That was kind of a radical concept at the time. And there were no contracts to copy again on how you compensate a contract grower to do this. So it was a leap of faith for the contract growers as well as ourselves. And we worked out contracts and had to do some things to ensure the energy use that would be compensated for and this type of thing. And it worked. It worked, and I think it streamlined our company and made us more efficient. Beyond that, we’re still looking and I’m sure we’re making changes that we don’t think about, but as far as we’re still looking for the next thing that can make us more efficient and probably give us a little edge, and we’ll keep our eyes open for that. You’ve navigated a lot of success among challenges. You talked about some of the challenges when the plant shut down, some of the Prop 12 stuff, the market’s constantly shifting. Any other challenges you’re facing or foresee that we continue to adapt to, John? I can lay awake and think about a lot of them, but one that, you know, we’ve struggled with and the industry continues to, integrate into packing. There’s a larger percentage of totally integrated systems. We were offered several opportunities to integrate into packing. At this time, we had decided that we were going to remain a live production supply to packers. It was based on our thought that we’re good at live production. We wanted to continue to be good at live production. And what it forces us to do is to really work on relationships. And that’s a lot of the fun of this whole industry is just the relationships and the people.
But so is the relationship with the processors we sell to, and that we build a trusting relationship — that will always be necessary. We want to be a preferred supplier, and ultimately we’ll find out if that’s the right path to go. It’s worked for us. And I think we have to view our packers that we sell to as partners, not as adversaries. Because if you don’t have that type of attitude, it’s not going to work. We have to get beyond the rhetoric about whether a company is foreign-owned or big is bad, and this type of thing. It really comes down to the people you deal with and the trust factor. And I’ve done handshake deals with some of these companies and we’d be a rounding error on their balance sheet, our company, and they’ve honored them. Every foreign company that owns any company in the U.S., that’s a U.S. fully held subsidiary that has to operate under U.S. rules and regulations. And the United States has been owning subsidiaries in foreign countries for years. We have to get beyond that and just look at the people we deal with and the people that we can trust and we can work with. The other thing we’ve learned about the packing industry, the fully integrated systems, is that about 80% of the cost of getting a pig harvested and cut into the primal cuts is in the live production side of it, only 20 to 25% is in the harvesting and processing of the primal cuts. So you can’t be bad at the 80% and make it up in the 20%. There have been times where that balance has been out of whack, in the late 2017/18 timeframe where packing margins became excessive and capitalism responded by building more packing plants. So hopefully we can keep that in balance where that continues to work out. But that’s one of the larger challenges that we have thought about wrestling with. You’re still fully involved with Schwartz, John, what keeps the fire going? I like the industry. I like the people we work with. And I want to make sure that before I am not fully involved, that I feel that we’re ready — I think we have such a great team here that I could be gone tomorrow in day-to-day operations and I wouldn’t be missed a bit — however, on some of the larger strategic plans, I like to have my input and I enjoy what I’m doing. The industry’s got great people and it’s a great industry to deal with.
WE JUST NEED TO CONTINUE TO RESPOND TO CHANGES, TO TRY AND DO THINGS RIGHT AND BE GOOD AT WHAT WE DO. On leadership choices and legacy
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