Pig Adventures

Waking up at 4:00 am for your job everyday? Tiring. Working inside a barn all day? Smelly. Getting to work with pigs everyday? Worth it.

Hello, my name is Logan Honegger and I am now a senior at UIUC. This summer I got the chance to work out of state at a 10,000 sow pig farm in rural Indiana. Coming from a background of showing pigs, I thought I knew everything there was to know about raising hogs. But after spending 7 weeks on a huge commercial farm, it's easy to say I learned a lot. 

During my time at Martin Family Farms, or MP3 Farms, I got to visit and work in every aspect of the farm. The other interns and myself started out working in the farrowing barns. We got to spend time doing chores, feeding sows, helping sows give birth and drying off baby pigs. We also got to spend time in the breeding barns where we learned to breed sows and how the farms' record keeping system worked. 

The main purpose for the interns this summer was to complete a herd census. The other interns and I took a week and a half scanning each individual sow into a software system. This was later analyzed by managers for errors in their systems. Errors could have been a wrong ID tag on the sow or a sow that was in the system. The best part of my internship was getting to go to World Pork Expo for a week and promote a neighboring farm that has an educational center. Myself and another intern got to spend the week talking to businesses in the pork industry and getting to network.