These piggies are headed to market

Schaubs are

five years

into hog

oper­a­tion

By Becky Brooks

Man­ag­ing Editor

PLYMOUTH – On any given day, a small farm five miles east of Ply­mouth in Rich­land County is home to 5,000 mar­ket hogs.

James Scaub II and his wife, Brenda, pur­chased the fam­ily farm from Brenda’s par­ents, Jim and Deb­bie Roberts and in the past five years added a $500,000 mar­ket hog barn and fol­lowed up by adding another $350,000 hog nurs­ery barn.

The Schaubs raise hogs for Hords Live­stock Com­pany, based in Bucyrus, as do other regional farms.

“Every­thing is auto­mated,” James Schaub explained about the oper­a­tion, while stand­ing in the “ween to fin­ish” hog barn. “Feed­ing is auto­mat­i­cally set by timer.”

The automa­tion also sets the amount of feed based on the age of the pig.

The large hog barn mea­sures 81 by 240 feet while the nurs­ery barn is about half the size.

Cur­rently the Schaubs do not live on the farm – the farm­house is occu­pied by the Roberts, but the Schaubs hope to build a house on the 120-acre farm in 2013.

At age 39, James Schaub does not work full-time on the farm, but instead is the main­te­nance super­vi­sor at Newhope Cen­ter in Mansfield.

Brenda Schaub, age 32, is the full-time care­taker of the pigs.

Through the pro­gram with Hords, the Schaubs raise the hogs for the Ag company.

“We sup­ply the barns, util­i­ties and labor,” James explained. Hords sup­plies the ani­mals, feed and medications.

While he is avail­able for some of the farm’s oper­a­tions – grain har­vest plant­ing, load­ing and unload­ing ani­mals, the Rich­land County farmer said it is his wife who over­sees the hog barns.

“She does the day-to-day oper­a­tion in the barns,” he pointed out.

Brenda over­sees the health of the hogs, han­dles med­ica­tion for the ani­mals where needed, and sep­a­rates ani­mals when the need arises.

“We have a ser­vice per­son come in every week,” she said about deal­ing with Hords. “They help us – what­ever you need.”

“We get two loads a year of the ‘ween to fin­ish’ hogs,” James explained. Those hogs are about five to six months old. The ani­mals in the nurs­ery barn come in at age six to eight weeks. Each barn holds 2,500 animals.

After the Schaubs put up the “fin­ish­ing” barn, Hords asked the fam­ily to add a nurs­ery oper­a­tion. The first barn came in 2007 and the sec­ond barn came in 2009.

“Most of the hogs we ship out of here go to Hat­fields in Penn­syl­va­nia, Tysons in Indi­ana,” James pointed out. The nurs­ery hogs also get shipped to other loca­tions and are not moved to the fin­ish­ing barn on the same farm, James added.

The hogs live with stan­dards many homes can­not meet – con­stant tem­per­a­tures of 80 to 82 degrees, a water sup­ply that runs through a sand fil­tra­tion sys­tem, and bio-security standards.

“We are not allowed to have any other hogs on the prop­erty,” James explained.

“That’s why we have cat­tle,” com­mented his wife about the other ani­mals being raised at the loca­tion. Her par­ents also have sev­eral other ani­mals liv­ing in sep­a­rate smaller barns on the farm.

Peo­ple enter­ing the hog oper­a­tion also have to shower in and out and are required to wear cov­er­alls and boots to enter the barns.

But let there be no mis­take – as clean an oper­a­tion as it can be – this is a hog operation.

Besides watch­ing over 5,000 hogs daily, Brenda also has the couple’s youngest chil­dren afoot. Of the couple’s total five chil­dren – there are two inter­ested in the farm oper­a­tion, she shared.

As youths both Brenda and her hus­band were involved in rais­ing hogs. Brenda grew up on the Roberts farm out­side Ply­mouth and tak­ing hogs to the Rich­land County Fair started early for her. As for her hus­band, James grew up in the City of Shelby and dis­cov­ered live­stock after join­ing FFA in the high school. He dis­cov­eredhe had a knack for han­dling live­stock and hogs. He won the county fair Show­man of Show­man honor in his teens, which he still remembers.

After high school and after a short stint in the U.S. Army, James went to work for the Fry Farms in the Shelby area and that was how he was intro­duced to the mas­sive hog rais­ing operation.

“Mark and Andy Fry and us – we load each other hogs,” James said.

The Schaubs received finan­cial sup­port of their par­ents to get their hog oper­a­tion off the ground five years ago with the first barn, the cou­ple said. Today James said that the hog oper­a­tion is finan­cially sound.

“Your ini­tial invest­ment is a lot of money,” he com­mented. The farm has 85 acres of till­able ground, and the Schaubs put that into corn and hay not only to feed their dozen plus cat­tle involved in a cow-calf oper­a­tion, but the crop money also is pay­ing off the land.

James said he intend for this near mil­lion dol­lar hog oper­a­tion they have built to stay in the fam­ily and be passed down to the next generation.

Posted by Becky Brooks on Nov 15 2011. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS Feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.