Submitted by Kentucky Soybean Board

Farmers have utilized their offspring to carry out the work of their operations for generations. The large families of the past may have even come about, in part, because of the need for more help on the farm. But as times have changed, equipment and processes have gotten more efficient and streamlined, so more acres of row crops can be tended with fewer people. 

That’s great, unless the number of households that depend on the family farm exceeds the revenue possible on the acreage available to adequately support them. In those instances, the choices are few. In many areas, the  arrival of poultry and livestock integrators have provided a solution for many multi-generational farms, including Pirtle Farms in Water Valley. 

Pirtle Farms was established in 1832, and the newest generation to join the operation includes Dan Pirtle’s three sons, Dillon, Dalton and Daniel. Dan and his brother, Craig, have been raising soybeans, corn and cattle since they can remember. When the new generation came about, it was obvious that for the family farm to transition from supporting two households to supporting double that number or more, something had to happen. 

Thanks to Henry, Tennessee, based Tosh Pork, the two oldest Pirtle sons have been able to build hog barns to have something of their own. Tosh is a large-scale integrator that produces more than 850,000 market hogs each year.  After farrowing at one of Tosh’s ten sow farms, three-week-old piglets are transferred to one of nearly 100 wean-to-finish sites in western Tennessee and western Kentucky. 

Water Valley is bisected by the Graves/Hickman County line, and Dillon’s hog barns went in first, on the Hickman County side. After obtaining a beginning farmer loan, filling out mountains of paperwork and prepping his water quality and nutrient management plans while learning how to care for the pigs entrusted to his care, Dillon got his first load of baby pigs on July 4, 2017. 

Holiday pig delivery must run in the Pirtle family, because on Memorial Day of 2019, Dalton’s first piglets arrived. “That just goes to show that when you have livestock, it’s an everyday thing,” Dillon said. “Tending to the hogs takes a few hours a day,” Dalton added, “so it’s a really good fit with the other aspects of our operation.”

Regulations that help farmers be good stewards of the land, water and air required Dalton’s barns to be adequately distanced  from Dillon’s, so Dalton’s operation is located five miles away, in Graves County. This gives them plenty of acres to distribute the manure on without over-applying it to the soil. 

Each operation has two barns, connected by a central alleyway with a ramp for load-in and load-out purposes, and will house 5,000 pigs per barn. While the brothers own and operate their own companies independently of one another, they do pitch in and help one another out. 

Daniel, the youngest, stays focused on the daily tasks of the cattle operation but admits that he often gets “roped into helping out with the pigs.” The three brothers do have an operation in which they are all partners, called 3D Farms. The business was created to purchase equipment to put down hog manure. The boys have a contract with Pirtle Farms, Inc. to get rid of their hog manure. This helps the boys dispose of the hog manure and helps Pirtle Farms decrease their fertilizer bill. 

“Tosh Pork has been great to work with,” Dillon said. “When I filled out the loan paperwork to build the barn, my lender saw Tosh on there and it was pretty well instant approval. The Tosh family is well-respected, and they have earned that good reputation. I talked to several other contract growers before I committed, and everyone I have spoken with has good things to say about their experience.” 

As contract growers, Dillon and Dalton don’t own the pigs. Dalton said, “the best way to describe it is that they rent our barns and our labor. They provide the piglets, the feed, professional vetting advice and the transportation of pigs to us when they’re weaned and from our place to the processor when they’re ready to load out.” 

When asked how COVID affected their operations, the brothers said that when processing plants began to scale back their production, Tosh Pork’s nutritionists immediately supplied reformulated rations to their growers to slow the rate of gain. Dillon said that while a plan was in place if the situation continued, neither brother had to euthanize any pigs. “The barns stayed empty longer than usual between herds,” he said, “but Tosh rents our barns, so it did not affect our income.”

 “We are just now getting back to full capacity,” he said when we visited the first week of November. “When the packing plants got backed up, they slowed the rate of gain on the pigs in the barns, but they also backed off on the breeding. Nobody was sure how long the packing problem was going to last, and there’s no sense in raising pigs if they can’t be processed.” 

Contract growers normally get piglets when they are 16 days old and keep them for about 24 weeks. The hogs are loaded out over a period of time, with markers from Tosh coming in to choose which hogs have reached market weight of about 265-275 pounds. The load-out takes place gradually, with each trailer holding 165-170 hogs. With the farmers and helpers loading 2-3 trucks each day, and approximately 30 trucks being used, load-out can take a couple of  weeks. 

There’s not much downtime in contract growing hogs, Dillon said, noting that he usually gets a week or so between herds and averages 2.1 “turns” of his barns each year. “That’s not a break, though. That is washing the barn out completely, disinfecting, and getting ready for the next load of babies.” He said that the contract hog operation works nicely with the other aspects of farming.

“When it’s planting time or harvest, every one of us is all in with the row crops. When it’s calving season, we all go help Daniel with that. When it’s time to load out pigs, I can count on my brothers to help with that. Contract growing gives me enough income to be part of Pirtle Farms and also have something of my own, at the same time. It’s a great fit for me and my family, and Dalton feels the same way.” 

Vocabulary to Define:

streamlined

revenue

transition

farrowing

wean-to-finish

Research to Conduct:

Explain crop and livestock integration or integrated farming.

Questions to Answer:

What steps did the Pirtle’s take to make sure they were caring for the environment?

What benefit is there to using hog manure as fertilizer?

How did Tosh address issues related to COVID?