Step on to Lukas Fricke’s farm in Ulysses, Neb., and you’ll quickly see a farm family carrying on a legacy rooted in six generations.
“I get to work on a family farm, really lucky to be able to farm with my brother, Brendan, my mom, Laurie and another longtime employee, Mike,” says Fricke. “We grow kids, crops and pigs.”
The Nebraska farmer says his father started planting seeds of conservation across their farm, including when he adopted cover crops nearly 15 years ago. His dad has since passed, but Fricke is working to not only preserve the strong foundation already set by his father, but also uncover new opportunities. This year, those opportunities are continuing, but he’s also not immune to the challenges currently facing farmers and livestock producers across the country.
“We’re worried about are we going to have enough extra nitrogen that we’re not already getting from hogs to be able to help in turn grow that corn crop for next year’s pig crop,” says Fricke.
The other major concern he has as a pork producer is having enough people at the packing plants to which he sends his hogs.
“That’s something that I’ve actually experienced quite a few times when trying to take pigs,” says Fricke. “We’re now scheduling around moving loads, taking them on and off simply because the employee force is not there all the time.”
Availability and proximity to the nearest packing plant isn’t just about business for pork producers, it also has a major impact on his relationship to the environment.
“I really never even knew our carbon impact,” he says. “I never understood what our water footprint was until I started to look at it. I know a lot of people want to maybe paint a bad picture for production agriculture, with using barns to raise our animals, or using synthetic fertilizers or crop protection products. Those aren’t scary things. Those are a part of the solution.”
Fricke, along with other pork producers, recently came together to set sustainability goals for the pork industry, goals in which National Pork Board’s Ashley McDonald says are aggressive, yet attainable.
“That was one of the things that they really thought about is what is right for our industry,” says McDonald who is the interim Vice President of Sustainability for National Pork Board. “We want to be aggressive enough. We did an assessment of the needs of the supply chain members as well as external stakeholders, and then looked at those ambition levels and looked frankly, at what types of measures we’re going to need to employ in our industry to actually achieve those.”
The environmental goals set by Pork Board include a number of things including:
- continuously improving water-use efficiency
- improving soil and land biodiversity by restoring and protecting natural habitats
- by the year 2030, reducing greenhouse gas emissions by 40% from a 2015 baseline
“There was a lot of analysis done, and at the heart of that was what is achievable, technologically, economically and what’s right for the U.S. pork industry,” says McDonald. “One thing we have to remember is that everything that improves the productive capabilities of the pork industry is a sustainability practice. And so there is a very long list of those practices in barn as well as in the field.”
In order to measure and communicate the strides made in sustainability, the National Pork Board created an “On-Farm Sustainability Report” for pig farmers which is used to assess what farmers are already doing, while also digging into areas in which they can improve.
“One thing we’ve realized from doing a lifecycle assessment and other assessments of our industry is that 50% of our footprint comes from the feed that we feed our animals,” says McDonald.
“Until you start sitting down and doing the accounting and say, ‘I’m using less diesel fuel, I’m having less passes, I’m using less water, which is less electricity to pump water and or all those different things, they all add up in the end to help create a better product.”
From measuring tillage and fuel used to grow crops, to the manure his farm produces, yet also taps into for fertilizer needs, Fricke says his On-Farm Sustainability Report was a game changer.
“We’re taking out more co2 in the atmosphere already, because I’m using row crop and I make less passes across the field,” says Fricke. “I’m using my hog manure where able to better impact the environment. All of that is helping me to take more co2 out of the atmosphere and store it in the ground.”
From that completed assessment, Fricke found just in one year, their farm management practices accounted for
- Taking 207 average passenger vehicles off the road;
- Five rail cars of coal saved from being burned;
- 3,585 tons of soil, which equates to 224 dump trucks, that was saved from being lost to erosion.
“It really helped us understand that every little thing that we do, every little less pass across the field and every less pass of tillage help add up and really create a difference,” says Fricke.
Fricke says as the report broke it down in such tangible situations. It really helped him understand every detail or pass across his field, counts.
“We’re not a ginormous farm, either,” he says. “ The best part is, is that there’s lots of people like us that are doing this. And if they took the time to sit down, get the numbers out. It’s really not that hard of a process. You’re already using it for your end-of-the-year breakeven calculations. Honestly, it helped us figure out where we can go, where we can improve and where we can do even better.”
For McDonald, it’s these findings that will translate into conversations rooted in solutions.
“We can produce an aggregated report that talks about the greenhouse gas reductions we’ve contributed that talks about our manure usage and the soil health benefits of that application,” she says. “There are a ton of benefits to being able to do it yourself, as opposed to wait for somebody else to tell you to do it.”
As the pork industry works to quantify the sustainable solutions already in place, it’s helping open the door for crucial conversations that Fricke knows can help secure a future where pork remains at the table.
“I think it’s more our relationship with the environment and the beneficial relationship that modern agriculture can play,” he says.
We will be uniting together June 6-12 for PORK Week across all of our Farm Journal platforms to elevate the important role the pork industry plays in feeding the world. Share your stories and post photos on social media using #PORKWeek22 to help us honor the pork industry. From “AgDay TV” to “AgriTalk” to “U.S. Farm Report” to PorkBusiness.com and everything in between, tune in and join us as we acknowledge the most noble profession there is: feeding people.
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