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! 

Small Town Girl - Rosie Sanderson

Today we welcome small town girl and farm kid Rosie Sanderson who shares her family's proud farming history and tells her story with the hope of educating others about farming and agriculture. 

If I told you I grew up in a town with a population of 48, you would probably assume that I grew up with that typical “small town girl” story… and you would be correct. Anything you can think of to insert into a small town girl story could probably be applied to my childhood: I learned how to drive a Super M tractor before I learned how to drive a car, I crashed a go-kart or two into my dad’s grain bins, I spent my summers showing cattle, was constantly begging my parents for a horse (which I still haven’t gotten, by the way), and I had decided by age 4 that I was going to be a veterinarian when I grew up!

I was raised on a livestock and grain farm in northern Illinois. (No, not all of northern Illinois is Chicago! Population 48, remember?) My dad farmed with his dad and brother, so I was lucky enough to grow up with my dad, uncle, and grandpa at our farm every day. When I was little, we always had pigs out on the pasture at our house. I can remember riding out to the pasture in the truck with my dad to check the piglets, but he always made me stay in the truck (much to my dismay) because sows are very protective.

My brother Trent and I checking pigs with dad.

As I got older, our farm shifted from pigs to cattle. I got my first bucket calf when I was 7, and I was in love! I named her Wise-Guy (don’t ask me why, I don’t get it either). To this day, my grandpa tells the story about how sick my Wise-Guy got when she was just a small calf, and how I would lay in her calf hutch and sleep with her because I didn’t want her to be alone. As an experienced livestock farmer, of course my grandpa thought “Great, she is going to get attached to this calf and it’s not going to survive.” Well, she did! In fact, she is the cow that started what is now our herd of over 50 cattle. 15 years later, she is still on pasture at my parent’s farm. 

Me with my 15-year-old cow Wise-Guy.

With the help of Wise-Guy, I started showing cattle in 4-H when I was 8 and continued to show calves from our farm until the summer of 2008 when I moved to central Illinois to attend Illinois State University. Moving to college was a huge change for me. Not because it was away from home, family, friends, and grandma’s cookin’… but because these people had no clue about anything agriculture!

As soon as people found out I was an agricultural animal science major, the first question was always “Wait, you are from a REAL farm???” I thought to myself “Who are these people and where did they come from!” Where I grew up, everyone I knew was another farm kid. I had never met anyone that hadn’t seen a cow before. I thought I must have met the only people on this earth who had never been to a farm. People would ask me about chocolate milk coming from brown cows, brown eggs being healthier than white, if cow-tipping was a real thing… and all I could do was laugh! Were these people serious?

As I made my way through college and met more people, I realized that this wasn’t an exclusive group of people who had never been exposed to farming. In fact, I began to feel like the weird one because I HAD experienced these things first-hand. I started to realize that people wanted to know about farming, but they didn’t know where to go for the information. They didn’t have access to farming like I did growing up. This was a problem, and it was here that my passion for discussing farming and food production with farmers and urban folks alike. So I quit laughing when people asked me what I thought were silly questions, because I was their closest connection to farming. If they couldn’t ask me about these things, where did I expect them to go for their answers? 

My family in front of the house in Norway that our ancestors
left 170 years ago!

In 2011, my family had the amazing opportunity to travel to Norway and go to the farm that our ancestors left in 1843. We feel so lucky that we got the experience to stand in the house that they lived in and explore the farm that they left to bring us to where we are today. Farming has been in the family for longer than record books have been around! It is hard to wrap your head around how far we have come but how much has stayed the same, too.

I still have some cattle on pasture at my parent’s farm today, but I hope to move them to my own farm someday, just like all of my ancestors have done. When I have my own farm, I know that I will take with me the important lessons that I learned growing up on our family farm; including the importance of sustainability. Both crop and livestock production are jobs that come with a responsibility to conserve the environment, and that is a responsibility that my family has always taken seriously. Today our farm is more sustainable than ever with the help of new technologies. If that interests you, you can learn more about what we do at our farm’s website: www.sandersonag.com. In 2010, our farm even received an award for Illinois Soil & Water Conservation Family of the year from Orien Samuelson!

My family receiving a conservation award from Orien Samuelson.

One thing I wish people understood about my farm family is that we want to answer your questions! Farming is our livelihood, our history, and our passion. We take pride in what we do. If you have a question about agriculture, why not go straight to the source and ask a farmer?

I love what I do, and I think most farmers would say the same thing if you asked them. I feel so blessed to have been raised in “God’s Country” where I learned the importance of hard-work, responsibility, and most recently the importance of sharing what I know with people like you! 

Riding my mare, one of the many perks of living in the country!

If you ever have a food-production related question but don’t know where to start, visit my blog, Unpolished Boots, or facebook page and ask me! I will always be happy to answer your questions or get you in contact with someone who can!

Thank you Rosie for the fantastic feature! Remember - if you or someone you know is involved in farming, ranching, or the agricultural industry and would like to share your story here please contact us! YOU could be the next Face of Agriculture! 

Standing Oaks Enterprise - Family & Agriculture

Today we welcome Sam Wildman as he tells us about his family farm - Standing Oak Enterprises - and how his family works together and advocates for agriculture and swine production. 

Standing Oaks Enterprises is the name of our family farm. The name comes from an old oak grove that is located on one of our farms. My father always told me he named it that way because it represented a firm, simple & long-lasting entity. Our family & our farm only exist because of the grace of God, our commitment to the Lord and the resounding faith we have all been raised with. 

My name is Sam Wildman, I am 21 years old - studying agribusiness & economics with a minor in agriculture communications at The Ohio State University. I represent over 200 years of agricultural tradition on essentially the same farm as we started on. I am the second of four children (Kim, Mindy, Simon & I) and represent the eighth generation to be involved with our farm which now raises pigs, corn and soybeans. 

Our farm, located in South Charleston, OH, an hour west of Columbus and only an hour and 15 minutes north of Cincinnati puts us near the extreme edge of the corn belt. We are also only one hour north of where the glaciers pass stops and where the rolling hills of southern Ohio begin.

We raise 650 sows (mommy pigs) which produce roughly 18,000 pigs for market every year. The pig business is our livelihood and the grain we raise is specifically to offset some of our feed costs. On 700 acres we are able to raise enough grain to feed our herd for about half a year. 

My dad, Charles Wildman is the owner & primary caretaker of our farm. He oversees daily care of our pigs which includes nutrition, health, breeding, birthing & weaning baby pigs. We have a few employees (including myself and my older sister) who help with daily care whenever he needs us. We then have six finishing barns located in other parts of the state, owned by other farm families who raise our pigs from the time they leave the nursery (45 lbs.) until the time they are harvested (263 lbs.). 

Dad holds a seat on the Ohio Pork Producers board of directors, National Pork Board’s swine welfare committee, and is very involved in other advocacy programs with these two groups. Dad and I have become very involved in promoting agriculture, especially pork through social media outlets such as blogging, twitter & facebook. Transparency is something that we see is very beneficial for the relationship between agriculture and the consumers who buy our products.

We are in the process of becoming a partner in what is probably the most exciting thing to happen in the pork industry. We will be getting out of the sow and birthing business this winter and converting to a wean to finish farm where we will raise around 25,000 pigs a year for market in our nurseries and then in our finishers I spoke of earlier. The exciting part is that as we move towards more transparency in the industry we must do things to show others how we raise pigs on a commercial farm. This will be happening in Indiana at Fair Oaks Farms as well as on our farm. I encourage you to read more about it here.

My whole family has been raised with a strong Christian faith. My mom, Carol plays the piano every Sunday at church and is the praise band coordinator. My father is also involved at church as the finance elder and all of us kids are involved in different activities with the church.

The most important thing I have learned from my parents and my involvement in agriculture as I grow is to simply be yourself, remain true to your beliefs and stand firm for what you are passionate for. In my life, that is God & agriculture. 

If you enjoyed this feature and want to know more about us or have questions about anything please look us up and ask us. You can find more about us here - Sam's blog, Charles' blog, Carol's blog, Sam's twitter, Charles' twitter or on Facebook. 

Thanks Sam for the fantastic feature! Young people like Sam are the future of agriculture and we are thanksful to be able to share their stories. Be sure to check out the Wildman family blogs, twitter accounts, and Facebook page. 

If you or someone you know should be featured on Faces of Agriculture, please contact us - we need your story now! 

Jamie Rhoades

Hi everyone, I’m Jamie Rhoades. I blog over at This Uncharted Rhoade and I am also one of the girls “behind the scenes” here at Faces of Agriculture. While we share everyone else’s story, we thought it was about time to share our own also (look for Elizabeth’s in the next couple of weeks)!

I live and work in the great state of Missouri, where we’re not quite southern, not quite western, but defiantly brimming with agriculture. My husband and I live on his parent’s farm and we have about 20 head of cattle, mostly Angus. My husband works with his dad on the farm where they raise cattle, hogs, and crops. I work for a University where I’m in charge of a research project that includes 24 gilts (female pigs that haven’t given birth yet). In addition to work, I love working with our cattle, writing and advocating for agriculture, hanging our with our husky puppy and photography.

I’ve been involved in agriculture for almost as long as I can remember. Although I didn’t live on farm or have animals when I was a kid, both of my grandfathers had farms – where they raised everything from cattle and sheep to hogs and crops. I was a long time member of 4-H, and when I hit high school I became very involved in FFA. I showed cattle at the county fair for a few years and found my real passion in animal agriculture. I also met my husband in high school where I fell in love not only with him, but also with the idea of working with and raising pigs and spending the rest of my life on a farm.

Although working in the agricultural industry isn’t for the faint of heart, I still love it. I can’t imagine doing anything else with my life. I started off in college majoring in agricultural journalism and later switched to animal sciences, but retained my love for writing. While in college I became aware for the first time of organizations such as HSUS and PETA and realized that my potential career path and way of life was at stake. I became passionate about spreading information about real farms and farmers, and sharing the story of agriculture to anyone who would listen.

I started my blog with the intention of sharing my little slice of life with anyone who might care to listen, in the hope that I could help just one person understand a little more about farmers and agriculture. It’s not easy to wake up everyday and go to work in an industry where you are rarely respected or appreciated by the people you are providing food for. But I honestly wouldn’t trade it for the world. I get to live in the country, surrounded by open fields and cows. I get to work at job that I’m passionate about, and I get to try to make a difference by sharing my opinion and experiences with others.

If I could help the public to understand one thing about this industry, it’s that farmers and ranchers are real people just like everyone else – not a huge business or cooperation. We have goals and dreams, successes and failures. Everything that happens on farm happens for a reason – our practices have been research and perfected over many years to give our animals the best possible care and treatment. If you have question about your food – talk to farmer. Don’t know a farmer? That’s what we’re here for!

Thanks Jamie for sharing your story! Check out her blog, Facebook page, and twitter to keep up with this farm girl!

We NEED your story! Contact us about being a feature!