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Farm Beginnings™ Profile: Jason & Laura Penner
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Jason Penner |
It’s mid-November, and as the sun sets on a southwest Minnesota hog farm, a winter chill cuts through Jason Penner’s Carhartt work clothes. But he keeps working into the gloaming, putting the finishing touches on a hoop house. Already nestled on one side of the polyurethane-topped, Quonset-shaped building are 12 sows with pigs. Miniature metal hoop houses, called pasture huts, provide each sow with her own individual housing. In a few more days more sows will be added to this hoop house. Next door is the concrete slab and framing for another hoop structure, which will be where pigs are finished out before slaughter. These buildings will serve as the core of Jason and his wife Laura’s natural pork production enterprise. Beyond the hoop buildings is a cornfield full of baled stalks, which will be used as bedding.
“I wish I was further along,” says Jason, 29.
He’s not just talking about the hoop buildings. Penner is anxious to get his farming career off the ground as well. Ironically, Penner sold his first load of pigs on this particular day, and he received a good price, even though it was through the conventional market. But the farmer knows how volatile hog prices can be and isn’t betting on those good prices staying around forever.
“High hog prices have bought me some time,” he says.
The countryside here is dotted with the low, enclosed buildings of large swine operations. This is hog country—just to the south is the number one pork-producing county in Minnesota. Penner says most of the hog farmers in this area are using concentrated confinement facilities to raise hogs on contract for large companies. That’s not for Jason. For one thing, he grew up doing chores in his dad’s confinement buildings (they are less than a hundred yards from the new hoops) and didn’t like the smell or the working conditions. He also feels the future is in natural pork niche markets.
“There isn’t any way these 3,000-sow operations can meet the consumer demand for the kind of natural pork I’m raising,” he says.
Penner’s cautious attitude comes partially from his educational background. After graduating from high school in Butterfield, Minn., in 1994, he went to Taylor University in Indiana to study business. His original plan was to be a stockbroker, but by his sophomore year, he knew what he really wanted to do was return to Minnesota and farm. He didn’t think there was much of a future in conventional agriculture, but knew from his business training that the more an economic sector concentrates, the more niche opportunities are created. After graduating from college, Jason took a job with a software company in Indiana. But at night he surfed the Web, learning as much about alternative hog production and marketing as he could.
Laura, a native of Indiana, got her nursing degree from Ball State. In 2003, they moved back to the area and bought a house on five acres, just a mile from Jason’s parent’s farm. The couple enrolled in the Land Stewardship Project’s 2003-2004 Farm Beginnings™ course and twice a month that winter did the two-and-a-half-hour drive to Montevideo, Minn.
The course helped provide some real world grounding for what Jason had been gleaning off the Internet. And although he had done plenty of business plans before, Farm Beginnings™ helped push him to finish one for his farming enterprise. Penner feels one of farming’s weaknesses is that many people don’t think the basics of sound business planning apply to it, that it is its own unique animal.
For Laura, 27, Farm Beginnings™ was a good introduction to the nuts and bolts of agriculture. “At first I just asked a lot of questions on the drive home,” she recalls. “It did get me more excited about what Jason was doing as I saw what my role would be in the farm.”
Last spring, the Penners rented 80 acres and pasture farrowed 10 sows. In September, they began construction of the two hoop buildings on his family’s home place. Jason’s research has shown that one problem with natural pork markets is the lack of pigs that are born in the winter. He’s hoping to take advantage of that gap in the market with the hoops. He also likes the buildings because they are multiple use facilities—they can be utilized for various stages of hog production, as well as put to other farm uses such as storage.
There have been some potholes along the way: they had a tough time convincing lenders that hoop houses were a good credit risk, which delayed construction by about two months. The Penners also feel a bit isolated and wish there were more small and mid-sized farmers their age in the area.
Meanwhile, the education process has continued. Jason attended a hoop house conference in Iowa earlier this fall, and he has visited, called and e-mailed Dan Wilson, a northwest Iowa farmer who is a pioneer in natural pork production. Jason is still telecommunicating for the Indiana software company, and Laura works as a nurse. They have an 18-month-old son, Ian, and another baby on the way. On one hand, as Jason says, he wishes he was further along. But being on the short side of 30 puts things in perspective.
“My dad told me he didn’t really start farming until he was 30. He was farming, but he really didn’t get a clear perspective or vision of what he needed to do to be successful and profitable until he was 30. I hope I am starting out of the gate with a good vision.”
—Originally published in the Oct/Nov/Dec 2004 Land Stewardship Letter
Click here for more on Farm Beginnings™. You can also call 507-523-3366 in southeast Minnesota or 320-269-2105 in western Minnesota.
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