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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