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Plain honored with Distinguished Service Award at 2023 Pork Forum

Ron Plain, professor emeritus and extension economist in Department of Agricultural and Applied Economics at the University of Missouri- Columbia, was recognized as National Pork Board's Distinguished Service Award recipient at the 2023 Pork Forum.  

Plain, who started his career as a high school agricultural education instructor, spent most of his professional career focused on helping producers understand the economic forces related to their pork production business.  

His career in academia began just before the farm crisis and the major changes to the pork industry. During his 35 years as a professor and extension economist, Plain made more than 2,100 presentations to U.S. farm audiences and also traveled internationally, sharing his insight on how to manage pig farming as a business. 

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There’s a Whole Barn Buried Under This Field Now

Video: There’s a Whole Barn Buried Under This Field Now

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.