Getting piggy with it

May 18, 2023

Iowa Swine Day 2023 will be held on June 29.

By Andrew Joseph, Farms.com; Image via Iowa State University

The 2023 Iowa Swine Day program will focus on what it does best: provide widely regarded speakers who will share information on topics vital to today's pork producers.

The 12th annual event will be held on Thursday, June 29, 2023, at the Scheman Building on the Iowa State University campus in Ames.

Registration for the event begins at 7:30 AM, and the official program starts at 8:30 AM.

Registration costs US$65, although students may attend at no charge as long as they register before the deadline of midnight, June 22. No walk-in registrations will be accepted.

There are four plenary session speakers:

Eric Potterat of the Los Angels Dodgers baseball team will explain key performance optimization factors of high-performing individuals and teams;
Joe Kerns from Partners for Production Agriculture will help audience members understand the carbon market and how to apply it to their businesses;
Banks Baker, with PIC, will describe genetic improvements in a sustainable food system;
Jack Bobo of The Nature Conservancy will explore whether animal agriculture can save the planet.

The afternoon is organized into four concurrent sessions: sustainable pork production; production strategies for foreign animal disease and health; the future of pig farming; and Iowa State University research.

Each session has four presentations, and attendees are welcome to listen to all speakers in one concurrent session or choose to move between sessions.

New this year is a pre-conference ISU Swine Networking Social sponsored by TechMix, AB Vista, and Lynch Livestock.

This new social replaces the post-program barbeque held in previous years. It will be held at the Hansen Agriculture Student Learning Center, 2508 Mortensen Road in Ames, from 5:30-7 PM. All attendees registered for Iowa Swine Day are welcome to join.

The full program, information, registration forms, and directions to the venue are available on the Iowa Swine Day conference website: www.aep.iastate.edu/iowaswineday/

Video: We Let Dad Drive a 50,000 Pound Dump Truck

There's old hog barns under that field now. The old hog barn site on the farm has been sitting there for decades, and this is the week it finally came out: concrete pad, burn pile, charred lumber, all of it loaded into a CAT 725C rock truck and buried in a pit we dug back in the timber.

Tork's been waiting his whole life to drive one of these, so he gets the keys to a 50,000 pound rock truck and I ride shotgun. The excavator loads, the dozer clears the timber, the drone shows the whole site from above, and by sundown there's nothing left of the old place but a smooth patch of dirt. It's a weird feeling erasing something that was here before either of us, but the farm has to keep moving.