Podcast: True cost of staff turnover in pig production

The Real P3 podcast series is an initiative where pork professionals worldwide are interviewed about challenges and solutions in their day-to-day work.

Hoek shares the story on how, in 2018, Summit Smart Farms was formed. The aim was to tackle 2 problems in the swine industry, namely the human capital challenge and to provide the industry with the tools to allow the ‘waterfall’ of data and convert it into practical information.

A tool was developed and Hoek shares with Dr Bradley some key findings from information gathered from 125,000 sows, 44 farms and 3.3 million pigs.

Workers’ wages, expectations and recommendations

They also discuss wages for workers in the pig industry, as well as expectations and recommendations to get people to come and work in the pig production sector, and strategies on how to keep them there.

Dr Casey wants to know Hoek’s thoughts on educating the workforce in the swine sector, and asks: “Are we training and teaching our animal scientist, who will become our managers, wrong?”

Earlier episodes of the Real P3 podcast series

In the previous weeks, Pig Progress published earlier episodes of the Real P3 podcast series:

• Episode 20: Porcast’s Jean-Philippe Martineau and Louis-Philippe Roy, France;
• Episode 21: Amanda Minton and Dr Justin Fix, USA;
• Episode 22: Dr Daniel Columbus, Canada;
• Episode 23: Dave Klocke, USA;
• Episode 24: part 1: Dr Craig Bradley, Michigan, USA;
• Episode 24, part 2: Scott McKenzie, Michigan, USA;
• Episode 24, part 3: Dennis Wooden, Michigan, USA;
• Episode 25: Guy Soreq;
• Episode 26: Dr Joel Flores, USA;
• Episode 27: Pablo Morena;
• Episode 28: Willem Steyn (South Africa), Philip van den Brink and Vincent ter Beek (the Netherlands);
• Episode 29: Myles van Deventer (South Africa);
• Episode 30: Katherine Marcano-Bell; Iowa, USA;
• Episode 31: Johann Kotzé, South Africa.