CEOs of the Industry (Volume 1)

So, from your experience, Cris, what qualities or mindsets are essential for success in the field? Grit plays a huge role in an industry that’s evolving as fast as ours. The appetite for meaningful connections always goes a long way in helping us all advance. The capacity to let go and adjust effectively and quickly to new ways of doing things, to new rules of the game, is also critical. And ultimately, Jim, just doing exactly what you say will gain you many allies in the journey. Where can the biggest lessons be found in the industry? So, an example: disease pressures to solution finding, herd changes to solutions, global regulatory pressures to solutions. We can go on and on, Cris, but I wanted to get your feedback on that. It’s important to bring health to the center of the conversation. Despite not being the main factor driving the cost of production, from my perspective, it remains king. It remains the difference maker between good farms and great farms, between good performance and great performance. And very bluntly put, without health, all the investment you can have in genetics, nutrition, husbandry and infrastructure is not fully utilized. Or you could even argue it goes to waste if you have a sick pig on the farm. So for me, a lot of the lessons are coming from a well- managed health program on the farm versus a poor one. In our field, if you put three different professionals in a room, you will probably come up with three different recommendations. And this is where we always advocate and work with our teams and our customers to just have soundly designed field experiences – field trials – that will allow the pig to give the answer. These are animals that are not only very smart and reliable, but they are also very noble in terms of showing you with their performance, with their growth, with their behavior, if the interventions that we are making are beneficial for them or not. Where do you see the CEOs of the Industry podcast going in the future, Cris? We will continue exploring the leadership journey of each of the CEOs for the global swine producers. We will have crucial conversations about the challenges in front of them, the leadership styles they are promoting in their organizations, and, more importantly, exploring our common path toward sustainable and healthy swine production.

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