Jan Archer to lead National Pork Board
By Steve Herring
Published in News on June 27, 2016 1:46 PM
Full Size
News-Argus/STEVE HERRING
Wayne County pork producer Jan Archer laughs she snuggles with two baby pigs born on her farm. Mrs. Archer was elected this month as president of the 15-member National Pork Board that represents America's pig farmers. Mrs. Archer and her husband, Jack, are owners of Archer Farms LLC.
Wayne County pork producer Jan Archer has been elected president of the 15-member National Pork Board that represents America's hog farmers.
Mrs. Archer and her husband, Jack, are owners of Archer Farms LLC. The sow farm markets 28,000 weaned pigs annually and raises corn, soybeans and hay.
As president, Mrs. Archer will preside over board meetings that are normally held in Des Moines, Iowa, and also will represent the board at other functions.
She was elected at the board's June meeting in Des Moines and will begin her one-year term as president on July 1. She served as vice president this past year.
Mrs. Archer served two three-year terms on the North Carolina Pork Council and is in her second three-year term on the national board. The board is responsible for research, promotion and consumer information projects and for communicating with pork producers and the public.
It funds national and state programs in advertising, consumer information, retail and food service marketing, export market promotion, production improvement, science and technology, swine health, pork safety and sustainability and environmental management.
It also operates the national Pork Checkoff Program funded by farmers.
"Forty cents from every $100 of value -- every time a pig is sold or transferred is paid into the Pork Checkoff automatically," Mrs. Archer said. "That money can only be used for education, promotion and research. It can't be used for any policy making. It can't be used for any lobbying. It can legally only be used for education, promotion and research, and it is overseen by the USDA.
"An individual farmer, it's very hard for them to have enough time, knowledge or finances to market their product, or to get advertising time for example, or to do a lot with continuing education that we do a lot of that now. All those monies are pooled, and the National Pork Board, through the Pork Checkoff, administers all of that."
The budget depends on prices, and can range between $60 million and $90 million, she said.
"This coming year we are going to be in the lower end because we've got a lot of pigs coming onto the market," she said. "There is a lot of pork coming onto the market, and it is the law of supply and demand. When there is a lot of supply, the price goes down."
The board is entering the third year of its five-year strategic plan, and Mrs. Archer said she would like to see that progress continue.
"The biggest challenge this year, well it is two-fold," Mrs. Archer said. "We have a lot of pork coming this way. Over the next four years we have the potential to add four new packing plants to our country. Sometimes we are victims of our own success. We are really good at producing pork and producing really healthy, high-quality pork.
"So, I would like to be able to make sure that our farmers are still able to stay in business by making a profit. If our prices get so low that we start losing farmers, that is going to be a challenge, especially losing family farmers."
North Carolina is great at being able to keep some of those family farmers in business, she said.
People might question the state's contract system, but the reality is a lot of farmers, including her farm, would not be able to stay in business if they did not have someone to share the financial risk, she said.
Disease is another big challenge, Mrs. Archer said.
"There are a lot of disease out there that we don't have," she said. "With the way that people and things move across the world now, we know that that pipeline is open because we have gotten several of those diseases that we had never gotten before.
"If we ever got foot and mouth disease or classic swine fever, that would be devastating to our industry. So really understanding our disease profiles and keeping some of those diseases out of our herd is paramount."
A native of Michigan's Upper Peninsula, Mrs. Archer, 60, has 40 years of experience in the pork industry.
"Not a lot of pigs up there," she said. "It is cold most of the year. But I went to Michigan State University and discovered agriculture while I was in college and fell in love with it."
She worked in Central America after graduating in 1978 with a bachelor's degree in animal husbandry (now called animal science). When she returned to the U.S. she had two job offerings -- one in southwest Kansas working with pigs and the other in Arkansas.
"The guy in Kansas said, 'Well, you need to come here because there is a good-looking guy behind every tree,'" she said. "I got off the airplane, and there wasn't a tree for a hundred miles in any direction.
"But that is where I met and married my husband. We were both working on the same farm. He is from Maryland. We had our love for agriculture and for pig farming in common."
The company sent the Archers to Pennsylvania and to Singapore where they lived for several years.
They returned to the U.S. 1987 and Mrs. Archers said they could have moved anywhere in the county, but that they were watching the pork industry.
"The real innovation was happening in North Carolina, and so that is where we opted to come," she said.
That innovation brought them straight to Wayne County where they worked with a company for a while before building their own farm.
"A big part of it is the contract system," she said. "We didn't inherit a farm. We didn't come here with a lot of money. It costs a lot of money to build a farm. Having a way that we could have someone share that risk with us is the only way that we would have been able to farm, as is true of a lot of people farming in North Carolina.
"The way that system was structured meant that we had support. We had someone to share the risk. We had someone to help with innovation, help get new ideas to us and that was happening in North Carolina."
The Archers contract through TDM (a division of Hog Slat) in Newton Grove.
Unlike Iowa and southern Minnesota, the top-pork producing area in the country, North Carolina does not have the acres upon acres of flat, black ground to grow corn, she said.
North Carolina is a "corn deficit" state, yet it ranks second in pork production, Mrs. Archer said.
"The thing that made us No. 2 is people -- people who were entrepreneurial and innovative," she said. "We have a great legacy."
Mrs. Archer said that much has changed in her 40 years in the pork industry. Perhaps one of the biggest is the consumers' interest how their food is grown, she said.
"We used to kind of operate in a bubble," Mrs. Archer said. "That bubble has popped, and we have to be really transparent about what we do and how we do it. The other thing that has really changed is the level or professionalism among farmers. We have continuing education just like anybody else.
"We have to be certified. We have to demonstrate everything that we do. I tell people all the time it takes five pounds of paperwork to produce one pound of pork because we have to document absolutely everything that we do. People who pushed back against that are no longer in the business. Our consumers want to know what we do and why we do it and how we do it, and they expect that we can show them."
As with most farm families, somebody has to have a "town job," and it was usually her, she said.
That included a 12-year stint with Purina Mills. She stayed for some time after it was sold, but eventually started her own consulting business, Archer Consulting.
The company provides personnel training to the pork industry, including certification in Pork Quality Assurance Plus (PQA Plus), Youth PQA Plus and Transport Quality Assurance for producers and allied industry representatives.
"I am not on the farm every day," she said. "I do producer education and outreach for the North Carolina Pork Council. It is the best job that I have ever had. I get to work with all of our farmers.
"They are the best people in our state, and I get to work with them every day. So that is nothing short of an honor."