Barn Talk - Why Hog Farmers Are Winning in 2026

Episode Date: February 22, 2026

Welcome back to Barn Talk! In today’s episode, hosts Tork and Sawyer sit down for another candid, insightful conversation, this time with David Newman, a true leader in the U.S. pork industry and the current CEO of the National Pork Board. From his roots as a fourth-generation pig farmer to guiding national marketing strategies on behalf of 60,000 pork producers, David Newman brings a unique perspective straddling both boots-on-the-ground agriculture and big-picture industry leadership. Together, they dig into the major shifts that pork producers have seen in the last year, from resilient domestic demand and record-setting exports, to the evolving challenges around labor, health, and new opportunities in international markets. Listen in as David Newman shares his personal backstory—growing up on a diversified family farm, weathering years of ups and downs, and the grit it takes to innovate and adapt in modern agriculture. Plus, the trio explores the future of pork: innovations in product cuts, shifting consumer tastes, and how pork’s affordability and versatility are creating the biggest opportunities in decades for producers at every scale. If you've ever wondered what it takes to transition from farm life to high-level leadership, how small-town innovation can change an entire industry, or what the future holds for one of America’s cornerstone proteins, this episode is for you. SUBSCRIBE TO THE PODCAST ➱ https://bit.ly/3a7r3nR   SUBSCRIBE TO THIS’LL DO FARM ➱ https://bit.ly/2X8g45c  LISTEN ON: SPOTIFY ➱ https://open.spotify.com/show/3icVr4KWq4eUDl7Oy60YMY  APPLE ➱ https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/barn-talk/id1574395049 Follow Behind The Scenes👇🏻 ● This’ll Do Farm Instagram ➱ https://bit.ly/30KPBNk   ● Barn Talk TikTok ➱ https://bit.ly/3qciekS   ● Sawyer’s Instagram  ➱ https://bit.ly/3BtX0n4   ● Tork’s Instagram ➱ https://bit.ly/3LGZJxS    00:00 "Support and Share Barn Talk" 09:15 "Pork: The Time Is Now" 15:25 "Pork Board's Strategic Success" 16:33 "Boosting Pork Demand Together" 21:47 "Pork Campaign Targets Hispanics" 28:58 "Life in the Hog Business" 33:33 Rise and Shift of Hog Farming 39:47 "Lessons, Tenacity, and Opportunity" 44:08 Agricultural Financing and Risk Management 51:07 Workaholic Leader Shares Leadership Insight 57:16 PRRS: A Growing Swine Challenge 01:04:18 Future of Labor in Food Industry 01:10:34 Global Agriculture Shifts and Pricing 01:13:24 Global Protein Demand and Emerging Markets 01:17:13 Brazil's Pork Export Expansion 01:22:19 Global Pork Industry Insights 01:32:34 "Legacy of Patrick Fleming" 01:34:21 "Busyness, Strategy, and Vision" ------------------------------- ⚠NO FINANCIAL ADVICE / DISCLAIMER⚠  The Information discussed and shared on Barn Talk is provided for educational, informational, and entertainment purposes only, without any express or implied warranty of any kind, including warranties of accuracy, completeness, or success for any particular purpose. The Information contained in or provided from or through this podcast is not intended to be and does not constitute financial advice, investment advice, trading advice, or any other advice. The Information on this podcast and provided from or through our content is general in nature and is not specific to you, the user or anyone else. You should not make any decision, financial, investment, trading or otherwise, based on any of the information presented on this podcast without undertaking independent due diligence and consultation with a professional, professional broker or financial advisory. Understand that you are using any and all Information available on or throug... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

All of the food we eat and much of the clothing we wear comes from plants and animals that are raised on farms. Farms are different in type, in size, and even in names. Welcome to Barn Talk. What happens at the barn? Stays in the barn, but not today. We're going to let it all out for you guys. Today is going to be another great guest episode. Got a great guest coming to Southeast Iowa to have an awesome conversation with us in the barn. But before we get into it, you guys know the drill. If you get any value from the show, all that we ask is you share it out with the people that you know. The more that you guys do that, the more that this show grows, the more guests we can have on,

the more episodes we can make. It's kind of the ticket to admission to watch or listen to the show. We found the best way to grow a podcast is through word of mouth and through you guys. So, you know, there's a lot of ways you can get value. If you laughed, if you learn something, if you're related to us on something, just share it. Another thing you can do to help us out here at Barn Talk is leave a review on Spotify or Apple. The more you guys do that, the more credible. you make our show, which in turn allows us to have more guests come on the show and have great conversations with us. And we also just love hearing your guys' overall thoughts on the show and how we

can improve it and what you think about the show in general. So we appreciate all the reviews that come in on those platforms. Last thing you can do is if you like watching the podcast, you can always subscribe to our YouTube channel, Barn Talk, where we put out video episodes and clips and all kinds of stuff. So we really appreciate all your guys of support and I'm excited to get into this one. How are you doing today, Kingpin? I'm good. Today, it's a good thing that we're doing this today. Our guest is venturing down from Port Congress in Des Moines because that's going on. And I'm not there, but we're here. And that's good. Today is probably the last day for the winter season that we will not need the cancer canyon cancer cannon because it's pretty nice in the

barn today what is the cancer cannon for people to don't know one of those forced air uh kerosene torpedo heaters we call them the cancer cannon because uh if you've ever been in one they're pretty they're pretty good once they're running uh they stink like hell when they start and if you get one and you run it and it starts getting low and it sputters every time it sputters it just puts out a out of smoke. So, yeah, Tricia doesn't like when I call it that. But anyway, we've got one of those. There's degrees to the temperature system here in the barn. The mild winter gets the heat AC units, the, I don't know what you want to call. A wall units. They're like a mini split kind of that they put in hotel rooms. We have three of those. And those manage pretty well. And then if it gets,

if you get a little wind or it gets a little too cold, too cold, down around, you know, 15, 20 degrees. We got a couple of Mr. Heaters that we run on LP Pigs. But if we try to just not, we just try not to do episodes when it's like 11 below, like it's going to be on Friday and Saturday morning. But if we have to, we fire up the old cancer cannon and get her heated up. And that works all right. but today, today's pretty good, but it, the wins. We only got one level of heat today, right?

We don't have. Oh, we got, we got the Mr. Heaters running just because, uh, I didn't know what the tolerance was for the group that's coming today. So we, they'll probably get shut off once we get going. Look at you. You're accommodating. I am. I try to, I try to be, yeah, I try to be. Yeah. I try to be. Yeah. I mean, I don't give a rip about you, but yeah. Well, we all know that. For the paying clientele, we like to take care of them.

Yeah, there you go. We do have some high quality clientele today. So our guest today is a farmer, but he's also the CEO of the National Pork Board. And he leads the Pork Checkoff funded promotion research and education project on behalf of America's roughly 60,000 pork producers. Before serving a CEO, Newman led the National Pork Board's market growth team. And he was actually here. We did a podcast with him a while ago. It's been over a year ago when he was in that role.

And he also helped with domestic demand, health, and nutrition. And he is a very knowledgeable fella down to earth, still raises pigs. Me, scientists too. Yeah, I mean, there aren't very many people that, and we said this before about folks that we have on here. It's kind of a unique set of talent when you can run your mouth like I do. but you're actually smart. You see, that's kind of the difference. This guy actually has like, he has real knowledge, but he can articulate.

So we're excited to have him. So without any further ado, let's get into it. Well, we're live, boys. So David Newman. Welcome to Barn Talk. Welcome back to Barn Talk. Welcome back. Well, I'm glad to be back.

So thank you. Yeah, we appreciate it. So it's been a great year for pork producers after a string of not so great years. So what has happened this year? Well, really, what's happened since the last time we talked because we were really just kind of trying to find her way out of things the last time we spoke. Well, last time we spoke, I mean, back this up to where we were a year ago and even back it up to the year before to that when I started at the Port Board leading marketing.

Tough time to start when everybody's losing 30 bucks ahead, right? You know, fast forward to where we're at now, you know, the reality is while there's been some supply challenges out there, the reality is demand's pretty good. And, you know, we're coming off of another near record year on international exports. Even amongst all the conversation, right, the conversation about tariffs and all the what ifs in the world, pork is still very well positioned globally. U.S. pork, right, is still positioned well globally. Even though you've got major competition from Brazil. Everybody knows that Brazil is really leaning in on the global marketplace. So keeping that foothold is important. But domestically, last year, when we talked,

we talked about the launch of the Taste of Bork and Doe campaign, which we did in May of 2025. You know, really, a lot of people are realizing the opportunity that exists for pork. And I think that you're starting to see that come to fruition. We saw cutout was over 100 bucks in December. in my life, I have never seen that. For people that know what a cutout is, what is that? Yeah, if they're listening. Yeah, so when you think about cutout values and you hear about these in like daily reports, pieces like that, it's really quite simple. Cutout is the price a packer gets paid by breaking that pig down into its primal cuts or even farther into other cuts.

You guys know about this well. And what can they receive that price? Take that price and subtract it from what they paid for the live hog. And that's the cut out value. Yeah. So quite literally, because, you know, meat guys, we're pretty simple, right? I mean, what happens when you literally cut out the meat and you get paid that price? That difference establishes where we're at from a threshold standpoint.

And it gets deeper than that. But at the end of the day, it says if producers are making money and packers are making money and we're selling more work to consumers, that's a winning proposition for the entire category. All the way around. That's right. Yeah. How much has, how much has, and this is a little, I guess is a little off the subject, but I was just thinking about that. Because to the consumer, pork still feels like a bargain.

That's the thing. Yeah. I mean, how much has the rise of beef prices helped the value of pork? Yeah. Well, I mean, you might imagine I get that question. A million times. A million times. Okay.

So, you know, I'll back this up and say, I, you know, I'm the third generation. My son and daughter will be the fourth generation on our farm, diversified, fair to finish sow operation. We also run a cattle business as well. So it's no secret cattle business has been pretty good, right? Especially if you're on the cow calf side. Now, if you're buying those 500, 600 pound calves, that's a different story. If you're selling them and you're listening to this right now, you're probably saying, and this has been a pretty good run.

And so the realism to this scenario is, I'm not an ag economist, by the way, but we read this every single day. And the correlation between consumers trading from beef to pork is actually not that strong. Now, we want it to be strong, right? We want to think that when we think about, wow, I mean, how can rib-eis be $25 a pound

and you're not trading down to a $3.5, four-dollar pound loin? What consumers do rather is they typically, they tend to trade across the category, meaning that they'll just go from steaks to ground beef, right? But here's the secret sauce right now of what we're starting to realize, is that the broader business, think food service companies, retailers are realizing the opportunity. Because we're continuing to hear this thing about affordability of food. We're continuing to hear about feed me, feed my family, and pork is an affordable nutrient-dense protein, right?

This whole thing with the food pyramid now being turned upside down. All of that has beneficial to this red meat business. So what I would say is, is this, there has never been a time to seize the day in the pork business like there is right now. And we may not see, this is kind of a bold statement, but I, I was speaking with a producer that's here in the area just today. And I said, you know what, in your lifetime and in my lifetime and my career, we may never see an opportunity this big in front of us again,

which was the foundation to what we put down and saying, that's why the time is now to double down on pork. Because the affordability is real. The quality is real. So we've got to make sure that we put that in front of consumers the way they want to see the product. That's an important piece. What do you think on that side? What do consumers want to see on that product?

Is it more fat? Is it what kind of cuts they want? What are you seeing? Well, yeah, it's a great question. So it's kind of all of the above. So first off, the Taste of Pork and Do campaign is built not solely, but with an intense focus on flavor. Because consumers are driven by taste and flavor.

That is their preference. It's what drives them to everything they do. The type of coffee they drink, right? The protein they want to eat, the snacking they do. So first off, it's about delivering them something flavorful. You mentioned this thing about fat and, you know, as a meat, it's an old meat scientist here, right? I say, fat equals flavor. We know that.

And if you don't believe it, look at people's obsession with bacon, right? Why are people obsessed with bacon? Because it tastes good. Because it tastes good. This isn't rocket science. It's meat science, right? I mean, it's because it tastes amazing. So we've got to continue to focus on that, right, across the whole carcass.

Because we got flavor moving beyond way beyond bacon. That's what's so awesome about the pig business. And a pig in particular is that when you look at pork as a protein, you have so many different flavor profiles there. You know, we literally have research that says pork has 111 different flavors. And I'll just give you an example. You know there's a huge difference between eating bacon, a pork steak, a pork chop, or ground pork. I just describe five totally different eating experiences.

So you got to focus on the flavor piece. And then the next thing, Sawyer, is about there's a huge opportunity for innovation in pork, guys. I mean, huge. By and large, you know, the reality is we still fabricate that carcass very much the same way we did 50 years ago. we still have a lot of, you know, large primal cuts, things along that line. The reality is consumers today are eating smaller portions. They're cooking totally different than our parents did. I think we talked about this last time, but I mean, there's more air fryers and homes than there are coffee makers.

Well, we got to meet them where they're at and actually give them something that will literally fit in the appliance that they're cooking in. So we've got to think about different flavors. We've got to think about portion size. and I think it's okay to get innovative and think about some of the further processing items. I mean, it's no secret that chicken has done a very good job innovating, right, around some of those cuts. This isn't about trying to mimic chicken. That's not what we're going to do, right? Pork has its own unique position, but let's innovate and let's think different.

And that will keep this cut out, that will keep this demand on the rise with the current population we have in the U.S. and not just focusing on the international market, which we're going to continue to do, but we've got to think about the 20 billion pounds of product that we sell domestically. You read my mind because my analogy, as I was sitting and I was thinking about this campaign that you guys launched is,

and I consume a fair amount of chicken, mostly wings, mostly buffalo wings. But needless to say, we won't hold that against you. is, like you said, I mean, it is its own thing. And you have everybody from the barbecue crowd because that's a totally different, that smoked meat thing has become such a phenomenon on this country down to the ground stuff that, you know, people that are, well, like you, that are like, to me, eat the most boring, what can we put with rice and eat to get our, hit our macros?

We've got to hit our macros. I don't worry about, I hit my macros. I don't worry about, I hit my macros. I don't worry much about it. But that's what, so, that's what to me is great about agrout pork. And I think your campaign kind of, you know, when you start something like that, you never know. Like, you never know what the world, how the world's going to change. But do you feel like from National Pork Board's standpoint that, like, that campaign at that time and that messaging, like everything with the food pyramid and everything else, man, do you feel like you kind of hit it? I mean, I'm going to take a liberty here and knowing that you guys love to say controversial statements. So I'm going to jump into this, right, and say, I think it's working. Yeah. And I think the timing, you know, really exhibits

that this is a different porkboard than you've seen in the past, okay? Because we identified the problem and we ran at it, right? And we knew that this, was an opportune time. We talked about earlier here, right? This price between other proteins, those type of things, that's really important. But, you know, we already do own a huge portion of breakfast and barbecue, but it's so much more than that. And the opportunity when you tie in all of these individual pieces, and you look from the time we launched, which was the week of May 6th, and you look from the week of May 6th until now, pork business has been really, really good. I'm going to tell you, are we going to take full credit for that? Absolutely not. But I will say this. One of the pieces when we launched was that this can't be done in a vacuum by the National Pork Board. Go out here and tell everybody else what we're going to do. Before we did anything, we went out to the rest of the business and said, if we're going to do this, we're going to put a serious amount of money towards it, enough money that you're going to take us serious. And then we want your advice on how we work together, right, to create what I call the halo effect.

to say if you get everybody to believe that we can do this and you put your money where your mouth is and we're going to do the same thing, that if we invest in that, we can raise the whole portfolio. And you're starting to see it. You know, it's not just international. You're starting to see a huge demand left here. And again, affordability has something to do with it. But, you know, you mentioned ground. Ground pork is one of the biggest opportunities that the pork business has in front of it. and for the first time literally in the last 50 years of producers talking about ground pork finally you can find it in retail finally you have packers running ground pork lines and we are doubling down on ground pork in 26 if you can win in that category because it does meet

younger consumers in a really good spot you know thinking about meat as an ingredient and not center of the plate how does it go with rice how does it go with vegetables and more importantly, how does it go with authentic dishes, authentic Mexican, authentic Chinese, authentic Korean, authentic Italian, pork is at the center of all of those, maybe not as a chop, but as an ingredient. And there's just an enormous amount of opportunity there as we move forward. This is kind of on that subject of food, but have you ever, we've always sat and wondered, like fast food is, yeah, we own breakfast and fast food.

pork does. But why has there never been something that's worked as far as like a breaded tenderloin in the fast food space or a pork burger? Like we always sit and dad and I when we're going through. We're like, gosh, we just, how can we, how have we never capitalized on this category and got something to stick? Because if you ever had a really good breaded tenderloin, it's insanely good or a really good pork burger. It's insanely good. But it's just, it's never caught on. and I guess I never know why, why it's never caught on. I have a brother that lives in Nashville,

and I have a brother that lives in Dallas, Texas. And whenever we go there, we take Bud's pork burgers down, or our own pork burgers now. Pork burgers. They love pork burgers. They love handballs. Oh, yeah, handballs.

They love that. But people, they're like mystified when you give them one. Like when my brother has a cookout and you have people over there, you give them a pork burger, they're mystified. They've never had anything like it. And they're like, where'd you get this?

How do you make these? And I'm like, I don't know why somebody's, not selling these. Yeah. Well, all right. So we mentioned earlier, what's the number one? You know, what's a big question you get every day? If I had a dollar for every time someone has asked me why we don't have a pork nugget, I could retire. Yeah. Okay. And a pork burger on the menu. And here's what I'll tell you is we have so much opportunity moving forward in that category. And I'll give you my shameless plug because my favorite dish in the world to eat is pork

which is a fried pork loin, right? So if you're in Germany, it's schnitzel. If you're in Washington, Iowa, it's a country fried pork steak. And if you're in Japan, it's a piece of loin that is then breaded, but it's breded with panco. And it's a game changer. I mean, it's so good. And it's one of the most authentic eaten dishes in Asia. So I do think that there's opportunities we tap into the market.

What I think is important is we don't just try to mimic what everybody else has done. You know, I have two kids, and trust me, they've eaten enough chicken nuggets to last a lifetime, right? Because why? It's convenient. Yep. It's quick. And it's consistent. And it's consistent.

We can do that in other categories. You know, Sawyer, your question about why don't we have a pork burger on the menu is one. and I'm just saying this because it's the truth. We haven't probably done a good enough job of just really pounding that out at QSR, which is quick serve restaurants, right? Really thinking about how we can work with them. You get a lot of limited time offers. Think about the McRibb.

Think about other items like that. But how can pork own something that's unique? Now, there's some balances here. One is just the massive market size of where chicken is out. that in that category. The other side, there is some other components if you think about religion and you think about you have a portion of the population who may not consume pork. And then if you think about the idea that you would have to change your kitchen design around and have a separate cooking utensil, those are huge hurdles to overcome. But to me,

it's not about just let's go try to get this with everyone. Let's chase people that are really, you know, meat-centric. And let's try. to really encourage them to think outside the box and something different. And I'll give you an example, if you don't mind. One of the things we're doing in 2026 is we're launching a new multicultural campaign that aligns to the Taste What Pork and Do strategy. Okay. Taste what Pork and Do doesn't have a good literal translation in Spanish. So we have another one that is still focused, another brand campaign that we're launching in 26 to go parallel to what we're doing in Taste What Pork and Do. And And if you want to know why, because the population growth in this country for the next 30 years is going to be mostly Hispanic.

And I was just recently with the agency that we're working with on this campaign. And they said, you know, here's some interesting stats. There's more salsa packets sold in the United States than there's ketchup. Really? And there's more tacos sold in the United States than there are hamburgers. Wow. So when you think about authentic and you think about carnival. Cornitas, El Pastor, all of these dishes.

Pork is at the center of that. Those are easy categories we can win in and make sure that someone else isn't taking our place. You can have authentic carnitas, it better at pork in it. Yeah. Right? Yeah, that's a huge opportunity. Double down on that. Don't go away from the other opportunity.

We're going to keep working there. But if that takes five or 10 years to achieve and it takes years and years and years to penetrate someone's menu, especially if they're really, really big. Let's celebrate the fact that we move hundreds of millions of pounds of sausage and ham, right, at breakfast. And then let's continue to hammer down in that other portions of the category where we can really dominate us of protein. Yeah, it's good. That's all good. It sounds good to us.

When you, sorry to cut you off. Go ahead. when you think back you as a kid growing up in northern Missouri, right? Southern Missouri. Yep. Did you ever think that you would know quite so much about the hog business as this part of the hog business? You know, that's a great question. So here's a little fun fact about me.

So I was actually born in Pocahontas County, Iowa. That's born in Pocahontas, Iowa, more specifically. And my parents were involved in the hog business up in northwest Iowa for years. Think about that explosive growth in the early 90s. My family was originally from Southern Missouri, where my family, our family farming operation still is today that my wife and I own and operate. You know, I grew up very traditional farm boy, right? I mean, and look at me, right?

I was great for driving T posts and just, you know, I was like a piece of farm machinery. So I spent my years livestock judging. I was a state FFA officer, did all those things. But only until I went to college, this is the way I've always said it is. I spent my whole life thinking about animals from the outside in. And that's a different perspective. Then I went to college and I got into this meeting. science area and I started to think about livestock from the inside out and that is a radical

mind shift. And that really honestly changed the trajectory of my career path for my life. I wanted to be a veterinarian and I changed and I went, this meat thing is way too cool. And that led me into academia. It also led me into business. We own our own meat company and our own farming operation. that led me down the path of marketing. And, you know, here we are. Did I ever expect this? No. Did I expect there's going to be the CEO of the National Board board either?

No. But I'm sure I'm glad I'm here. Yeah, absolutely. And I'm having a lot of fun because I'm very passionate about this business. My family has made a living from pigs my entire life. I tell my kids, hey, everything we own is because a pig exists. and that's really important to me. So I guess the only way I can say is,

I practice what I preach. And you can bet that I eat a lot of pork. Yeah. Yeah, well, no, it's awesome that you've, you know, actually come from the, you know, from actually being a farmer, you know. Right. You're the CEO.

I mean, is that the first time that's ever happened? Has the CEO always been a farmer or not? Yeah, I mean, that's a good question. I mean, the, if you look at that lineage over time, definitely there's people who've been involved in ag, been involved in agriculture, row crops, you know, other things. Some maybe I can't even speak to because I don't know. But when you look at where we are now, the answer is yes, I'm the first CEO at the port board

who really came from the business. And I hope that that gives confidence to the producers we represent every day to say, hey, I have literally experienced getting our teeth kicked in in this business. I mean, I was a teenager in 1998, and I've seen our family literally lose nearly everything in value in a very short period of time. I know what it's like to see 10 cent hogs, right? And we've rode this roller coaster for a very long time. My dad used to say pig farmers are the most optimistic people on the. planet Earth, right? So what I try to bring to this every single day is not only my background

and knowledge of the business that I'm still tied to from a family perspective, but also I try to bring that energy and passion to say, guys, what drove the business for the last 30 years is nothing like what's going to drive the business for the next 30. So I may not be the thought leader on that, but I can tell you that we're looking out the windshield here. There's a reason the windshield is a lot bigger than the rearview mirror. People love a history lesson. I want to see what's out here in the distance, and I see a lot of opportunity for port. Yeah.

Well, let's go back just a little bit in that rear view mirror and talk about growing up on the farm. You know, what did it look like as a kid growing up on your family operation? What did a typical day look like? What were your fond, some of your fondest memories? But then what does it look like today? I mean, I know you said it a little bit where you are, but kind of give that full, look into. Okay. Yeah. Yeah, great question. We want to know David the farmer. You want to know David the farmer. All right. Well, so, uh, the Newman family, we were pretty wild. So, uh, I grew up

four siblings. I'm a twin, by the way. So, so, you know, I grew up in a very, what I would say, traditional farm family. You guys understand this. Diversified, uh, where we farm in, in southern Missouri, not a lot of crops, a whole lot of pasture ground. So pigs were always our bread and butter. They have been literally for, as I mentioned earlier, for generations in my family, this has been the core of our business. You know, we've always had been in the cattle business as well, but hogs were everything we did. So when you think about it, very traditional, I mean, I watch your videos, you know, this whole getting up in the morning and loading hogs. working through the weather, working through all of the different things that happened on our business,

which there are never any two days that are the same, was very traditional in the way that I grew up. Now, we actually ran a commercial operation until the late 1990s. So contract grower, worked with a large packer. It sounds very familiar, right? Brought a lot of that mentality that we had in northwest Iowa at the time. Go to the late 1990s, tough times in the hog business, and especially tough times down in the very southern part of the region where I'm from, which is kind of interesting.

And the reason I say that is twofold. One, we're a long ways from grain. Yeah. Now, northeast Arkansas, the Delta down there, got a lot of grain. Now, most of that grain is sucked up by the poultry business. But either way, basis is his mess, right? But when you think about getting availability on feed, you got that. But tie into the fact that if you back this business up 50 years, at one point in time, we lived in the largest pork producer county in the country.

So at one time, there was 19,000 pork producers between Oregon and Howell County, Missouri, where they used to house the National Feeder Pig Sale in West Plains, Missouri. Wow. 19,000 producers. In those two counties, there were. There is one left. It's our family. Really? Really?

Pork producer left in both counties. That is insane. And every guy down there that will tell you that runs a thousand cows today because this is beef country now, every one of those guys will tell you the old timers will say, I paid for all this with 100,000. Yep. Wow. And it's fascinating. That is incredible. It is.

It is. So I grew up with that. You think about there's some guys. there's some guys who were like legends in the pig business. One of them's name was Pig Paul, Roland Pig Paul. He was part of establishing National Port Producers Council way back in the day. He lived just north of us. And what they did is they brokered all those feeder pigs, which were born out on dirt.

And then they would broker all those feeder pigs to Iowa because this is where all the grain was. And there was a lot of guys that made living loading hogs on two-ton trucks and driving pigs up here to Iowa to put them on feed. and eventually as the industry started to consolidate and things shifted, pigs just left that part of the world. So very interesting. Here the Newman family stays in the business, but we realized we were going to have to do something different and think radically different.

And radically different meant if we were going to play ball on the pork business, we were going to have to go for quality over quantity. So in our family's business, we switched from the commercial side of the business over to the purebred side of the business. We really, we doubled down on the Birx, and we entered into the restaurant business in New York City. Wow.

And then on the West Coast as well. And we have been chasing that trail for 25 plus years now. So it's, you know, what I tell everybody is, my dad used to say I spent about $4 million learning how to, how to merchandise meat the wrong way. Yep. And I take all those lessons into what we do. every single day and thinking about what I do now to say, this is producer money.

I have that experience. You can lose a lot of money fast. I have that experience, but there's a lot of opportunity. And so I'm really proud to say, we're still at it. Yeah. We have a great team. We survived. And sometimes agriculture, as you guys know, is about surviving.

And here we are. We've built something that we'll be able to pass on. to our kids while still being able to take advantage of opportunities like what I do now. And I'm incredibly proud of that. That is something to be really proud of. That's awesome. Well, man, I mean, I have so many questions just kind of inside that story. Like when you said there was 19,000 pork producers in those two counties, how fast did that dwindled down?

I mean, like two years? Was it over over about a 10 year time? But if you really look at what happened in the 80s, I mean, literally the late 1970s, it was heyday. I mean, if you, if we ever, you know, do a Zoom or a Teams call and you ever look at my office, right behind me is the fender of a 1972 Chevrolet one-ton truck. And this is back from the family days when people painted their name on the truck, right? And so the family name was on the driver's door, which doesn't exist anymore. But on the fender was hand-painted hog farms. You know, I mean, people were, if you were a hog farmer, you were somebody, right?

So, I mean, when the business shifted and the industry really translated from North Carolina to Iowa, right, the commercial side of the business, my dad was managing a sow barn up in Pocahontas County. you look at this thinking about having a sow barn that had more than a thousand sows in it. Whoa, man, I mean, that was unheard of. People came from all over the world to think about how to replicate that model. And when it shifted, it just shifted the market dynamics away from those, you know, small, mostly outdoor raised pigs. Why would you raise outdoor pigs in the Ozarks? Perfect weather. Yep.

Perfect climate. Soil that you're not raising corn and soybeans on, right? that old hill ground was pretty good to do that with. And so a lot of those guys used hogs to diversify markets. I mean, you guys have heard these stories. I mean, you could sell a truckload of pigs and go buy a brand new pickup and still have a couple thousand bucks left over. And, of course, trucks didn't cost $90,000 then either.

Yeah. But it changed pretty quick, Sawyer. I mean, when it was gone, it was gone fast. Yep, the group size change. That was as much of it as anything as we started, people started expanding all these buildings started getting built and nobody wanted small groups of pigs. Right. Nobody wanted small groups of feeder pigs. And then the health changed because, like I could, I've talked to Dave Eichelberger about this many times when he was selling feeder pigs. He'd sell, you'd take, go to Colonna on Wednesday and go to Keosacu on Friday or Thursday.

And, you know, thousands, thousands and thousands. thousands of feeder pigs, all co-bingled. Nobody gave a second thought about health. So you drove up there and bought a set of feeder pigs that had been mixed with every other pig that was there or very close proximity, brought them home and raised them. Yep. So you had the group size got bigger,

but then the whole health things changed. Oh, yeah. And separate site came in and we started fighting disease. And that changed, that changed everything. And if that didn't get you, then the 90s, the 90s, the 90s did. So the whole world changed. It was tough, right? Well, and I want to give you your flowers on, I mean, going direct to consumer 20 plus years ago.

Yeah. I mean, that's innovative. It was before. That was, talk about that a little bit. That's pretty awesome. So, you know, it was a story of resilience in our family. Like, I mean, no one. and our family could imagine not being in the big business.

That just conversation wouldn't happen at our kitchen table. But it's also saying, well, this isn't working. Right. Right. Something in this equation is not working. And so it was really interesting. We started by literally, you know, we still had 1100 sows. Okay.

This would have been 1998. We were running about 1,100 sows. And we started by buying like 20,000. 25 burks. Well, we'll see how it goes. You know, we'll raise them up. Then you've got to figure out how to get them bread. And I mean, it's an interesting ride, right? These are not your typical, you know, hogs that we had dealt with in the past. But if you went back into the 60s, in the 60s and early 70s, my parents had 300 hamps house. That was a big pig operation in the 1970s, right? And so we knew something about raising pigs that way.

and I'm going to give most of this credit to my parents at the time because I was a lot younger. But, you know, we started saying, well, how are we going to merchandise this? So we did the absolute wrong thing. We tried to start at retail. You know, learned a hard lesson there, right? There's a lot of competition out there in the world. But then we actually started to hook up with literally going in the back doors of restaurants. Hey, I'm so-and-so, right?

I'm David Newman. here's what I do. I'm a farmer. Here's what we do. Here's the product we have. It's something we think we believe in. And I've seen my dad do that a thousand times and say, hey, we're going to deliver consistently here. We can figure this out. And 25 became 35 and 35 became 50 and 50 became 100. And 100 became 200 a week. And it was born. And we, you know, persistence paid off. Now, you think about the changes because then you make a pretty solid 20-year run of figuring things out. And then every restaurant in the world shuts down in a month. And then you get to learn a whole new business.

You know, our business, we went from 100% restaurant food service to 100% online e-commerce in seven days. Yep. And in that seven days, we had hired an 80%. agency. We had built out a new platform. We had aggressively started marketing and we just launched an entirely different set of our business, which was tough and expensive. But again, we learned a lot from that experience. And so a lot of tenacity. Some people also might say ignorance just for staying with it. But it's something we believed in. And as I said before, it's been good to my family, and I think that's going to continue to be good for them.

And so, you know, I have this conversation quite frequently because I go, it doesn't matter to me whether you have 40,000 sows or you have 40 sows. We represent, right, at the Port-Bore people of all sizes. But there's a heck of a lot of opportunity in those spaces. And you're seeing a lot more of that in diversified operations today. So I think it's a cool area where people can play. Okay. When I sell my business, I want the best tax and investment advice.

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Yeah, that's, that's, I think that's awesome. I mean, because we talk about it on here all the time, you know, the two realities of ag, it seems you face as farmers is, you know, it's get big or die or create your own market and not be a price taker all the time, you know, or do a little bit of both. Yeah. And, you know, just, you know, direct to consumer. I didn't really, I don't feel like really got talked about a whole lot until, you know, social media and all that. And the competition became really big. So the fact that you guys went at it early before all that came, that's awesome. Yeah.

I think that's awesome. Wow. Well, thank you. I mean, it was a grow or die scenario. Yeah. Right? But at that time, when you had just come off of, I mean, we were in the worst equity position we had ever been in. Yeah.

So growing. Right. I mean, you got to grow with your banker, right? It was already very nervous about the situation that just unfolded. we lived this in 2023. Not just 1999 or 1998, right? I mean, that's kind of an interesting parallel to say,

that's exactly, if you could ask me, like, what would your dream be? It's to take the bottom out of that cycle. Yep, yeah, right? Because the bottom is so emotionally hard. We tend to talk about the finances, right? But farming is so tough. You guys know this.

it doesn't matter what you're in. I mean, our friends in the grain business are experiencing that now too, right? I mean, the highs are high and the lows are abysmal. Yep. Yep. And it seems that the gap between the peak and the valley is growing. That makes it really hard to think about generational farming and transitioning things to your kids and having these conversations. And every business experiences it in agriculture on somewhat of a repeated cycle.

Yeah. Yeah. Well, let me ask you something. That brings up a good question. So, you know, one of the best ways to deal with $4 corn is to feed it to livestock. Yeah. But when you think about that today, do you think, do you feel like our banking system is equipped to give people the American? amount of capital they need and have the vision to allow more people to follow that path. Because, you know, you look at the cattle business just as you talk, but even the hog business. If you're going to make the switch, if you're going to enter that market and you're going to be a

fair to finish operation or a finish to retail operation, or if you're going to, you're a young person you want to get in the cattle business. Yeah. How many banks out there are equipped to muster up that capital and stick with people? Yeah. I think that's a – I think that's a – I think there is an opportunity there, but I also think it's a huge challenge because I don't know. I don't know what the answer is.

Yeah, and I don't know what the answer is either. You know, here's what I would say is you hear this all the time, and I can't help but tend not to agree with this statement, is – imagine you put yourself in a situation where you were going to try to start from nothing today. I don't know how you do it. Right. You better have somebody in your family who's got a ton of cash, a ton of collateral, right? We all know you want to go out here and borrow money.

How are you going to get to collateral? But if you're going to go build Sal Barn or something else and you're going to put a pretty sizable amount of that down in cash, you know, you've got to think about that first. I mean, is the banking system equipped? say probably, you know, if you think about people who are already in the business, sure. And if you use risk management, I mean, just think about right now. Thank goodness our producers are in a great spot for 2026. If you're using good risk management, you think about where corn and toy beans are at right now and you think about where hogs can be in the summer months, et cetera, times are pretty good, right? You can lock in and be smart.

But you had to be there to get it going to your point, right? I mean, you know, use that cattle example. Go into your bank today with nothing and say, I want to buy 100 cows, which by the way, is not enough to make a living on. Right. And I'm going to go buy heifers, bread heifers, and they're $4,750 a piece. There's an enormous amount of risk proposition there. Because I was selling heifers five years ago. I remember selling a big set of heifers we had for a thousand bucks piece. Yep. Yep. And that's just commercial. That's not seed stock.

Right. That's just a commercial. So, you know, it's tough. But I suppose if you back this up, you think about these old magazines sitting here on the table. I mean, it's a different day and time. It is. You know. And I think about, you talk about banking.

I mean, it used to be that we would have meetings as a family and with our team members. And it was all about feed, right? Feed was cheap. We made money, blah, blah, blah. Nothing's cheap anymore. Everything is so expensive. You know, it doesn't matter if it's equipment, tires, diesel, name it, parts.

Everything's so high that the cost equation looks a little differently than it used to. And I think we're still trying to flesh that out. Because, right, nothing stays high, right? What cures high prices? High prices. So we know we're going to go back to buying some expensive feed and the livestock business together in the future.

I'm proud that the rest of the barnyard works together. During these times, we start to recognize the partnership is real. The amount of grain that we consume and the livestock business makes us pretty good partners with our friends across the board. Yep, yeah, absolutely. What about working with family? Do you got any, we get asked all the time from people, you know, family dynamics and making a family operation work.

You got any tips or you got any know-how on how you've kind of kept it all together with your family. Wow. Yeah. That's a great. Not to throw you. That's a great question. Yeah. Well, I, you know, here's what I would say is you, we all know the most obvious statement is here. You got to work hard, but you got to work smart, you know, in our operation today that my wife and I own, my mom is retired living on the farm. My dad passed away 13 years ago, probably the stress from hung farming. I'm being completely honest with you, right? Had some to do with that. Now she's remarried.

Life is good. It's great. One thing that we do, my wife and I, with the family we work with, with our employees and everything else, it's like, just be honest, right? Let's talk about this. Let's be transparent. Let's get it done. That said, you remember that thing?

I grew up in a family with four kids, right? My parents farmed for a living. That's all my parents did for a career of their entire life. I got the school bus. They were weaning pigs or breeding sows or, you know, we were doing something along that line. I've seen claw hammer's thrown. I've seen people run off mad. I've seen windows get broken.

I mean, I see me and my brother beat ourselves half to death. I mean, I've seen it all because it's such a unique lifestyle growing up on the farm, right? I mean, I go back to say, you still got to have a lot of tenacity. but but all that said is I think what we also got to do is remember how fortunate we are I am so fortunate that my wife and I get to raise our kids on a farm because what I learned there I wouldn't be sitting here if it wouldn't have been for what I learned there and wisdom is really a real thing as you get older you recognize like where did where did I get this work ethic from you know where did I get

my not just love of the land, but like understanding that even when times are tough, you still got a lot to be thankful for. So we're trying to pass that on to our kids. And also along the way, teach them this financial piece of saying, you got to be smart. You know, I've had friends who got into farming when corn was seven bucks. Yep. And they're not farming anymore. Yep.

Right? They went and bought $3 million worth of equipment or, you know, they over, extended the market turn. I tell our kids all the time, things may look good now, but I mean, they literally can change overnight in this business. And so this tenacity and just being proud of where we come from, I think is a huge component of what we do in agriculture as a whole, not just the pig business. Well, you talk about wisdom. So you're the, you've got to have all the wisdom, because when you make it to be CEO, you can't turn around and ask the guy above you for advice. So what's been the most surprising thing to you is you've transitioned roles,

and what do you feel is national pork boards? We've talked a lot about opportunities, but what are the challenges out there that you guys are working on? Yeah, that's a great question. Well, you're right. There's no one to blame now but me. Right. Some people have used the line. It's lonely at the top. I don't feel that way. And I'll tell you why, because my leadership style and my personality is, one, I love people. You got to make hard decisions sometimes. But, you know, a good friend of my dad's worked for ADM for years and years and years. And he's been gone a long time from the business. But I remember being a kid. And I asked him, he's very high up in the business. and I said, hey, what is your secret to success? Right?

You manage a lot of people. Like, how did you get where you are? And it was like one of these high school projects, you know, where you got to ask a mentor or something. And he said, that's easy, man. I live my life by one principal. I never hire anybody who I didn't think was smarter than me. Yep.

Yep. Right? So here's the fortunate part, the part that I have to realize is I could be probably accused of being a bit of a workaholic. And it's funny. People talk about distress. Mine is more eustress because I love what I do.

But the reality is we have a lot of really talented people working on behalf of the pork business. And the best thing I can do is show them the path and get out of their way. And so I'm my own worst enemy sometimes of that. Some people might call that micromanaging. I try not to do that, but I try rather to say, if we stay up here 60,000 feet and we show them the direct. we need to be going and we show them the passion for why we need to be going there on behalf of the producers we represent, then it's like, go get it done. Let's go do it. Let's get out of the way. So you mentioned priorities. This demand piece is huge. Okay. And I'm really glad that we're back

in the demand space. And that has been something that's been talked about for years. We were at the National Port Board, mostly absent from demand for about 10 years. When we came back, we came back unapologetic. That's the words of Patrick Fleming, who led the domestic marketing campaign, National Port Board. He used to say, we got to be unapologetic about what we raise, what we do, how we sell it. So the demand piece is still huge, as I mentioned earlier, not just internationally, but domestic. And then let's address the 800-pound gorilla in the room. Swine hell. is questionably as bad now as it's ever been. I'm not a veterinarian.

I hope I don't make a veterinarian mad by saying that. But I've been living. I've been living in this business my entire life. We're constantly talking about swine hell. You know that thing when you go from 19,000 to one? We have one site that's been pers negative for 28 years. Yep. That's because of proximity, right, for us and some diligent work.

But if you take a look at the broader business, endemic disease is still a huge challenge. And so we're really focused on a national swine health strategy. And the thing is, is what does that mean? Because if you just go out here and say, well, we want to continue to prevent foreign animal disease, which is true. Thank God we don't have ASF or any other foreign animal disease because that would be market limiting. That's important. But how do we actually tackle this endemic disease work?

and for the first time ever at the National Port Board, we're using a word and testing out a word that is pretty controversial in the pig business, okay? And that word is eliminate. Like, can we eliminate purrs? Yeah. And a lot of people will tell you no. They'll tell you no. It's just, there's just too much.

It's everywhere. We have eliminated diseases before, okay? And they were totally different. I respect to that. Something I said, an Iowa port Congress when I spoke is I said, here's my perspective on the word eliminate. If I ran the American Cancer Society, I want to eliminate cancer, okay, if I were in that role. But the reality is it might take 100 years for that to get done. But we need a North Star.

Yep. Because one thing is for sure, there's no benefit to any of us having purrs. Right. So we got to think about purrs, PDV, some of the other endemic diseases that are actually impacting our producers every day because it's costing us billions of dollars. And it's just another. I mentioned this piece earlier about like how emotional the farming business can be, right, and how psychologically hard that bad times can be. Disease is the same way. We tend to think about the component of having dead animals, which is tough.

stuff on the finances, right? Stuff on, especially when they're 240 pounds and you're dragging them out of the building. That's tough. Yeah, it's not fun. It's not fun. It's demoralizing. You know, it just gets to be repetitive. But it's mentally demoralizing, right?

That's a real mental health thing. So, I mean, it really ties in the human side of our business to say there's many reasons we need to talk about this. But do we have the answer to eliminating purses today? Nope. No, we don't. We're not going to lie to anybody and say that. But what we are going to say. is how do we focus on making sure that everybody, all these acronyms in the vet community,

that we get everybody together and say, this is an opportunity to hit the reset button and admit to ourselves that we can get better and that we can get better on behalf of the farmers we represent. So I think those priorities are there. And the last thing I would just say is, you know, we have 42 state pork associations with 42 sets of problems. and I don't mean problems within the association. I mean, what's impacting California pork is radically different than what's impacting North Carolina pork and is radically different

than what's impacting Iowa pork. So we've got these tentacles in the business, boots on the ground with our staff and our state associations to say, how can we best position ourselves to think about as thought leaders what's going to challenge this business? Again, looking down the windshield, 10, 20, 30 years from now. Is it water quality? Sure. Is it sustainability? Sure.

Is it profitability and all the other sides of this business and swine health? Yeah. But we can't be all things to all people. We've got a finite. We're like a farm at the National Port Board. We have a finite amount of resources. Right? And so we've got to deploy in the best way we can to maximize the return for you guys.

Yeah. That was good. I mean, yeah, PERS is not fun. We've explained it on this show a lot, you know, people, people that don't know the pig business. They don't understand. But, I mean, it's, it's a challenge we've been facing for a long time. I don't know, before we got on the podcast, you said your dad mentioned a saying about PERS. Do you remember what that was?

Yeah, well, so there's a couple of things about purrs. You know, if you go back to the early generations of my family, they call it mystery swine disease. Yep. And then it became this thing called Pers. And even when I was a kid, Pers was something that was mostly in the sows, mostly in a sow barn. Now you think about it in finishers and elsewhere,

and you go, oh, this is tough. You know, it just keeps, the problem keeps growing. But actually, a producer in Northwest Iowa, who happens to be on our board of directives, and I'm not going to butcher what he says exactly, but he tells it the profit, reducing. He has a really good saying. And now, of course, I can't, I can't think of it. But it's just like, it basically says like, this is demoralizing and it's losing us money. And it's so true. So I think it's

our responsibility to go out here and think about the big things, you know. And if you go all the way back to the beginning of this story, I'll say this. Like at some point, you know, 40 years ago, a group farmers got together and said, man, I don't have time to think about all the things that are impacting my business today about marketing. I mean, they didn't even talk about sustainability then, right? But they talked about environment. I don't have the bandwidth to get that done. And that is literally where the checkoff system was born. Not just pork, but the other, right? I mean, corn, soy, beef, name it. There's more than 20 of them. And I think it's pretty cool. And I still think it's very relevant to say, wow, you're putting in a fraction of an investment

and you've got a whole staff of people who literally wake up every morning dedicated to making your business more profitable every day. That's why we exist. And if we don't do that, shame on us, right? You got to stay focused. And that's the most important thing in what we do there. Stay focused on what matters. And that's those strategic priorities we talked about.

What do you, let's kind of switch gears a little bit. What do you, what about labor? What about labor in our industry? But agriculture in general, I mean, it seems to be more and more of a problem as time goes on. And maybe this doesn't talk into CEO on the National Porkport. Maybe this is just you at putting your farmer cap back on for a second. Yeah. But, I mean, do you, do you see that problem getting worse?

And if so, how do we count? how do we battle that? Is it AI? Is it, I mean, I talked to a guy the other day. It was like, he's, you know, they, they have some sows and they, they race pigs for themselves. And he's like, we can't get anybody to chore barns. Hell, we don't even want to chore barns. You know, it's just getting harder and harder to get guys to chore pigs. And so, you know, we have the conversations all the time. What's it look like? Is there going to be a camera at the end of the feedline? And we're going to, maybe you don't get to Barnes every single day. I just didn't know if you had any thoughts or things that you've run in your own.

head about it. Well, if I had the solution to labor, I probably wouldn't be standing here. I'd be running some awesome labor company. But I can tell you from my own experience, labor is a challenge. I mean, we know that. I mean, I'm stating the obvious whenever I say labor is a challenge. But, you know, I think that if you look at where we've come over the last 20 years, I think labor is going to continue to be a bigger problem. Now, you know, we don't work on the policy side of the business, of course, at MPB, but these visas, right, employees that are coming in, if you look in the Delta, for example, down near where we farm, you think about that, there's a lot of visa holders that come in from South Africa, a lot, right?

And all the farmers there will tell you this. If it wasn't for those guys, we couldn't get our crop out. Yep. Couldn't get it in, couldn't get it out. We can't find reliable help. And I have people come by the farm at least once a week. Hey, you know, Mr. Newman, I'm looking for a job. I'll work hard, you know.

And I said, okay, said, well, you know, can you, here's what time we start. Can you be there? Well, you know, I mean, I, yeah, I think I can. You know, can you even get to work? Well, I think I can. And then they show up and you know how this goes, right? I mean, and it's like a repeated thing. Yep. And what's interesting is what we've at least found, and this is just speaking for

ourselves, is that the money is really not the motivator. Nope. It's really, no matter how much we pay, you kind of get the same results. Yep. I think that might be one of the misconceptions about labor and agriculture. And I can speak to this because I have firsthand experience. when I worked on the production side of this business, we had a bonus program in our sow farms for the company I worked with

that if you came and worked there and you made it 60 days, we would give you like a $3,000 sign-on bonus. And I was there for five years. We never paid that bonus once. And so people are like, they don't understand why you need the visa program. Right. That's why, because the money, it isn't about the money. No.

It is, and in past, like in older generations, as we grew up, the concept of a job that you had to do every day, that you couldn't, whether you didn't feel good, whether it was raining, whether it was snowing, it was just something we did. Every day the pigs had to be fed, the pigs had to be moved, this had to be done.

And a whole generation of people, whether it be the hog business, whether it be the cattle business, the poultry business, even grain farming to a certain degree. But today that's not, that concept, people, that's just foreign to people.

And so it's very difficult. We'll move on from that. You know, my son is 13. And this weekend, we were just having this conversation about labor. You know, I'm like, thank God he's 13, you know. And he's a hoss, too, right? So, I mean, he's been able to reach the clutch since he was like eight. So my life is complete.

You know, he can move equipment around and we're in a good spot. And I was just telling him this weekend, this thing about labor. I say, hey, you know, I'm going to rely on you for this and this and this. Because they said, no one's ever going to care like you care. No one's ever going to care like we're going to care. Okay. And that's something you've got to start like thinking about now. You know, what I think is interesting and it's not really getting into the policy side of this at all, which is in our camp.

But there is one thing that I've observed over the last 25 years of my career. And I told you that my background, my PhDs and meat science, right? So I spent a better part of 10 years in packing plants from, you right, and especially in my younger career, and I've spent countless hours and more people need to realize the volume of employees we need for our food supply. And it's not just on the farm, it's on the processing side. And if you take a look at that population today and what it takes and you think about all the policies and everything else that are surrounding that, if we don't think about how we're going to fix

that who's going to do it. Exactly right. Where's that labor going to come from? Because there's just some things. This is my opinion. There's just some things a robot's not going to do. Right. I mean, I tell my kids all the time, hard work, critical thinking.

You get those two things. My kids, I say this to my wife all the time. I'm like, we stay on the path we're on with our kids. Our kids are going to run the world. They're going to be able to write a blank check because people aren't going to know how to jump start their car, change a tire. I mean, I think our parents and grandparents said this too, by the way. So I hope that it works out better than I anticipate sometimes. But my neighbors were dairy farmers when we grew up. And they had kids that were our age, you know,

and we would, they would come help us and we'd work cattle and we'd do something with hogs, right? We'd go over when they were cutting silage. And I've climbed and leveled a silo more times than I care to remember, put up, hey, right? You just got it done. And when I look at technology and everything else, and, you know, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's been amazing. Technology is amazing. I'm as pro technology as they come, right? But, but it's probably made us a little bit lazy too. Oh, yeah. Right? And when we think about the other side of like where you can win in this, there's a big opportunity. Labor's going to continue to be a problem. Yeah. Oh, yeah. Yeah. Yep. What's the biggest opportunity for pork board when you look out on the horizon? Yeah, that's a great question. I mean, I'm going to go back to say the biggest opportunity is where pork's position can land in the next five to ten years. Go back 40 years, pork was the number one consumed protein in the United States.

That's pretty amazing, right? Just 40 years. where we're at today is truly a transformational time. I keep saying it all the time. I've already said it once on this episode here. But I'm telling you that if you ask me, what is the biggest opportunity for pork in general? It's this opportunity to really capture demand,

to capture a generation, generations, and put pork back in a leading position. Okay. Are we going to get to the number one? protein in the next five years? Nope. Probably not. But you got to think long term, just like in business. You got to

think long term what's possible. I believe that. And we talked about the demographics of the United States. We talked about the opportunities that are out here globally. The biggest single opportunity in this business is to reposition pork. And if we do

that, then we have truly met our mission. We say, we say, consumer-focused producer-led. Well, I can talk to you all day long about the things that matter on your farm. And I've lived to that my entire life. We can talk about swine health.

We can talk about, you know, building design or pumping pits or power washing. I'm really good at that. You know, whatever you want to know, there. But at the end of the day, you really want to make sure that we're also thinking about your end consumer. Yep.

Because this entire business revolves around one theory, a consumer walks into a store or a restaurant, they choose to buy pork, they cook it and eat it, and they like it enough to repeat the process. And if that doesn't happen more than 25 billion times a year, and that's if they eat one pound of time, then you eat don't exist.

And it doesn't matter whether you're selling slats, feed bins, combines, building supplies, doesn't matter. It will change the business forever. So I think our single

biggest opportunities with the consumer on behalf of the farmer we represent. Yeah, I think you're 100% right on that. I mean, we drink that,

I'll drink that Kool-Aid all day long. What, I don't, we kind of touched on exports a little bit in the beginning, but we didn't really go that deep into it.

I mean, overall, how are you feeling about exporting pork out of the country. I mean, it's a little uncertain. I mean, it's just different from, I think, even a year ago when we talked to you last. Oh, yeah. You know, so what do you think overall about it? Are you optimistic? I'm still optimistic. I mean, again, all things considered, we still had a banner year in exports. So Mexico continues to be an incredibly important trading partner. So think about Mexico, a ton of success in Central Latin America as well. Canada, of course, Japan, one of our longest trading partners over time. I'm very optimistic, especially if you look at what's happening in Europe. I mean, this decline of agriculture in Europe is a real thing. Add in some other

blows, African swine fever, right? I mean, the pig business has been hit pretty hard over there, but regulation and environmental activism, animal welfare, all the things have happened in Europe, which is about regulated a huge portion of their food supply out. So that creates an opportunity, right, on the global marketplace. So I'm still very optimistic, and there's a butt in here. You know, the butt is that the one unique thing that we are, the one unique position we're in today versus where we were five, 10 years ago.

And it's just the realistic side of the business is that the United States is no longer the least cost producer. Okay. I mean, the Brazil has a very strong agriculture sector, as you know. I just spoke at the World Meat Conference down in the Madagrosso region of Brazil about eight weeks ago. And you travel through that part of the world and it's pretty fascinating, right? you start thinking about what the opportunity looks like. And, you know, my wife or my brother, somebody asked me like, well, what do you think? And I said, this must be, parts of that must be what the United States looked like back in the 1950s

before we built the interstate system and before we really started to be able to move product out of the Midwest even better. Because you can see the opportunity is real. So the reason I say that, Sawyer, is that we still live in many parts of the world that are still emerging and developing, it's still a price game. And so we have been that least cost, high quality. We still have the highest quality, safest pork in the world, right? That isn't going to change. But when it's a price equation, we have competition now. So we've got to start thinking about quality, how we differentiate ourselves in the marketplace, beyond just price. We've got to start

thinking about this domestic side of the business as well, because what's going to happen here is that from 1990 until where we are, if you look at it on a chart, it's just unbelievable. Export growth, right? 1995, we were a net importer of pork. That crazy. 1995, we were a net importer. Today we export 30%. Yep.

Right? And whether it's all falls and variety meats to China, which is crucial, that's a huge value per head basis to us, or it's hams and loins, you know, going to other parts of. the world, we're not going to go, the forecast is we're not going to go from 30 to 60. Right. Right. And by the way, I mean, we probably have to ask ourselves, is that even where we want to go? Yeah. And so it's a pretty big reliance on a very fragile system. So. And the demographics of the world don't. There's just, I think that, I think we're at a tipping point on really, growth anywhere, unless you take that market from somebody else, there isn't just a lot of growth

left because our population worldwide has kind of leveled out. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, and that's, it's the economy of scale, right? I mean, we still have markets out there that if they gain wealth, there's going to be a huge opportunity for protein. I mean, right? The first thing people do when they make more money is they eat better and specifically they eat more red meat. So you got those countries like the Philippines, Vietnam, Southeast Asia, right? Mexico is a great example that is growing an affluence. And as that grows, that's going to continue to be there. But, right, there is a rate here where we have to consider when we think about the competition out there, what's this going to look like? So I'll throw a wild card

in there. And the wild card is Africa. Yes. Right? Billions of people, largely untapped, market access is still an issue there. But I mean, you talk about the future. There are many people in agriculture will tell you that there is a huge future for meat and the red meat business in Africa. It's very complicated. Distribution is complicated. I mean, you speak hundreds, if not thousands of languages from the southern tip to the northern tip. And you've got wars and all these other things to consider.

but there is data out there that says countries like Nigeria could actually be larger net exporters by the year 2040 than Japan. Wow. Because if you've ever looked at a population pyramid, Japan is rapidly shrinking. It looks like this, where you have a very small portion of the population on the bottom that's young and a very large percentage of the population on top that's very old. that's not a long-term business proposition, right? Africa's a flip. It's kind of like the food pyramid. It's a flip.

They have a very small percentage of population that's old and a huge population that's young. So as that becomes the new frontier for the economies of the world, agriculture and food is going to be right at the center of it. And you're already seeing that because other countries are trying to develop there. The Chinese are trying to develop very rapidly in, Africa. So where does the U.S. play in that? And so that's my wild card to international markets moving forward. But without it, it still is a, it's a leg of the stool that we sit on. So we're going

to need to continue to nurture those markets internationally. Yeah. Yep. Yeah, I, I've never been to Brazil, but that excites me what you said about Brazil. Like, talk a little bit about it more because I'm just curious in my own my own personal personally I'm curious to like when you say it's just like takes you back to old days of agriculture it's just when you say there's so much opportunity do you mean like in all of agriculture in Brazil the pig business cattle everything I mean what well what is it so I mean there's a couple of factors right and we'll just start with the most basic there's a huge advantage if you're in the if you're in the agriculture sector and particularly if you're in the grain business,

there's a huge advantage to the statement, no winter. Right? Yep. I mean, certainly weather still plays a huge role. But when you can go corn on beans on corn on beans or, you know, you could just continue this. Double crop. Perpetuity.

Yeah, even triple crop. Yep. I mean, they can get a third crop in the ground. That alone tells you the whole story, right, of what the potential could be. infrastructure, bridges, right, the ability to export, all of that is still being further developed. You're seeing massive investments down there in that area, which I find pretty fascinating. We just had last year, actually, we did a large competitive analysis on Brazil, right? Really wanting to, again, what do we need to be thinking about 10, 20, 30 years down the road?

You know, I'll give you a pork example is if you think about what's going on in the pork business, most of that business isn't very far southern Brazil, right? Now in 2026, prior last year, only parts of Brazil could export pork because they were what was called FMD, footmount disease, free without vaccine. Now you have all of Brazil open to that market, okay, based on the World Health Organization and how they classify. that, which means they're open for business, right, on the global market. And so I was in a processing plant. Just give an example, these guys processed about 32 to 3,500 head a day. Okay, so there's one fascinating part. They processed 3,500 head a day, and they had over 2,000 employees in the plant. Wow. You remember that thing about labor? Yeah. Not a problem. I mean, I mean, there was a person for a person in the plant.

It was amazing how much labor was there. And I asked like, well, what about labor? And they're like, what about it? Was labor a problem? No. No, we actually have our own area over here that we built for our employees. They had 25,000 sows and they had their own little town for their employees there, right? Because these were high paying jobs in an emerging market, right, where you've got a fairly low-income population.

in comparison to the United States, right? So we asked them, well, what about growth? You know, what are you thinking about growth? And they said, well, we want to double. I want to double. And I said, okay, when do you want to double? And they said, oh, next year. We're going to double next year.

And then we're going to double again the year after that. Not our growth plan is double over the next five years, right? Now, we want to double now. Yeah. And we have the market. to double now. And so, you know, unlike what the United States did, my analogy of the 1950s is this isn't going to take 30 or 40 years to catch up. Yeah, because the technology. The technology is already there. We made most of it. And the capital's coming from outside.

There's people down there that are investing in it. And, you know, we've been, yeah, I mean, U.S. farmers have been going to Brazil for a very long time on trade missions and talking to the Brazilians, whether it's on how to effectively grow corn or soybeans or raise hogs. When you think about the meat business specifically, the Brazilians have dominated the red meat and poultry sector on exports. Pork is kind of the up-and-coming opportunity for them. They've already figured out how to export a tremendous amount of poultry and beef out of Brazil. A very carnivore-driven society, by the way, right?

and they're learning and taking those learnings and applying those over to the pork sector. And that's where you're going to see a lot of growth. By the way, there's no pers in Brazil. And there's a lot of technology used in Brazil that we don't necessarily use here in the U.S. either. So as we start thinking about, you know, what lean gain efficiency looks like, what the cost of production looks like, what the cost of feed them looks like, what labor looks like. if you don't look at that and tell yourself, I really need to keep an eye on that as a U.S. producer, you're probably naive

to what's happening in the rest of the world because it's going to continue to grow. Now, in comparison, we are a juggernaut in comparison. This isn't going to happen overnight. But in some of those key markets, there's a lot of very tense competition. today. Yeah.

So, well, that's some great, I mean, that's great insight. That's the, we say it all the time on here, you know, if you're just blind and don't know what,

what game you're playing or what field you're on, you got to know what's happening to be aware of it so you can make better decisions. Yeah. Yeah, that's, that's scary to the U.S. producer, but it's also the reality.

And so what are you going to do about it? Yeah. What can you do? My favorite analogy about situations like that is, there's a guy named Jovey Miller and he says, you don't want to be in a situation where in business or in relationships or life is like deer hunting and you're the deer because it's a sport and only one person knows that they're being hunted or only one person is hunting and the other one doesn't know.

Right. You don't want to be the deer. Don't be the deer. Yeah, that's exactly right. And I think it's important because, you know, part of the reason that we have touchpoints to the entire globe. and it was an area of interest for me and has been for the last 25 years. I've been very fortunate to travel all over the world and look at the pig business. I lived in Europe for a time and worked for a pork company there and just really to try to

understand the heartbeat of the business and what's happening. I think your point is dead on. But this does go back to another point we made is that moving forward for the next 10, 20, 30 years, the things that differentiated us in the marketplace before are different than what's going to differentiate us in the marketplace moving forward. That involves product quality. It involves even some things that sound very simple that are not simple at all. Portion size. Case size.

You know, I was in the Philippines last year. I was in Manila. And right, you still have a lot of Southeast Asia that's got all these wet markets, which are fascinating. Yeah. And I was talking to this guy and they move millions of pounds of product in this wet market, right? Most of it brought in on mopeds.

Yes. Wow. You know, not on reefer trailers, right? The worst traffic in the world is in Manila, by the way. If you've ever been there and you ever rode a Jeepily, you would know that. And he says, you know what's the hardest thing to do, Newman? I say what? He says, you ever try to put 360 pound cases of pork on a moped?

Yeah, not very well. Not very well. Doesn't work. Right? But he says, those 10 pound cases sure do work better. Yeah. Well, that's a huge thing. Yeah.

To think about portion size, boxing, the price associated with all of the above, changing operations in a plant, switching lines. So when we think about what differentiates us in the marketplace moving forward, we just have to be keenly aware that what we've done in the past is not going to be what makes this, tick in the future. Yeah. Yeah, because if you're the, if you're the logistics guy, buying those boxes for 60 pounds, that looks like a bargain compared to buying for 10 until you don't get the market until you can't sell it. Yeah. I mean, that it's, it's a, it's such a big world and having to start with that end buyer and work all the way back

Oh, that is. I mean, well, but yeah, but you have to do it. The rest of the world just needs protein in general. Yep. Right? So what each market needs is so uniquely different. I mean, that's why we work with the U.S. Meat Export Federation because they've got offices in more than 25 countries. The cultural nuances and the relationships drive this business.

Yep. You know, if you're going to go talk to someone in Japan, you better know something about Japanese culture. Yeah. Or you're not doing business, right? You want to go talk to someone in South Korea or Mexico or China or Africa. You better know the market. And I have a very good understanding of how it works and how cold chain works and how supply logistics work. And you got to build those relationships because a lot of what we do literally tens of billions of dollars where the business is built on that.

And literally, we built the backbone of America off of that. I mean, we lived through one of, and we're living through one of the greatest times in agriculture, we think about the way we grew and the technology we put in place, but we can't forget about that fact that that customer's changing and they're changing on every corner of the earth. Yeah. Yeah. For sure. What about you, what about you and your family farming operation personally? When you think about, you know, talk about understanding what field you're playing on,

what what does what how optimistic are you about the future of your family operation and what are what are some things you're looking at implementing or changing or thinking about when it comes to your operation yeah moving forward that's an interesting question soyer i mean uh if you know if you ask me like what keeps me up at night man cost definitely keeps me up you know i go my gosh i want my kids to worry about how i mean the fluctuation in the business and the way that this has happened over time because it's still a tough business to be in, agriculture as a whole. The ebbs and flows are, we talked about that, the difference between the valleys and the peaks, they get pretty big. What I'm optimistic about, and I'll just say you asked about my family individually,

it's really interesting. I think that part of the strength in our future is diversification. right so I mean because we are very well diversified across multiple proteins in this particular case because we are in the cowcalf business we're in the hog business as well that is played to our advantage and it's allowed us to grow in years because of one because we couldn't grow in the other it's allowed us to invest from one to the other now your banker looks at that sometimes and goes are we still at net neutral right Yeah, but we're not behind. Right. But we're not going backwards. You know, you can see progress. You can still see things being repaired. You can still see a building going up.

You can still see equipment that's not terribly outdated. But we've got to be smart about that stuff, right? But I'm optimistic that if we stay diversifying and we don't put all of our eggs in one basket, it's probably going to work the best for the way our system is set up. You know, the caveat is. everybody's geography is a little different. I don't live in road crop country where, you know, where ground costs $30,000 an acre either. And I don't own any of that ground that I can sell for $30,000, you know, otherwise.

But a lot of the ground, we as pasture ground, right, hogs don't require nearly the land requirements. So we're thinking, like, how do we grow this? And if our kids want to take it over, can we make good decisions? We're going to continue doing, you know, the direct-to-consumer thing. we've done in the past. We continue to invest in that. And I think, to be honest with you, that business is only going to get better. Are you back going to restaurants again and? Oh, absolutely. So you're doing both now. Both. Oh, yeah. Full bore. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I mean,

that insanity of 2021 was pretty wild, right? I mean, but the tough part was the gap in between was like someone shuts a switch off, turn it on. Shut it off, turn it on. But we train. We train. I think I said this the last time we caught up was the cool thing about what happened was that we taught 8 billion people how to cook at home again. And in this affordability, cost conscious society, we live in whatever else, you know, they've learned to shop more online. They've learned that they can buy high quality. They've learned that they can, you know, they can buy a local, they can go to their retail store and have it put in the back of their car. But when you think about restaurants and things like that, too, they also learned smaller portion sizes. don't carry too much inventory, right, especially during that time.

We try to limit our costs. And so we pay attention to all of that. And I think that innovation is going to be a big piece of our business moving forward as well. Different cuts, right? Thinking outside the box. And here's what's cool about that as well is that a lot of those trends that happen in restaurants, particularly when you think about the high end side of the business too, right? Just think about the success of what's happened in the food business, food network.

You know, chefs are famous now. That wasn't the case 25 years ago. Right. But a lot of those trends do make their way to mainstream food. You're starting to see that in retail. You're starting to see unique cuts of pork you didn't see before. We're going to have to continue to think along that line. So I'm very optimistic, but I'm a very optimistic person.

Okay. I believe that we can survive it. I believe that what's being good to our family for the last 50 years can be good to our family for the next 50 years if we're smart. Yeah. But we're going to have to think differently, which, you know, thank goodness has been something we've been reasonably good at. We're not afraid to take risks.

Yep. And just roll with the status quo. That's not how I work at all anyways. You know, but you can't take, you got to be smart with your risks, right? Yeah. Be bold is one of my best things I say all the time, right? But be careful. Yeah. Right. Yeah. No, I mean, we say that all the time. You know, I think in this day and age of ag, you got to think outside the box. It's just a different time. It's a different time. And so, yeah, like I said, I can't, I can't give you more kudos that you guys are doing that. That's really cool. I admire that a lot. Yeah, thank you. who's someone that you would want to give flowers to that you think is doing awesome things,

whether it's a farmer or an entrepreneur, somebody inside the porkboard, you're a family, who would you love to just recognize right now and just say, man, they're doing some cool stuff? Wow, well, okay. I mean, I'm going to, I'm going to strike an emotional chord here, okay? So there's someone that I really recognize is really important. And so I mentioned this individual earlier, but Patrick Fleming, who's the vice president of domestic marketing at Pork Board, he's ran the business for the last two years, lifelong advocate for the pork business. I mean, to the bone. I mentioned those words like unapologetic, those things like that. So Patrick, unfortunately, last week lost his battle to cancer. Oh, no kid.

And so he passed away last week after battling cancer for a period. of time. And, you know, it's tragically sad. But what's really awesome about this story, too, is that the taste of pork-and-do campaign, many of the things that I talk about all the time. You remember that thing about hiring people who you know are smarter than you are? Classic example. You know, someone who said, hey, I'm going to come back to this business and really pour everything I have into it, regardless of this other personal thing I have. I mean, how amazing this story is is there's not enough time to actually tell you how incredible it was. But his swan song was this whole push we're in right now.

Let's throw what we know about the business out the window. You know, we learn from the past and we move forward. So if I'm doing flowers and kudos today, it's in memory of that guy. and Patrick Fleming because he, you know, this is a guy who literally advanced the business years that he will never get to see the fruits of his labor. But all the things and many of the things that we're doing right now is foundationally because of people like that. And we got a good staff of those people at the pork board who are working hard on behalf of farmers every day. So I'll go there today. That's a great legacy. Yeah. For sure.

Yeah. If a producer out there is listening and they've never gotten involved, obviously you got your check off, what can they do? How do they get involved? How's the best way to get involved? Yeah, that's a great question. And so I'm a firm believer that the world is ran by those who show up. Okay. It's busy. We're in one of the busiest times. I think that we, I don't know if it's the busiest time we've ever experienced. It feels like it. But it sure does feel like it. Maybe it's just a season of life as well.

Or maybe it's the fact that we're all carrying these phones in our pockets that never stop buzzing. Okay. And we could probably learn from that to slow down a little bit. But I know that everybody's busy out here protecting their business and protecting their family and their future and everything else. But I get a lot of feedback every single day as does our staff about good. bad or otherwise, right? Here's what you should be doing. Here's what we should be doing.

You remember the thing I said about consumer focus producer lead? What I do every day is led by a 15 member board of directors. And those people literally set the strategy and my job is to help carry out out, right? And really carry out their vision. What I would ask any farmer out there that's listening is reach out when you're at, whether it's a county meeting, state meeting, we have tentacles to the business everywhere. If you, if you, tell me or you tell anybody, hey, I want to get involved with something at the portboard, you better watch out. Okay. Now, we're not going to sign you up for 20 meetings a year. Okay. This is, this is part of where we're moving in the future is this is not about being an

activity-based organization. This is about doing what's right and prioritizing efforts. So if they want to get involved, reach out to us directly, get on a committee, right? Just share your thoughts with me, I promise you, we listen because it's your money. Yep. We're handling your money. That's the reality of this situation right now. And we want to be good stewards of that. So if you want to help make a difference for what's going to happen down the future, jump in. We got to, I'll hand you a shovel. Awesome. Jump in. I love it.

Is it, is it, is it national porkboard.org or is an NPB.com. Actually, if, if you just go, well, the easiest way to be candid with you is you can Google this, you can use AI, you can go, just look up National Pork Board. Type in Taste of Pork and Do, it's the digital world we live in. You'll find your way. You'll find your way. In a very simple search, there's no way you can't find us over in Clive, Iowa, where the headquarters is at. But we do have simple ways to get people involved. And, you know, if your interest is international marketing, We got a home for you. Your interest is, I want to learn more about what we're doing domestically or in swine hell.

We got a spot for you and we will listen. So I think it's really important that we jump in, right, and contribute to the future success of the business. And that's good for all of ag. Yeah. 100%. Yeah. Well, David, it's been an absolute pleasure. And I'm glad that you're at the helm of this whole deal.

And, yeah, we love all the insight and value you gave. and yeah, just proud to be a pork producer and glad I feel good about where things are. I feel good about what was talked about today. So, guys, if you got any value from the show, share it out with the people that you know. Leave a review on Spotify or Apple. If you're a pork producer, get yourself involved. We love you guys. We appreciate you.

We'll see you back here next week for another episode.