Producer to Producer: Indiana farm manager shares real life perspective from the barn

Mar 17, 2025

Tim Burnside, swine farm manager at I & S Furrer Farms in Wolcott, Indiana, spoke at the Four Star Veterinary Service Pork Industry Conference in Muncie, Indiana, to share his experience as a swine farm manager. After his presentation, he spoke with The Pig Site's Sarah Mikesell about his on-farm experiences.

Tell us about I & S Furrer Farms.
We have about 1,800 sows and are a farrow-to-finish operation with three finishing facilities. At any given time, we have 24,000 to 25,000 animals on feed.

I oversee farm management and leave the physical work to his team. One of my responsibilities is lining up the pig marketing, which can be challenging.

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You have to make appointments to send market animals anymore, and we sell five days a week, but sometimes six or seven loads a week, and wean about 1,100 pigs every week. I’d really like finishing space for about 2,000 more pigs. I keep the facilities really full, so we need at least two more weeks’ worth of finishing space.

We are a closed herd and raise our own breeding stock on the farm. I really like that concept, and I think it’s helped our productivity quite a bit.

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Video: Four Star Pork Industry Conf - Back to Basics: Fundamentals drive vaccine performance

At a time when disease pressure continues to challenge pork production systems across the United States, vaccination remains one of the most valuable and heavily debated tools available to veterinarians and producers.

Speaking at the 2025 Four Star Pork Industry Conference in Muncie, Indiana, Dr. Daniel Gascho, veterinarian at Four Star Veterinary Service, encouraged the industry to return to fundamentals in how vaccines are selected, handled and administered across sow farms, gilt development units and grow-finish operations.

Gascho acknowledged at the outset that vaccination can quickly become a technical and sometimes tedious topic. But he said that real-world execution, not complex immunology, is where most vaccine failures occur.