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Pig Farmers Focus on Taking Care of People, Pigs and Planet
Leon Sheets - Northeast Iowa Pig Farmer

Farmscape for June 14, 2018

American's Pig Farmer of the Year says farmers are typically to busy doing than talking about their role in taking care of people, pigs and planet.
The Pig Farmer of the Year program recognizes excellence in pig farming with winners taking on the role of pork sector ambassadors.
Leon Sheets, who operates a northeast Iowa area farm that consists of 600 acres of row crops, a 36 hundred place facility that takes pigs from weaning to 40 pounds and three finishing barns, told those on hand last week for World Pork Expo in Des Moines his role as Pig Farmer of the Year is taking him to places he normally wouldn't have the opportunity to be and to meet and talk to more people than ever before.

Clip-Leon Sheets-Northeast Iowa Pig Farmer:
Our key messages come under our "WE Care" principle.
We're going to talk about animal welfare, animal well being.
We're going to talk about food safety, we're going to talk about worker safety, we're going to talk about the environment.
We're doing the right things by the environment and we're also doing the right things for our community.
We're involved in the community.
If you start asking a pig farmer, a pork producer, what do they do around home, be ready to start writing down or allow a little time because we are all involved and we think it's the right thing to do.
We've been doing that.
It's not anything special.
We were doing those for years.
My dad did them, my granddad did them, my great granddad did them.
We just put names and we made up six bullet points on a presentation that this is what we do.
It's what we've been doing but we were home busy taking care of our farms and not visiting with our customers, public, telling them what we do and someone else was doing the talking.
Now we've got a farmer.
This is what I do every day.
You want to know what we do on the farm, ask me, I'll tell you.
This is what I get the opportunity to go out and chat with people.

Sheets says the consuming public wants to know where their food comes from, how it's grown, that it's safe for them to consume.
He says all pig farmers are spokesmen for their industry but the Pig Farmer of the Year is just a little higher profile.
For Farmscape.Ca, I'm Bruce Cochrane.


       *Farmscape is a presentation of Sask Pork and Manitoba Pork

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