Chad & Anna - Feeding pigs & the world

Please welcome Chad & Anna Wastell who share with us about their unique family business and love for agriculture, family & pigs. 

Hi! We’re Chad & Anna – Team Wastell – and we feed pigs to feed the world. This is our story.

I’m a small-town Kansas girl. Population 1200; wheat fields and milo as far as the eye could see. My high school had a nationally recognized FFA program and the school parking lot filled with farm trucks each morning. But I was a town kid, a drama and music kid, and I never participated in 4-H or joined FFA. I loved the county fair mostly for the snow cones and cute cowboys.

I attended a small liberal arts college in Kansas and lived in Eastern Europe for a while. I climbed the corporate ladder in the hospitality industry wearing high heels and a suit, and my marketing skills were further developed through a job as Director of Communications at our megachurch. But I always loved visiting my hometown; staring out at a wheat field and open sky filled my heart with a sense of total calm. 

My husband grew up in suburban Omaha. He was raised in the family business selling Crystal Spring hog feeders. From a young age, he spent time in hog barns, sat in on manufacturing meetings with his parents and celebrated his birthday each summer at World Pork Expo.

Chad left for Northwestern University in Chicago to pursue the field of computer engineering, but after graduation, he decided to come back to the business and his family in Nebraska. It wasn’t an easy choice; his classmates were transferring into jobs with glamorous, fast-paced consulting firms, and more than a few friends and mentors flat out told him he was crazy to choose the family business.

But it was the right choice. Armed with a desire to rebuild his relationship with his parents and fueled by the passion that drives everything Chad does, he threw himself into the business of feeding pigs to feed the world. He committed himself to extensive training, completing an internship with a hog production company and traveling to Europe and South America to understand of the needs of an international market. His engineering background provides the right skillset for product development with Crystal Spring Hog Equipment and the complex technical service of the Pro-Sort large pen auto sort system. He knows his products inside and out and is passionate about the benefits they can deliver to a producer.

As Chad and I were falling in love and getting married, I once (or twice…) declared that I would never work for the family business. I want my own thing, we need work/life balance, hog barns are really smelly, I’m just not gonna do it. No thank you.

But when Chad was offered an expanded Business Development role that would require him being on the road several nights a week to meet with dealers and customers, we remembered all the conversations we’d had, all the "If Onlys". If only we could travel together, if only we could spend time together out on the road.

It became clear that I could fill a role at Gro Master as Director of Marketing, handling advertising and developing training materials for dealers and redesigning the website and blogging and all the things I love to do. And I could travel with Chad. I should probably learn not to say “never.”

Now, as we travel around the country and solve problems for farmers and producers that use our products, I meet the people and families that work so hard to care well for their animals and provide safe, nutritious food for the world. I have learned so much about the industry visiting hog farms and talking with the growers. The barns are still smelly, but I want to learn as much as I can about how pigs are raised and the needs of our customers so we can provide the best products and the best solutions for them.

I love traveling with my husband. I love rural America and the small towns and big skies. I love that through blogging and social media, I get to help tell the story of feeding pigs to feed the world. At the end of the day when we're tired and smelly and road-weary, Chad and I love being part of the bigger story of agriculture.

Thanks Anna for the fantastic feature! To learn more about Chad and Anna and their family business you can check out their website, blog, & twitter! 

If you or someone you know is interested in becoming the next Face of Agriculture please contact us today to learn more! 

Anne of Feedyard Foodie

Today we welcome Anne from Feedyard Foodie! Anne runs a cattle feed yard operation while her husband farms, and together they raise three daughters in Nebraska. Welcome Anne! 

My life changed the night of October 31, 1993. I was a city girl athlete and freshman at Dartmouth College. My girlfriends and I were bending college rules and attending a fraternity party on campus. Amidst games of ping pong, laughter, and loud music I looked across the room and my world jolted just a little bit. He smiled at me and his beautiful blue eyes drew me in.

Just six weeks earlier, my mom’s parting words as I boarded a plane for college were “Anne, stay away from those senior boys”. Somehow, during the ensuing weeks, those words were lost in the love that bloomed between the football player farm boy from Nebraska and the swimmer girl from South Florida. 

We married in June of 1996 and moved back to the farm in Nebraska a year later: Matt with his masters degree in Engineering and Business, and I with a BA in psychology. We passed on higher paying city jobs, choosing instead a rural lifestyle working in agriculture. Sixteen years later, we have added three daughters to the mix of cattle and crops, but we continue to make our lives in partnership with the land in Dawson County Nebraska.

The first thing that I learned when I moved to Nebraska was to buy a hooded sweatshirt to combat the wind, the second was how to “run” a scoop shovel at the cattle feed yard. A farmer and an engineer, Matt went to work on the crop side of the farm growing alfalfa, corn, wheat and soybeans; and dehydrating the majority of the alfalfa into animal feed called dehy pellets. Today, he farms approximately 5000 acres in the Platte River Valley and is a partner in a nationwide alfalfa distribution company, http://alfagreensupreme.com. 

 
Matt had no interest in the family’s cattle feed yard, and I had always loved animals so I asked my father-in-law if I could go to work at the feed yard. When he finished laughing in surprise at my request, he gave me an hourly wage job and I put on my blue jeans and went to work. 

· I learned to read bunks and run the feed truck.
· I learned to ride pens and check cattle health.
· I learned to administer animal health products and be a member of the processing team.
· I learned the book work and the business side of running a feed yard. 

Most importantly, I learned that working with your hands to care for animals was incredibly rewarding. In the years that followed, I added cattle buyer to the mix and today I procure 90% of the cattle that are fed at Will Feed, Inc. In the early 2000’s, I became involved in U.S. Premium Beef’s Age and Source Verified pilot PVP program and began tracing cattle from the ranch all of the way to the packing plant.

In my years spent as cattle buyer, I have met some of the finest people that I have ever known. I established relationships with ranchers who were interested in tracing their cattle and tracking performance. As a result, I transitioned the feed yard philosophy to a concept of vertical collaboration: channeling performance and management information on cattle up and down the production chain. 

A psychologist at heart, I strive each day to gain a better understanding of both the cattle that I raise and the people who benefit from them. I have instilled a philosophy of low stress cattle handling and Beef Quality Assurance at the yard, turning the focus to high quality holistic animal care. In the spring of 2011 I looked outside of my farm and launched a consumer focused blog http://feedyardfoodie.com in order to make my cattle feed yard transparent to all of those great folks who eat beef!

Last year, Feed Yard Foodie reached more than 70,000 people as I answered questions about beef production and talked about our family and our farm. Blogging has not only allowed curious visitors to view life in a feed yard, but it has also made me a better cattle feed yard manager. The virtual perspective of my readers constantly pushes me to offer better care to my animals and raise awareness of food quality and safety. 

I do not know what the next sixteen years has in store for Matt and I and our daughters, but I can attest to the fact that the previous sixteen years has made me a true Nebraskan at heart as well as a passionate advocate for agriculture. I often find myself thinking of this mantra from Winston Churchill: Success is not final, failure is not fatal: it is the courage to continue that counts…

Thanks to Anne for giving us the honor to share her story on the Faces of Agriculture blog today! If you have any questions about beef or how your food is raised we encourage you to contact Anne! You can also learn more by visiting her blog, Facebook page, and twitter! 

If you or someone you know is involved in agriculture and would like to share your story, please contact us today! You could be the next Face of Agriculture!