A hog sits down, while others at the Bentley Farm near Marshall crowd around to see who is outside their window. David Bentley has been farming and raising hogs most of his life. He now takes care of hogs on a contract basis for MFA, Inc. (Marcia Gorrell/Democrat-News) [Click to enlarge] [Order this photo]

"Raising your food" is the message on David Bentley's business card.

"I love raising hogs. I always have," he said. "Farming and raising hogs is the only thing I ever wanted to do. I've been fortunate to be able to."

Bentley, a 1977 Marshall High School graduate, lives just one mile from the Marshall city limits, with his wife, Christi, and 11-year-old daughter, Sarah.

David Bentley of Marshall stands outside one of the hog houses located near Marshall. Bentley, an active member of the Missouri Pork Producers, said he is very conscientious of odors and has never had a person complain to him about the smell. (Marcia Gorrell/Democrat-News) [Click to enlarge] [Order this photo]

His parents, Lloyd and Rosie, live across the road, in the home where Bentley was raised.

Within a few hundred feet of his parents' back door, Bentley has been raising hogs from nursery size (about 11 pounds) to finish (about 250-265 pounds) on contract to MFA since 2000.

He also plants soybeans, corn and wheat.

In fact, Bentley, an active member of Missouri Pork Producers, doesn't remember a time when he wasn't farming.

"Dad started carrying the mail full time when I was just a little kid, so he farmed on evenings and weekends," he said. "He might cut hay and he'd teach me to rake hay," adding that together they would haul the hay to the barn.

Bentley would then take the money he earned by working and buy "bobby calves," or orphaned baby calves, who needed to be raised on a bottle.

Eventually he started buying sows, starting with six and expanding to 25 sows as part of his high school FFA project.

"The year I graduated high school in 1977, we built another farrowing house and expanded to 50 sows," said Bentley, who also has a farm management degree from State Fair Community College.

Bentley's father put up a farrowing house soon after moving to their current house in 1960.

"We built a confinement floor the very next year so hogs have always been inside."

In 1994, they added facilities and moved all the sows inside.

At that time, Bentley and his father, who had retired from the post office, had 140 sows and a farrow-to-finish operation, which meant artificially inseminating hogs, caring for the babies and then feeding the offspring until selling them to a slaughter facility.

It meant a lot of labor for Bentley and for his father, who also helped after retiring from the postal service.

"One day a heat check boar got out and cut Dad up pretty good," said Bentley.

It was at that time, as his father was in his 70's, that David decided all the time he was spending in a farrow-to-finish operation wasn't worth it. To keep doing what they were doing would take hired labor.

Bentley decided to "specialize" and try to find a source of pigs he could raise from wean to finish, eliminating all the labor-intensive work with sows.

He first looked into buying into a large sow farm, where he could "get our share of the pigs every so often."

"In Iowa, that would have been no problem," he said, adding there are a lot more hogs in that state than Missouri. "You raise hogs where the corn is, basically," adding that with the exception of Saline and Lafayette counties, Missouri is not a large corn-growing state.

"The only choice I had was to lease, rent, contract, custom-raise or how ever you want to say it, " he said. Bentley leases out his facilities to MFA and is paid to feed and care for the hogs. He is responsible for the building, electricity and for properly disposing of the manure and dead animals.

After talking to three companies and two individuals, he chose to sign a contract with MFA, and has since renewed the contract three times.

"It's just custom work. I don't own them, they don't own me," he said. "The pig certainly doesn't know who owns them. I raise the pigs and don't treat them any different than I treat my own."

Bentley is now able to do the work mostly by himself, although his father, now almost 80, still helps him loading hogs. He also has someone who helps him on an "as needed" basis to load, sort and move the hogs.

"With wean-to-finish like we have now, I basically have two ages of hogs on the farm now. It is so much easier, so much less time is involved."

He remodeled his existing facilities and now has a nursery and a finishing floor. The pigs come in at about three weeks old weighing 11-12 pounds.

It's at that time Bentley's daughter enjoys picking them up and "cuddling them." After seven to eight weeks they are moved to a finishing barn, either one of Bentley's or to another MFA contract operation.

Bentley said although "contract" is often a "bad" word in some areas, it is not any different than custom combining or custom planting for farm owners.

"I'm not a hired hand, I'm more of a partner with MFA. Just like going to a neighbor and combining the corn for him. You provide the combine and the labor to do that job," he said. "You don't do the job worse because it is not your corn."

Bentley said he is not opposed to taking the risk and owning pigs again if he had that opportunity.

"I have less risk now, because the market doesn't affect me one way or another. Then again when times are good I'm missing out on some money," he said. "I don't have the risk of losing any money. I do sleep better at night."

Although the labor factor was why Bentley started looking at another way to raise hogs, it was around the late 1990s when a large number of hog farmers in Missouri started to sell out or change to contract operations as prices plummeted.

"The late '90s, when hogs got down to flat losing money, people were using a lot of equity in their farms to raise the hogs," he said. "They said, 'this is simply not worth it. I can either grow to spread my costs out and improve my margins or get out and make my money raising a few more acres of corn or something like that.'"

Bentley said everyone in the hog industry is now interdependent on each other.

"Certainly I've got to do an outstanding job as the owner of the pigs expects me to do. If they go out of business, I go out of business," he said. "We are interdependent on each other. Everybody has to make something."

He said crop farmers and cropland owners are also dependent on livestock production.

"As a crop producer, we need a good livestock industry to buy my feed," he said, adding that 57 percent of the corn grown in the United States is still used for livestock feed.

Contact Marcia Gorrell at marshallag@socket.net