
When I started farming in the early 1970’s, we owned our hogs and our hog operation paid the bills and sourced our equity. I bought and paid for a model 1066 IHC tractor with the profit from just 400 head of fat hogs. I wondered then why we were not raising thousands of them. This was the time when the industry was moving indoors with farrowing stalls and slatted finishing barns. We farrowed sows either in A-frames or bedded pens like the foodie producers do today. Most of our hogs were bought as feeder pigs. Our hogs were finished in traditional sheds, partially outside with straw bedding and pens cleaned with a skid-steer loader. We built one slatted finishing barn and that is where our focus on hog production shifted fully to cattle. We never made the transition to confinement production. We never wanted to be obligated to facility mortgages. We did not add to our land base during this period but we kept what we had. We got along fine with the volatility of the hog cycle. Ironically, many hog producers fared better during the Ag depression of the 1980’s than grain farmers did up until 1998 when the…