This is what I have been doing on this lovely Friday evening...spending some quality time with Carrie, Miranda, Charlotte, and Samantha.  As always, cheering for Aiden and yelling at the television screen telling Carrie she is so dumb for always picking Big!

And this is what Brady has been up to tonight.  He went to sleep early because he has to haul manure starting at 1:00 this morning. 

There are various times during the year when Brady is in the field all hours of the night; planting and harvest for sure, and I also travel some for work.  This means that there are always a few nights a month that we don't get to sleep together...but that is the life of a farmer and his crop insurance agent wife and i wouldn't trade it for anything. 

Today was a busy day on the farm filled with many great opportunities.  The boys and Aunt Jenny spent the morning in the hog barns working over litters and feeding all the pigs.

I spent the morning at the Fort Wayne Farm Show listening to Rich Morrision give a presentation on "Market Strategies in 2012".  Rich works with me at Diversified Services, he is a Risk Management Analyst and I am a Crop Insurance Specialist.  The Farm Show was a great opportunity to see everything that is up and coming in agriculture and also to network with farmers and people in the industry. 

When I got back from the Farm Show I met Brady and Billy at one of the hog barns to give a tour to some visitors.  These weren't just any visitors though, they were from the International Food Information Council.  They flew all the way from Washington DC to central Indiana to get a view of farm life.  This included a tour of one of our confined hog operations...made us feel special!  

Our farm, especially the hog operation side of it, is always welcome to visitors, tours, and anyone who has general questions about pork production.  We feel this is the best way to show that we raise healthy, happy, well taken care of hogs.  There are zero animal welfare issues, no animals are in distress, and all the hogs are treated well and respected as living things.  Yes hogs are money makers for us, and that...along with the grain operation, is how we support four families on the farm. 

Us having the farm open to visitors and tours often answers many questions and stops negative comments about livestock farming before they even start.  The animals are treated well and we have nothing to hide...so come on over!

We have a farrow to finish hog operation - meaning that we have boars and sows who do the hanky panky. The sows then have piglets after a gestation period of three months, three weeks and three days (114 days).  These piglets are cared for and fed for 6 months until they are market weight (250 - 270 pounds) They are then sent to the slaughter house to meet their maker and get butchered for delicious and nutritious pork.

The Peters/Mundell hog operation is a 300 sow outfit and we ship just under 5000 hogs to market annually.  It is a confinment operation, which means the pigs are kept indoors at all times.  This keeps the hogs at a comfortable temperature all year long, they live in state of the art buildings where the air quality is constantly monitored.  The confinment operation model of pork production is often criticized by animal welfare groups who say that hogs should be able to run wild and free...but tons of research has found that the pigs stay much more healthy and happy when they are inside during the freezing cold winters and scorching hot summers.

The International Food Information Council is a non-profit group based in Washington DC and their mission is to "effectively communicate science based information on health, nutrition, and food safety for the public good."  They are independent, not-for-profit, and they aren't on anyone's side...they just want the facts and thats why they fly places like our farm to get them.  They "do not lobby or further any political, partisan, or corporate interest"...they simply collect information and pass it onto the public so we can have educated consumers.

They got the whole tour and nothing was hidden from them, because there is nothing to hide.  We even discussed "controversial" issues such as farrowing crates, ear notches, teeth clipping, tail docking, and confinment hog barns.  I already touched on confinment and the positives of that.

Farrowing crates are crates where the mama pigs are kept when they have their babies.  Many animal welfare groups have the information about farrowing crates all wrong...saying that a sow spends most of her life in a crate.  When in fact she only spends a few weeks in a crate, these few weeks happen a couple days before she has a littler of piglets and a couple weeks after so she can nurse them.  The crates allow the sows to take care of here babies without laying on them (too much), and also the sow doesn't have to compete with all the other hogs for feed.  She is fed all by herself and can eat whenever she wants and she gets plenty of feed to support her health and the health of all her newborn piglets.

Ear notches are simply a means of identification for every animal.  Different places on the pig's ear mean different numbers, and these notches tell us the pigs age.  We use ear notches instead of ear tags for the well being of the animal - ear tags are often chewed on, played with, and ripped out by other hogs, where as ear notches are a perfect solution to this.

Teeth clipping is a practice hog farmers do for the health and comfort of the sows.  Baby pigs are born with super sharp "eye teeth", which are very comparable to a puppies teeth. These teeth will often cut the sows teets and cause infection when all the piglets are biting and sucking on the open wound.  The solution to this is clipping off the tip of the teeth so they aren't so sharp.  This is virtually painless to the pig because the nerve of their tooth is much further down from where the tip is clipped off.

Tail docking is done because pigs like to chew, and when they get older they will chew on anything that is available...this includes their little buddies tails.  We cut the tail off close to the base so the other hogs dont' have anything to chew on.  This process takes less than one second and most tails never even bleed a drop.

To find more information about the International Food Information Council just check out their webpage at www.foodinsight.org and to find out more about pork production and farming just ask me or Brady. 

Thanks for reading!

In case anyone didn’t know the Big Easy is New Orleans, Louisana.  The locals call it NOLA, Nawlins, and they are all proud to be part of the "Who Dat Nation" (that is what the Saints fans call themselves).  Brady and I went there for a business trip with my company.  We figured since I had to go anyways, he might as well tag along, we went a couple of days early and stayed one day late so we could check everything out.

New Orleans was a fun city but we don’t plan on ever going back.  The city was very unique and unlike any place either of us had ever traveled to.  The city was alive, it pulsed with music and art.  Many of the streets are constantly closed with bands playing on them, donkeys pulling carriage rides, and palm readers telling people’s destinies.

All in all it was a great trip and I am happy we went.  There were many things we liked about the vacation and some that we didn’t love so much.  I’ll start with what we didn’t like so much.

The Strippers 
-usually this isn’t an issue because we don’t go into strip clubs so we don’t see strippers…well in New Orleans it is a little different story.  Bourbon Street is peppered with strip clubs and cabarets where the naked girls stand in large doorways that face the street and ask men to come in.  I am an extremely open person about nakedness and sex, but I do believe it should be confined to the covenant relationship of marriage and it just grossed me out that these girls were shaking their thang on a busy public street and I am not even kidding, the only thing that was covered up was their lady cha cha.

The Poverty
-There were a lot of homeless people, which is common in most cities so it’s not like we were super shocked.  But one unique thing about the homeless people in New Orleans is that they all had pit bulls.  I love, love, LOVE dogs and have nothing against pit bulls, but I do have something against homeless people who take on the responsibility of having one.  If you can’t afford a house for yourself and food to put in your own mouth, then don’t bring a poor little pup into the mix.  Just a side note on this whole subject…I love to be generous and help people out, especially “the lesser of these” but if your health is good enough to sit on the street and heckle people for handouts, then I am sure you
are capable of getting a job somewhere.

Bourbon Street 
-was extremely filthy.  Yes it was entertaining and had some cool bars and shops, but overall it was pretty nasty.  The cops patrolled the street by horseback.  It didn’t make an already dirty city any cleaner having cops riding around on horses that would crap everywhere.   In addition to the horses, 90% of the people walking around on the street are hammered…you are even allowed to have open containers on the street so many of the bars sell cocktails “to-go”.  When the drunk people barf on the street in addition to the crap that the horses already left behind it's not a good mix.  Also let’s not forget about the strippers and homeless people that are already roaming the street.  Horse crap + drunk people + strippers + homeless people = don’t touch anything and when you get back to the hotel first wash your hands in boiling water then give them a nice soak in some hand sanitizer.  PS…I saw girls walking on Bourbon Street with no shoes on!  AHHHH!

Now onto the good things about New Orleans…

The Food 
-Oh my gosh…the food was amazing.  I thought I knew what good food was since I grew up fairly close to Chicago, but Chicago food can’t touch the Cajun flavor of Nawlins.  One thing we especially liked was the Beignets (pronounced ben-yay).  These are French donuts that are light and fluffy and covered in a mountain of powdered suger.  Next up...Bananas Foster…this is made of rich vanilla ice cream covered with a delicious rum sauce with slices on banana in it.  Yum yum yum we are going to try to make this one at home. 

The Southern Charm
-The people were so nice.  You could just feel the southern hospitality everywhere and it was awesome. 

My Co-Workers
-I am planning to do a post on my job in the near future so I will elaborate on this sometime very soon.  All I can say is that I work for an awesome company with lots of very amazing, fun, and downright crazy people!

Houmas House
-One day we left the city and did a tour of a grain export facility, a barge trading company, and a plantation.  The grain export facility was amazing...they could unload a barge filled with 84,000 bushels of corn in 45 minutes (thats 4,704,000 pounds)!  The barge company was also really neat, but I really can't think of any highlights except for the fact that the tour guide's name was Bobby Brady =)  The highlight of the tour day for me was a place called Houmas House.  The house was built over 15 years from 1810 to 1825 and today is restored to its natural beauty.  In it's prime the plantation sat on 300,000 acres of gorgeous Live Oak Trees and thousands of acres of cotton and sugar cane. 

Isn't that house amazing?!  I want a plantation for Christmas...hint hint Brady =)