Attention

The way in which the entire state government has come to attention over the bird flu is truly amazing.  While in no way seeking to minimize the importance of attention to a livestock disease which can sometimes infect humans, I must say that the way the government, from the Minnesota Governor to our senior US Senator and all their assorted cohort of enablers and hangers-on descended upon Willmar to fall all over themselves promising help to the area's beleagered turkey growers is a picture of what is wrong with our agriculture policy.

We first broke with PRRS in 1998.  It came at the end of the year in which we tried to cope with 8 cent commodity hogs.  It was coincidentally at the beginnings of our effort to include the next generation in our farm.  It cost us our entire winter and spring sales of market hogs, as they were peacefully decomposing in the manure pile.

Next episode happened in the fall of 2013.  This was a breeding failure which cost us about eighty five percent of the animals that should have been born and available for sale in the spring and summer of 2014.  This one came with associated follow on diseases which were able to take advantage of the pigs weakened immune systems; thus we are just now recovering full production.  Now, of course, is news of another epidemic.

These hog diseases caused us, besides personal anxiety and heartbreak over plans gone awry, financial losses in each of those years approaching half of this farm's gross sales. In addition, the second outbreak coincided with major expansions in all our pork markets so that we had to spend the year trying to locate and buy pigs we didn't have in order to keep our market.

Now, what is the impact of the politicians' efforts to hold a major agricultural industry harmless?  Well, since we never received a nickel, or even the slightest government attention, the turkey growers will now stand ahead of us in the line to buy and pay for equipment, to buy land, to expand and modernize the business.  But that is the least of it.  When we suffered the PRSS losses in 1998, we decided we needed a better price for the hogs we did sell and we built a pork sales business to accomplish that.  And we decided that since ordinary animal medical practice was not able to control epidemic disease for us, we needed to learn enough about nutrition and animal health to do that ourselves.  So started our nearly two decade search for enough change and new thinking in feeds and environment so that we could develop a hog herd with a high level of immunity and the strong health to safely operate in the animal disease hot house western Minnesota has become.

We were backed into a corner and came out fighting for change.  We are not done yet. This is precisely the "opportunity" being taken away from the turkey growers.  They will be pleased to continue with the same old routine, knowing the government will backstop them next time too.  This is no way to make agricultural progress.   

Jim