At the National Association of Farm Broadcasters Convention, the National Pork Producers Council’s Board of Directors President Lori Stevermer sat on a panel to discuss the challenges and opportunities facing the pork industry today. Farm Director KC Sheperd got her take on the discussion.
Stevermer said that lots of things keep her up at night but two things in particular weigh heavily on her mind. “When I look at our producers going through that long stretch of being unprofitable, that affects our ability to invent new technologies to really advance our industry.
“Also, the activists coming at us at our state levels and not allowing us to use the science, data, and metrics that we have from our farms which really proves how well we do as farmers is another thing that keeps me up at night.”
She said that although consumers don’t generally spend a lot of time trying to understand science, it is still important to pursue scientific data to better the practices of each operation and the industry as a whole.
As far as the Trump administration’s re-election into the Whitehouse, she said that NPPC is sitting back to see how things play out. “We know that exports are very important to our industry – twenty-five percent of our pork products are exported, which brings us sixty-four dollars worth of value – so any discussion about tariffs typically brings retaliatory tariffs to agriculture and the pork industry.”
She mentioned that farm labor is a concern for pork producers as well. She expressed frustration when discussions about bringing in legal immigrants to work on farms so often become border discussions.
“The H-2A visa cannot be used in the pork industry because it is seasonal, and our workers are year-round,” she said. “Can we reform that H-2A visa so that it can be a year-round visa? We also use TN visas quite a bit as skilled workers in our sale barns, and we have had a lot of trouble in the last year or so with a lot of declines in those applications. So we are really looking at how we can best use the tools that are there and modify them to work better for us because they want to work and we need them on our farms.”
On a positive note, Stevermer said that the year is ending on a positive as far as prices go, in fact, better than was expected. “I’m also just really proud of our farmers,” she said. “When I took over as president, one of the things I talked about was grassroots engagement. The work we do – the policy – is built on relationships. Our farmers have shown up. They’ve been engaged. They’ve done many fly-ins. They are reaching out to their legislatures, and my encouragement to them was to keep showing up because it has to be our voice. If someone else tells the story, it might not be told the way we want.
