A Year in the Life of a Farmer: Shipment of piglets moved into nursery

Follow the Haag family throughout the entire year. Each month, look for updates about the family members and the decisions they make on their farm.

EMINGTON, Ill. — A shipment of 1,500 weaned pigs arrived at the Haag family farm July 30 as part of their swine production cycle.

The weaned piglets were shipped from Brian Bradshaw’s Win Productions, headquartered in Valley City, Illinois, and placed in the nursery. The Haags will receive another 1,500 weaned piglets the following week.

“We do that in a nine-week cycle. So, we get 3,000 every nine weeks. They’ll stay in the nursery six to seven weeks depending on how our flow goes and then take them out of the nursery and clean it up before we get the next group in,” Mike Haag said.

Mike’s wife, Trisha, along with Aaron Hughes and Matt Hoogstraat moved the young pigs into their new quarters.

Earlier in the day, Haag was wrapping up a problem with corn bin storage.

“I had a bin of corn that started getting hot last week. Sometimes it’s really hard this time of year to keep grain in good condition to feed the pigs. That’s a challenge sometimes during these last few months before we get that fresh grain at harvest,” he said.

“We aired it out and cooled it. The corn didn’t go bad. It just started warming up on us. It can go from perfectly fine for six or seven months and all of a sudden it gets hot in a week.”

The corn in this area is at mid-pollination. After an extended dry spell, the area has received timely rains the last three to four weeks.

“That has really improved our moisture level for this area. It looks like we could have a really good crop maybe, at least on the right trend,” Haag noted.

Processing Update

Haag gave an update on the state of pork industry in general after being hit hard by the processing plants’ closures when employees tested positive for COVID-19.

Haag said most of the plants are back to nearly 100% capacity, but “we’re still trying to make up for some of the ground we lost. We’re still not caught up. We might have gained half of what we were behind.

“That’s what has been a big job the last few weeks in trying to find a place to go with this next group of pigs. Pigs are coming in today and to get that nursery empty I had to be creative on where I was going to go with pigs because I still haven’t been able to completely ship out the next group. So, we brought some pigs back to this farm to hold them for a few weeks out of the nursery and doubled-filled one of the finishing barns for two weeks. That’s a big job right now just trying to manage the flow.”

Dire Times

Despite the improvement in the processing capacity, the swine industry continues to struggle.

The price of pork on grocery store shelves is the same or slightly above what it was pre-COVID-19, but that’s not filtering down to the farm gate.

“The percentage that the producer who is doing the work to raise that animal is getting has gone down 20% to 30% through this. The percentage that the farmer is getting right now is drastically reduced and almost at a crucial level. Farmers are really hurting and we’ve had to work all the way through this process and it’s really hurt us as much as anybody for what we receive for these animals,” Haag said.

Senate Republicans unveiled another coronavirus relief package July 27 that would give the U.S. Department of Agriculture broad authority to spend an additional $20 billion to compensate agricultural producers and processors for the impact of the pandemic.

This money would augment the $14 billion that USDA has available to spend in its Commodity Credit Corporation account as a result of the Coronavirus Aid, Relief and Economic Security Act approved in March.

“I think it’s important to talk about the new package that they’re trying to introduce to help farmers and provide some payments to livestock producers. Livestock producers were part of the first relief package but it’s dire times and really hard time for producers right now. I don’t think the hog industry has seen a shakeup like this since 1998, and I think this is going to last longer,” Haag explained.

“Our best prices are usually in June and July but we’re only getting $20 a hundredweight right now. Usually September through November is when our bad markets are and most producers are really nervous and the grains aren’t a lot more positive either. Hopefully it gets better, but there are still a lot of pigs out there.”