, but they were manufactured. You want to have a fast growing pig, feeding pig starter all of his life. You want to make him look really spectacular, stick him into an eight foot by eight foot pen, feeding pig starter, and push him for all he's worth. Every time he has a sneeze or a sniffle, drive a needle into him. You know, there's a reason a lot of animals died because they couldn't get in the breeding pool, but we let that happen. I have to tell you a story about myself. There's a lot of people here that know me, folks from back home. If it comes into my head, it generally comes out of my mouth. And I was down at the grocery store down in Troy the other day. There's this round barrel on the wall and it said sanitizing wipes. And I'm sitting there on the old man's bench, which feels more comfortable with each passing day. And these folks come in, they're grabbing these things and they're wiping down the shopping cart handles. Well, before I thought, it came right out of my mouth. If there's something on a shopping cart handle that'll make you sick, maybe you should go ahead and die and get out of the gene pool before you do damage to it. And tune with my theme for this year's show. It got real quiet again. But go for this size and growth. When you do that, you're selecting for health. They're the ones that grew the fastest, grew the strongest, grew the biggest on your farm. And no two farms on earth are alike. You've got to be putting together hogs that will work first on your farm and then for your market. Okay, start small, but good. That's getting a little harder to do too. Like I say, we've got some pretty extreme hogs in type. There are some old boys that are moving back toward the center. Some boys doing some practical things. Y'all want to see a pretty good old sal that makes sense. You walk straight back here after a while and let this boy slap up that big red sal. You take some time to really look at her. That's kind of what God meant a hog to be. The only thing that could have made her better had she been born a do-rock. Don't fall for extremes in type. Go to the middle of the road type. We did a conference similar to this up at Silex many years ago. And Ron sat in on it and Jim Foster, some of you know the name Jim Foster. But Jim had the first $150,000 hog sale in the Midwest. And a man asked, he said, what should I look for when I go to buy hogs? Well, we talked for 20 minutes and didn't once mention hogs. We talked about the people you bought them from. And I never will forget. Ron said, well, he said they should be in farming a long time. I said, well, they should be farming the way you farm at home. Your types of buildings, your type of feed. We both agreed that kind of meant you should be an older man. And Jim Foster said, and he should never go to hog shows. I've kind of followed that. We led a 4-H club for a number of years. And I've seen the good and the bad of hog shows. I can tell you how to cheat and I can tell you how to win the right way. And I've seen it all. It's not pretty. Tell you one story that'll stick in your mind and maybe help you understand a little bit. Had a good friend. Had a boy that tore it up in northeast Missouri. Got to the state fair. Called the January Boer class. The boy was 17 years old, drove the Boer into the ring in the open show. But if you've never seen Boers shown, they all go into the ring at the same time. So this was August and they called the January Boers. You're talking about Boers that were crowded seven months old. Thirty of them went into the ring. He made the first pass in front of the judges. They pried open a side gate and then came a yearling Boer that had been brought up for the big Boer contest. The boy had a 45-minute running Boer fight on his hands. And he had to do it on his own. He had a boy that should have won. He settled for a red ribbon. On the way about, all the good old boys slapped him on the back seat. Welcome to the big time. When hogs went to 8 cents and premium standard decided we'll raise our Boers in the house. Welcome to the big time. Be good. And we need to get as many into this game as we can. And we need to get them into the right places. We have a chance now to sell a lot of pork. A lot of good pork. Got to sell a lot of pork to a lot of people that don't understand what good pork is. And that's a challenge to us. But that's how we respond to what the challenge is. That's why we have to keep the numbers down. A sal with two 8 pig letters any year will produce over a ton of pork sausage. Now, a ton of pork sausage. Okay. What do you make of that? Well, you stay back home and you might get a dollar and a half pound. You move a little closer to Columbia or Kansas City or St. Louis and you might get two and a half. You get with a local processor and you start turning them into brats with Italian seasoning. And you take a place in the market where they can identify you. And they go to four. You cross that St. Charles Bridge down there and you get into one of those Chesterfield Farmers markets in year six. From your sal with a ton, you've had gross sales of $12,000. I don't care if she's eating $30 a bushel corn. If you can't make money with $12,000 out of a sal, son, you shouldn't be in the hog business. You shouldn't be in any kind of business. But not everyone can cross that bridge. Not everyone's comfortable down there. But I've got folks back home that in Silic's 60 miles from St. Louis are netting $100 to $200 on every butcher hog they sell. Now they're not selling 800 or 900 of them. They're selling $15,000, $20,000, $25,000 or $30,000. Remember what I said about leave hogs away God wanted them? I think we need to farm the way God wants us to. Not be greedy. He set us down to be stewards over a whole big vast world. And that means being a wise producer. Know your limits. You can break these little niche markets and you can do it with a single sal. You can do it with the purchase of a wrong bore. It's what you put into it, heart and mind. I, like I said, we went from three years time to 25 sales. And my senior year in high school, we were up to a half a dozen sales. And this little tip fall away because it worked for me. But we needed a male hog. And we shopped every hog catalog that came through. Jess and Dick Spencer over at Gillespie, Illinois had a bread guilt sale. Well, bread guilt sale in January, but he had a half a dozen good boars tucked away in that sale. We set out the day after a blizzard. Jimmy Nutter and myself and dad's blessing and we went to Gillespie, Illinois. I had $500. That was roughly $499 more than I'd ever been away from home with it once in many a time before then. But dad said, spend it all if you have to. He said, you're not going to get that top pig. Well, like I say, they had ford been a blizzard and it was a bread guilt sale. I hit that top pig at $200. He got down to me and another boy. And I got him bought for $300. Like an idiot, I had $200 in my pocket. I got up and went back and started looking through the guilt pens. Cooler heads prevailed and I took my bore and my $200 back home. And my advice is, don't be afraid of a blizzard to go buy something. Many years ago, I do some auction work. A bunch of us stood together to sell a lot of old auctioneers. And they said, well, I said, what's the best day to have a farm auction? All the one guy said, oh, I want sunshine and 75 degrees and the birds singing. The guy said, man, I want it to be right after a good rain and everybody's feeling good. This old gentleman, he was out of Western Illinois and the old-time auctioneer, the packer boots, the leather britches, the cloth around his throat to protect his throat. He said, I want to do it on a Monday morning. He said, I want it to be colder than Billy Blue Blazes. I want snow flying. And I tell you what, all of us step back. And I said, well, why ever for? He said, I won't have a single tire kicker or coffee drinker there. He said, they'll be there to buy and I'll be in the house for dinner and done. You've got to know what your marketing is about, folks. And once you're in the hog business, don't fall into the trap of doing it the way the rest of them do. Your opportunities are going to come from outside. I don't like this push the parody and push the envelope thing. But you are going to have to find opportunities that will work for you. Your buyers are not going to be my buyers or not going to be Garrett's buyers. And you're not all going to fill the same role. But don't be afraid of the new and the challenging. I'm from up in northeast Missouri. There's a place called Woods Locker up there. Nice little family owned business. They produced, created and generated a product called the pork burger. That is the most recent modern cut of pork in the last 50 years. And they sell it by the hundreds of pounds. But who would have ever thought of a pork burger? Pork sausage, pork chops. It's kind of interesting. It's all different. A few years ago I hosted some boys from back in the northeast that were Rodale writers for the New Farm magazine. And came out and we were sitting and talking. And they said, I got to ask you a question Kelly. And I said, okay. I said, first of all, you people drink iced tea 12 months out of the year. And I said, yes, we do. We'll have iced tea. And he said, well, what's a pork steak? I said, what's a pork steak? And I said, well, that's a shoulder cut of pork. He said, a shoulder cut of pork. I said, what do you all eat for Sunday night supper? He said, Boston butt. I said, well, we slice a thinner color pork steak and we eat it 12 months out of the year for barbecue. You know, but somebody had to slice the first pork steak. You know, think about it. Somebody had to eat the first egg. I can see two old country boys. You eat it. No, you eat it. I don't even know what did you see that came from eat it? Somebody ate it. It's a multi-million dollar business. So are we going to have another new pork steak? I don't think so. 25 years ago, they didn't think there'd be pork burger. Well, you've hit on us. He asked about something called a round of pork. If you've been following the livestock industry, there's a lot of controversy over it, right? Did you know that there are 27 different cuts of beef steak? Actually, I think there's three, but they have 27 different names for them. That's merchandising. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, yeah. Well, if you've ever taken a face of a ham, and we do this at home because there's just a small family, but you look down the face of a ham, you've got three seams of fat coming off of the ham bone. And you take a boning knife and they'll naturally sever down those lines. He's taken off the top one, calling it top round. Slice the others as you've got ham steaks. It becomes a roast. You can call it just about anything you want to. Whoever heard of a flank steak 15 years ago? Or a flat iron steak now? And that's the thing, folks. We've got to be opened up to this. Don't get stuck in. Be traditional with how you're producing them, but be creative with how you're marketing them. Because that's just the whole point of it. Oh, me. I don't know where you come from, but you can't get away from them from where I'm from. Well, they're all over Pike and Lincoln and Warren counties. I stay out of those little speed trap towns. But like I say, the point is right now, and the things that are going to add value to these hogs, and we need to know about this value added, antibiotic free, outside housing, pure genetics, distinct eating quality. Antibiotic free right now is a very interesting approach to production. It makes a lot of sense if you've got the hogs that will stand up to it. That's the point. I was on a farm two years ago. We got a lot of Amish farmers in Missouri involved in this antibiotic free production. And these boys were scrambling to make it work with confinement hogs. And they trotted out a set of boars. And folks, they were so sick they had infectious pus coming out of their eyes. The boars weren't breeding. They were down to skin and bones. They had ileitis. Well, that was pretty quick surrounded by a bunch of young Amish farmers. How do we get out of this? Well, the hard truth was you get out of it by burying your way out of it. You just keep selecting for those stronger and better ones. And you will overcome it. You'll defeat all of these diseases. Hogs have a reputation for having a disease of the week. Well, simply, we've knocked off all the bad swine diseases. Pseudo rabies, which was the bad one when I was young. Pseudo rabies have been around for a hundred years. In horses, it's called Osjewski's disease or mad itch. They got to the point where I couldn't take a pig off the farm without an ear tag in it. And have his number registered and everybody knew where he went. Never broke with anything. We bred our way out. Deep, wide chests, long body, deep side. Hogs need fat to live. An inch of back fat is insulation. It produces hormones. It gives them the ability to stand into a feeder on those cold, wet, rainy days and you want to rush back into the house as quick as you can. And I told them, boys, I said, the only way out of this is you're going to have to breed your way out. I said, that means a lot of small leaders. I said, fellas, I started a new line of Durrock sales a few years ago and I went through several hundred, no several thousand dollars worth of gills before I found them that would work on our farm. And I'm sitting there and telling them and I mean they didn't want to hear that. And I looked up and way over here was an old Amish gentleman. Long beard and a black hat and true to the Amish orders he could be. And I stopped talking and the old man looked at me and went, that's an Amish high-five. I'm about as proud as that as I am anything else. Because that's it. I was on Robbie Myers farm many years ago and Robbie's probably as good a Hampshire hog man as they're in the world. And I'll tell you how good he is. I was up there trying to buy some of his cull sales to make mine better. And he said, oh Kelly, let's go out and look at the hogs. Well, you know, you hear all this stuff about disinfection and sanitary management. And now we pulled out into a pasture and he said, come on, let's go over here and walk and look. I said, Robbie, I said, now my shoes, I've been around other hogs today. He said, I'll tell you what he said, if you've got a disease on there, he said, I need to get it on to this farm and get these exposed to them to make them better and stronger. He's want to take that kind of risk. And that's what it takes. That's the way I sold a lot of boars. I bring a fellow out said, oh buddy, take him home. I couldn't kill him here. If you took a bulldozer and you'd pushed every building I owned into one big pile and set it on fire. If you'd give me $500 the next day, I could have been back in the hog business. First durot bore we ever bought. We went to a farm over in High Hill, Missouri. Oh boy, he was probably had more money than God. But his farmer was fenced with old bed springs. He's using old cars for hog houses. Well, we bought this bore and we went back home and Dad started to laugh. I said, Dad, what's so funny? He said, did you see the car that hog stepped out of? And I said, well, I was really, I was kind of watching the hog. He said, Kelly, he said that was a 53 Plymouth. He said, I'm driving you home in a 52 Plymouth. He said, I don't know, but he said, I think we've just bought a hog that's going to have to take a step down in life when he comes to live with us. But we got him home and we began to build with him. And that's it, folks. I wish I could promise you a solution today or a point you in a direction that says it's going to happen like that. And time is sliding away from me. I'm 63 years old. I told Phyllis, I've got one more step out in the world to take. And she said, good. So we went to town and she signed a mortgage. So I've used up my quota now. So you young bloods, it's your turn. I wish I could tell you, boys, you can go buy 10 guilds and find you five cheap acres and be in the hog business. Now, it may be that you're going to have to rent a little slot at the edge of a town. And you may have to do it with one sale and maybe 50 laying hens, maybe 200 tomato plants. But it'll be a start. It'll be yours. And if you make it good and you work at it, you'll make it grow. Growth doesn't have to be huge. And don't fall into this. You've always got to be growing. Growth is the philosophy of the cancer cell. If you're not growing toward a purpose and growing with a plan, you're growing like a weed. Now the other hard part of this, folks, is there's not a lot of professional help out there for you right now. If one of you figures out how you could get a roundup ready hog, I'll guarantee we'll have a Mizzou program to help you. But that ain't going to happen. And when you go talking, I was kind of drafted back here this morning to talk about swine rations without soybean oil meal in them. And I've been working with some farmers up in the north with chicken rations without soybean. Well, the only text that we could find that would work were over 80 years old. Nobody knows how to farm hogs the way our grandparents did. I wrote for the Rodale Magazine New Farm. George DeVault was a pretty good friend of mine. And Bob Rodale, when the iron curtain came down, they went to Russia. And they worked hard over there. You think big agriculture was a problem here? They had big state agriculture. And it fell apart. And George called me one time. He said, Kelly, he said, you know, he said, I think I figured out what these people need. And I said, George, what do they need? He said, you know how they talk about Russian serfs back at the turn of the century? He said, that was these people's grandparents and great-grandparents. He said, if I could give them 30 days with their great-grandfather to farm with, he said, I think I could turn Russian agriculture around. Folks were not reinventing the wheel here. We're trying to get the wheel on the right wagon again. And that is not going to be easy. I'm not sure where we're at on time. I never thought I'd say I'd miss Paul Berg, but he was pretty good about keeping me on track. And it's a shame because I got a pretty good Paul Berg story to tell you today. 110. Well, I got enough time to take up an offering, Gary. Let me say this. Yes, sir. Essentially, you're going to go back to your basics. Electronic fencing has gotten better. And that's the cheapest way you can go with hogs. Now, electric fencing right now, 12 inches high will turn back a sow or a bore growing home. You're going to have to put another strand in at four inches to turn back these younger pigs. And this high tensile shocking wire is real good. The fencers have gotten a whole lot better. As far as housing, actually, we're going to have to go back the other way. We had the best system of hog raising the world is ever known in the 1930s. It was based out of what's the county in Illinois. It's the big county to the north. And over here, we patterned and we call it the Le Cleed County system. You keep them, you ferro your pigs close to the house in a simple building. When the pigs are two weeks old, you take the sows and the pigs out on the cleaning. You take the sows and the pigs out on the clean ground. Quarter acre will support 4,000 litters. They're not raising animals, folks. You've got them out there to get sun shining on them, to get some exercise on them and to keep them on clean ground. Clean ground means any ground that a hog hasn't been on for at least 18 months. So you moved them out. And you put a pretty simple old housing. One South Farring houses work real well. We drug a lot of them into the barn in the wintertime and up on the hill in the summertime to catch the breezes. Pike County houses, 6 by 8, pig bunk on the back end, crawl in there. You learn real quick the importance of good, calm, natured hogs when you're inside a 6 by 8 foot building with a 500 pound sow and 10 pigs and one of the little devils squeals. I have to tell you a true story. We had a neighbor and Herschel was going on to his reward, but Herschel should have never been in the livestock business. He lost an arm and he had the barkiest set of sows that the good Lord ever made. And he kind of encouraged it because every time he'd walked by a sow that's rare up on the gate and he'd lay that hook in there and she'd bite them. And he thought that was real funny. Till one night he got turned around doing evening chores and he passed on the other side of the pen and he laid the good hand over them. I don't know if you've ever been bit by a hog, but it's not pleasant. But it made him a better stockman. Made him a soaring tender one for a while too. No, no he kept it. Folks, that's it. One thing that I have learned is we use a lot of water called range houses. And for many, many years those buildings were essentially 8 feet deep and 16 to 24 feet long. And one long side was left open. And we'd turn and position those to the south. Now when you took sows out or you had growing hogs, you could get probably, pinned on the length, 3, 4,000 pigs in there, a couple of dozen growing hogs. But the thing was, they were tippy in the wind and you had a lot of problems with blowback. You got snow and rain into them. Well, we had a neighbor that kind of pondered on this. Well, he made 8 by 16 foot houses, but he made only one of the 8 foot ends open. He turned that to the south, so he had 16 feet covered on 3 sides with a good roof. It created a microclimate. You put hogs in that, you bedded them well, on a winter day you could get to the back of that house and you could work in your shirt sleeves. Because it did that good a job of holding body heat. Now hogs, another thing is, they need insulation in the roof. Because hogs put out a lot of moisture when they breathe. If you contain it right now, sound pigs will produce 6,000 BTUs of heat in an hour. But it's wet heat. So if you've got a 10 roof over, that hits and condenses and you're raising sows and pigs in a rain forest. Because it just rains back down on them. Sadly, sows also like the taste of insulation. So that's where a 1 by 2 inch wire mesh comes in. Tack that over the insulation and they can't get at it. It's a challenge sometimes to outthink a hog. I have been outthought by hogs. And I do have time for one more story. Some of you met my wife, Phyllis. She's the joy of my life. If the Lord allows, we'll be 33 years married on the 5th of January. Good Pentecostal girl. I called her out one time, we've just been married for very few months. I said, Phyllis, I need your help for a few minutes. Well, she knew she was in trouble already. I said, now you stand here. Basically, I was using my wife as a gate. I said, Phyllis, you stand here and I will run these hogs by you and they will see you and turn and go into this pen. Well, all of them did that but one. And he was the smallest pig in the munch and he hit her across the shins, knocked her down and drug her backward under electric fans. She didn't say a word. Got up, walked to the house. Now I didn't have enough chores to keep me out there as long as I should. And you men know, you have to go to the house eventually. There's no way around, you've got to go. And I walked in there and there's the woman I loved with all my heart. She's sitting there all dressed up through gritted teeth. She said, we're going out to eat and it's going to be someplace very good. Garrett, I'm going to give you two words that will serve you the rest of your life. Yes, dear. And we did that. Folks, I've been 35, 30. I've been basically 42 years with the hogs. I don't have too many right now. Got the bad legs and the bad knees. It wasn't the hog's fault. It was me being a stupid young boy and trying to do things I shouldn't do. Don't ever jump off a loading dock with a hundred pound bag of feed. That just doesn't work. But it was a good life. I'll always be grateful for it. It can come again in a different farm. But it'll come again, I think, in the way my dad wanted me to farm. In the way I want the rest of you to farm. Clean, sweet, pure, and honest. And you can do that with a hog. So I thank you very much for your time and patience. Two o'clock this afternoon, we'll be back in the back. We'll be doing some poultry work. We'll be talking about breed selection. Tomorrow morning, we're going to do a two-hour session. We're going to do an hour up here and then we're going to do an hour back in the back. And we're going to get some chickens in your hands and a little mud and manure on you. And we're going to try to tell you what a good one looks like. This boy's got some good red hogs if you want to go back. And he and I'll be glad to work some points and show you what some hog things you need to think about. But again, I thank you. I thank the Mokker family for inviting me in here today. And I want you to stay and enjoy the show. And again, thank you very much.