Strike up a conversation with Scott Phillips, and you’ll quickly experience a passion that’s contagious.

“I just really love to raise pigs. I do, I just love it,” says Phillips, standing outside his home near Drexel, Mo.

Although his path to raising pigs wasn’t a direct shot out of college, it’s a path that led him right where he wanted to be.

“I went to the University of Missouri and graduated in 1983,” he says. “I came from the farm and knew I always wanted to get back to the farm.”

Mizzou was 2.5 hours from home. The son of two Mizzou grads, Phillips decided to major in agricultural economics. Despite not knowing exactly what he would do after graduating, he also pursued and completed a master’s degree.

“I don’t know if I had a career plan back then. All I know is I got a master’s because I got my bachelor’s a little quicker than I needed to. I didn’t have a girlfriend or anything, and that’s the only place there were girls, was in college. So, I thought I’d hang around and get a master’s degree. And that was my absolutely my only objective,” says Phillips as he laughs.

While finding a future wife didn’t work out then, receiving his master’s degree put him on a new path. He went to work for Monsanto Company as a sales representative and then Edwards Jones as a stockbroker.

“I always wanted to get back to the farm,” he says. “Life is always full of setbacks and failures. Failures are just a way to redirect – they’re nothing more than that. But there are all kinds of setbacks. I went broke as a stockbroker when the stock market significantly crashed in October of 1987.”

With that, life took yet another turn. He knew being a stockbroker wasn’t for him.

“My dad was in the Air Force Reserves and flew c130s out of Richards Gebaur,” Phillips says. “And I thought, ‘Well, I do love to fly. I’ve flown ever since I was 16 years old.’”

By the grace of God, he says he was accepted into the pilot program of the U.S. Air Force at the age of 26.

“When I finally got in the Air Force, I thought, ‘I really enjoy flying. I still want to get back to the farm, though.’ And so, I started in the Air Force. I was going to fly C-130s out of Peterson Air Force base in Colorado Springs, and they had A10s close to here at Richards-Gebaur.”

Richards-Gebaur Air Force Station was in Belton, Mo., only 40 miles from Phillips’ family farm. By chance, Phillips crossed paths with someone while in training that put him on yet another journey.

“I met a guy that looked like his mom just died; he looked like death warmed over,” Phillips recalls. “So, I asked, ‘Hey, what’s wrong with you? You look terrible.’ And he goes, ‘Well, I did not get fighter-qualified, and I was sent here by an Air Force squadron. I said, ‘Hey, if you want to, maybe you could take my slot on C-130s, and I could maybe try and go fly A-10 out of Richards-Gebaur, just totally off the cuff there.’”

That wild idea wasn’t so wild, as that’s exactly what the two did. They traded places, and Phillips went full-time for two years.

“The privilege of being able to go up there and fly fighters was exhilarating and fun,” he says.

From flying over Bosnia in a peacekeeping mission to other ventures as a fighter pilot, as Phillips became a reservist, he was able to fly less and be on the farm more.

“I always wanted to come back and farm. I love raising pigs, and I also love serving in the military. I was able to do both of those concurrently during the ‘90s. Then I ended up getting out of the Air Force and focused on raising my family and raising pigs,” he says.

Raising a family and pigs in the ‘90s was far from easy. After the hog market crashed, Phillips’ military training helped Phillips and his brothers combat the crisis.

“It gives you intestinal fortitude. It gives you a perseverance for things that are really important in life,” says Phillips.

Both his son-in-law and son serve in the military today, and his nephew and niece are part of his hog farming operation. The family farm has grown and changed, but Phillips has plans for some his children to also return to the farm one day.

“The thing I’m most proud of is being able to have an opportunity for the next generation to get started,” says Phillips.

While he cherishes the past, he’s adamant his family farm has room for more to return, even if that next generation will also need perseverance amid new challenges with consumers’ misconceptions of hog farmers today.

“Farming has changed, but so has communication,” says Phillips as he takes a smart phone out of his pocket. “Communication has drastically changed from the old party-line to now where you can just have a have a phone and call. That’s not the way it was back then. Agriculture has changed, too, and hog farming has changed. We’re bigger now. That doesn’t mean we’re less personal.”

Instead, Phillips says hog farmers are even more productive, taking manure and accurately applying that fertilizer at specific agronomic rates, something he would have never dreamed of being able to do when he returned to the family farm in the ’90s.

“Environmentally, we are so much better than we were 50 years ago,” adds Phillips, who sits on the National Pork Board (NPB). “We have more biodiversity, we have an entirely better atmosphere. We’re better at raising hogs, and the quality of our hogs is better, too, which is really important.”

Phillips is a fighter pilot turned passionate pig farmer, whose journey back to the farm is a novel one. But Phillips says farming and serving in the military are intertwined more than people might realize.

“A lot of people that are in the military grew up on the farm,” says Phillips. “I think there’s a sense of community – not a sense of entitlement, but a sense of sacrifice.”

With service, both on and off the farm, Scott Phillips has lived a life of purpose and proof that no matter the challenge, with enough fortitude and agility, you can persevere.

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