It's time for a new era of communication the swine industry one that you can get the latest updates while Community or driving to Farms here. You have the brightest mind of the global swine industry in your pocket most of your production models or your expected growth performance / feed conversion is really dictated by your ability to get the right feed in the right place at the right time. I'm not over feeding it not under feeding it or even worse not food swine it podcast is only possible with the support of forward-looking and Innovative companies, like just off always one step ahead and slide fitting every Pig a simple yet powerful big health and production management tool loot request experts serving producers and delivering breakthrough Solutions Zoom Pro essential trace minerals exceptional. farmers and Genesis the first Power in genetics Welcome to sign it podcast. My name is Marsha room Salvage your host for today's episode this episode. Sponsor highlight is about just all celebrating its 25th anniversary justo manufactures, the original Wireless Standalone swine fitting system designed by pork producers for pork producers. They are simple reliable and provide peace of mind 24/7. Sixty-five days a year just always not just manufactured by an equipment company, but by a family pork production business with a slat level understanding just all always one step ahead and slide fitting. Hello everyone. Today. We are hosting dr. Kyle koelbl and we'll get his thoughts on the importance of feed execution and how a production nutritionist valid. How are you today? How I'm doing? Well Marcy. Oh, thank you. Thank you again for your time. And let's jump right into it. As always we like to start with you know your background. How did you get involved with pigs and tell us a little bit about Yeah, well, I grew up in South Central Kansas a small town called our Kansas City, Kansas about 12,000 people right on the Kansas Oklahoma border and in that part of the country, it's very much an agricultural part of the state of Kansas where we have a lot of cattle a lot of wheat more and more each year. It seems like they're getting corn and I grew up the grandson of a an Aryan my grandfather had partial interest in a feedlot and from a young age really instilled in me the importance of responsibility through managing livestock and growing up. I raised and showed 4-H pigs was very much involved in in the showing of livestock and it's a little bit like the gateway drug that a lot of us in the swine industry today really got introduced to pigs. So I went to College started in 2006 and went to Oklahoma State University and like many I too thought that I wanted to grow up and walk in the steps of my grandfather and be a veterinarian but I quickly realized that a lot of people wanted to do that in really where my goals and my interest and my passion was was connecting the farmer to the animal and nutrition seemed like a very very logical step for that and saw Much more opportunity to widen my horizons through a nutrition background versus solely event medicine got a degree in animal science there in 2010 and during my time there at Oklahoma State. I was introduced by to what I would consider one of my lifelong mentors Kim Brock who hired me to live at the swine farm and I was involved with everything from the breeding to power-washing. Ting hosting classes for judging kids lots of different things at that farm posted its responsibilities for and one of those things was working as a student labor for dr. Scott Carter and his swine research team there and they did a lot of things with nutrient excretions. Some mass balance studies a lot of things in air emissions. I believe they have a room that would be similar to what Purdue University would have for there. U-turn excretion and environmental impact Barn. So upon my graduation there. I had a couple of different opportunities and one was actually to buy cattle for Cargill and looked into that and dr. Carter called me and said, you know, I think you should you should look into getting a master's in nutrition. You have a lot of a lot of interest in this and so I said, okay and I started my Master's there and worked on the environmental impacts of pay lean and a couple of different. probiotic strategies and additives for lactating sows and then also worked on some of the iodine value prediction stuff as far as ddgs or corn oils impact and as I started to get ready to finish my Masters in 2012, I quickly realized that I didn't quite know as much as I thought I did and whenever I was at Midwest Animal science, I saw all these Students wearing purple and Kansas State University just had such a profound present Presence at either Midwest or the national animal science meetings, and I thought to myself, you know, if I want to do the best that I possibly can. I probably need to figure out some way to get involved with those folks and and see how I can be a part of that team. So I was lucky enough to get into the swine nutrition group there at Kansas State University to start my PhD and from 2012 to 2015 I was under dr. Joel to Russia and dr. Mike toe cash, even though I did a large portion of my work with dr. Dre Beats, you know Marcy. Oh very well for our your listeners. When you go to Kansas State University, you're really mentored and raised by by a community. You have lots of mentors that are coming to your life during my time at Kansas State University. I worked on predominantly look. Different copper feeding strategies and also looking at different fiber withdraw strategies as well as some linear programming and some modeling with pig flow and quickly upon my arrival to Kansas State University. I was searching for some other income and some other opportunities to really learn more about production swine swine production. And dr. Joel Drew. Ooh, she got me connected with dr. Chad Hast it at New Fashion Pork and I quickly became became involved and oversaw the research for New Fashion Pork during my entire three years at Kansas State University. And that ultimately led into my first full-time job. I moved to Jackson, Minnesota and worked for Brad. Dr. Brad fracking and dr. Chad Halstead for for nearly three years after my graduation. There I was responsible for pig flow marketing research Nursery nutrition formulation. And I also was in charge of one part of our production called old-fashioned pork. That was really targeted towards Gap or very intensive involved Animal Welfare focused production that serviced Whole Foods and had a great great time. I'm at New Fashion Pork. I learned a lot about the value of a dollar the value of people and the value of doing things right very very great company and I was very fortunate to be able to have touched lots of different aspects of the business and have control all of those and I'll be forever grateful that and that led into my current role as a director of nutritional services for JBS live pork. I started here. In February 2018 and my responsibilities here are to oversee really anything that touches feed or that feed touches. So I'm responsible for all of the feed mills the research that we do I work very closely with the plant on meat quality and nutrition or genetics focus and how it can impact that as well as the research and formulation and that I work with the merchandising team on on Ingredients I have a team of five who who helped me get all of this done and many many more important folks that would work for them who really are the heartbeat of this company. I also would have the feed desk but also be a portion of that and that's today's topic is really how we focused on feed execution here at JBS and how it's important one of my very most important. Is Miss Mandy gerhardt? She was also has some K-State blood in her and she is really a great coworker very very much a huge asset to our business a very good nutritionist and her and I take feed execution very seriously, and it's really what we spend the focus of our day on so that's a little bit about me very cool. Thanks so much guy. Oh and yeah, really appreciate all the background because I knew I knew a good chunk of it, but it's always goes down to here from the beginning and also for our audience to to learn more about you as well. And yeah, Mandy Mandy I would Echo that as well great lady and great team right there. Cool Kyle. You had a great link right there on fit execution, right? So first of all, can you define feed execution for us? Yeah, so For me, it's quite simple. We have this phrase written or labeled or taped to the wall throughout our business and it's the act of getting the right feed to the right place at the right time and we would say that while you think as a production nutritionist being complete completely focused on formulation really about 80% of our time is spent on spent on feed execution while only about 20% or sometimes maybe even 10 is really focused on the act of truly formulating rations, right very nice. And what is the importance of it? And also what are the biggest challenges you see on a day-to-day basis related to feed execution. The importance of it is is that most of your production models or your expected growth performance / feed conversion? Vision is really dictated by your ability to get the right feed in the right place at the right time not overfeeding it not under feeding it or even worse not feeding, you know late feed deliveries out of feet events. There's lots of things that can impact that and so the importance of getting the feed their in the right way in the right kind of feed. Really is how closely related your True Performance is to your expected performance. So is it production nutritionist your it's heavily scrutinized on your cost and your performance and when you go to budget how much feed cost you are going to have per head that's based on actively getting your budgets executed to 100% And so any deviation from that. Going to be a cost. So the biggest challenge that we that I see today is as we look across the Midwest and our Corn Belt for us. It's really about Manpower Trucking and really high quality feed truck operators are very very hard to find there. There was a shortage for the last few years and that shortage is continuing to eat and Kris really month by month and I am in the camp that we're going to have to allocate more monetary support to these drivers because they are the link between the feed mill and the production system and the Nutrition department really serves as a service to production. And so we want our Growers to not have hiccups and feed ordering not have hiccups and Feet into the barn so Trucking is probably one of the biggest issues. The second issue would be the constraints of your system and what I mean by that is a lot of people have it in their mind and focus that if your batch at the feed mill is based on three tons because you have a 3-ton mixer then everything has to be in 3 tons and when you're feeding let's say a high highly expensive. Civ highly fortified Nursery diet that's seven hundred dollars a ton or six hundred dollars a ton if you overfeed that by any quantity or any amount in the pigs do not need it. Then there's a cost Associated which is the difference between the phase 1 and Phase 2 diet. So if it's a hundred dollars per ton put that on a per pound basis and then divide that by your allocation for pig and that's the cost of overfeeding that So we try to look at the feed mill and say yes, our batches are in three-ton, but maybe we have enough Loadout bins that we can make a larger amount of that so we get good mixes but oftentimes it's much cheaper to send a truck out with say only 4,000 pounds of your in 1 vs. 6,000 even though that compartment will hold three ton. It's just one diet and then it's really what level of in accuracy you're okay with of under or over feeding. You're always going to under or over feed that to some degree, but it's understanding of what level you're okay. The last challenge would be is producers ordering feed on time. So we focus on that. We have a new program that we're using FAS feed allocation system. It's a In program made by Prairie systems and it really helps with the pain goes empty and shutting the slide on one end and opening it on another make sure that we don't get blending a medication blending a phases. You're going to have Sun blending in the feeder. But making sure that those bins get emptied when they should be feed is not sitting in there in the been too long. You're not having any type of water issues because maybe feed didn't want to flow out of one bin so So you decide to just leave it there and then six months later. They you finally decide to clean it out. All of those things kind of add up into what we would call successful feed execution amazing very very nice and new thirst a little bit on the value of some of the the feed execution Kyle and if you translate that on a per Pig basis, or do you have some measurements of that today? Yeah, so In my experience, there's probably as much value as a dollar to a dollar fifty ahead. Sometimes even two dollars a pig and feed cost in just accuracy. So if it cost you $65 ahead to feed it to Market. There's probably somewhere between two and a half or three percent Improvement in that cost by just not overfeeding the allocations. only giving the pig exactly what he needs so that value difference is going to be between the cost of what you overfed minus the cost of the feed that you should have fed / your allocation to put it on a 4 divided by 2000 to put it on a per pound basis and then multiply that by your allocation and that puts it on a per head basis and you know, depending on which system you're looking at some are certainly better than others, but I wouldn't be surprised if If a lot of groups were three to five percent off of budget one way or the other that's a very realistic number God very nice changing gears a little bit and looking more at the big picture Kyle. How do you suggest folks to restructure and Nutrition department? And what kind of people you need to help on that regard? Chad did one time told me it's always the people it's never the pigs and how true that has been. I'm very fortunate to be blessed with a team that understands the goal. And when I started this Venture JBS Life Fort did not have a Nutrition department. A lot of people on my team were not at their current roles. And the way that we structured this department was really giving people the opportunity and the empowering them to make decisions and getting people that buy into the gold that understand the goal and giving them more opportunity in the power to make decisions on their own that benefit. The business is extremely rewarding for me and I think it's extremely rewarding for JBS. We're very very much. Family-orientated culture driven company, but we also have a very very passionate and a very aggressive focus on Improvement and Excellence not just for ourselves but our customers as well. So my team when we sat down and decided what the structure of this was going to look like we gave everybody a piece of the pie and we gave them some opportunity to practice ownership, which is one of our big value. He's within JBS that that we take very very seriously. So on my team David barnhouse Angela Donley Mandy gerhardt, Brittany carender and Max Capitan a bitch all touch various portions of this feed execution. And that's the number one thing that we do each day, but we cut up the pie. We allow people to take ownership. We hold each other accountable. We have kpis and benchmarks around that we're constantly looking. Get those things to make sure we're driving in the right direction. And then we're explaining and teaching to our team's how this saves US money. How does this improve our profitability of the company and I think many times where we don't do a very good job of explaining to the people in our business who are actually getting the work done how they drive the bottom line and with feed execution. The math is very simple the objective seems very simple, but sometimes it's very very hard to get it done. But my team very much understands the value of getting it right and I think that's the most important thing very nice Kyle and how do you get the production staff on board with fiddich execution? Yeah. That's a great question Marcio. That's another reason why I feel very blessed to be here at JBS and certainly there's some some experiences you may have heard of or we all are familiar with where maybe the veterinarians and Nutritionists don't see eye to eye or the production team and when people are not rowing towards the common goal. Sometimes you can be a little misaligned and be off center and in our system. We're all focused towards a common goal of profitability or the percentage of good Market pigs that make it to the plant and the underlying factor that gets this accomplished is communication so through some education. For our to our production team. Our nutrition team was able to express and teach the importance of getting feed delivered right and also the importance of Growers and our production contract Growers and families that work with us. No matter what kind of farm they have teaching them and letting them understand why ordering feed correctly is so important. So the communication was key the first That we did when we launched our new feed ordering system. We had it out there for a few months got everybody familiar with it. And then we went and created our own booklet of how we wanted the production team to do it or have their Growers do it and then we did mandatory trainings for all the Growers. So we have over 700 contract Growers and David barnhouse went out and gave classes with our published book on exactly how to download the app. How to put the app into into work how to order feed what this means and we refined the process a few months after launch so we knew exactly what we wanted and then the second thing is communicating where the mill is currently at with deliveries and also the weather so we all know that this February and the Midwest was very very cold very very treacherous time. Lots of a defeat events lots of loads that weren't able to make it out the door and every production system in Iowa. And and the Midwest and the Corn Belt experience that this year was a very very quick tough winter and what I have every feed mill whether it's a toll Mill or an internal mail is twice a day. They send me a an update and it's not just me it goes out to any field manager that would pull feed out of that Mill. It goes to production manager and all of the trucking companies and it's very simple. It says how many loads of we hold today. How many do we have left? Are there any same day feed orders? And if so, which producers were they and we're there any out of feet events. And if so, which producers were they and then what that does is it notifies the field manager that hey one of your producers had an out of feet event or same day feed order and so our production staff is extremely diligent of acting upon those emails twice a day. They come at eight in the morning and 4:00 in the afternoon on the dot and when See that if they have one of their producers, they'll pick that phone up and they'll utilize that opportunity as a coaching moment. In order to say, you know, mr. Smith. Why would you have an out of feet event? Well, we have the Iowa State Fair this weekend. I thought I had more feed their than I did and I wasn't running my bins in tandem. Okay? Mr. Smith. We really need to work on this in FAS. There's a mobile report that actually shows you how much feed you might have on. On site based on current consumption curves and it should give you an indication of when you needed to order feed. And so that open communication between the production team and the mill is really maximize through that email and that's been a really good opportunity for us and we don't have to call and check up on the field manager and and and see if he's doing that. We just continue to have a decline of out of feet events that really are shown by the production. Teams really Keen focus on that delivery aspect. So it's getting them to know where the mill is out on delivery. Are they ahead of schedule or they behind on schedule and what kind of inclement weather would be showing up that would inhibit some of those things to happen on time which we've all been a part of very nice a lot of golden nuggets right there Caillou. I love I love when we get to to learn a lot of very tactical things that a lot of our listeners can implement. That same day or next day. I love it anything else on feed execution before we move to the three questions. We ask every guest Kyle. I think that about does it cool since 1971. Zebra Corporation has focused on one thing Trace mineral nutrition as the most research proving organic feed Trace mineral products in the industry zebra performance minerals deliver performance. Are profitability to swine operations around the globe to know more go to zebra.com. It is time to our face. What is your favorite swine related book? I'll well my favorite one is the second edition swine nutrition written by Austin Lewis and least Southern and I think that that book, If other literature that while that book, I'd be getting a little bit dated here in our time. It serves very very good purposes to give you a not a simple answer but a simplistic answer that I think is a very good and quick reference. I encourage anybody who's looking at doing nutrition for a living. That's probably a good one to keep in your in your suitcase. Very nice. The the blue cover the Blue Book very cool. What is your favorite book unrelated to pigs? Well, I tried to read a lot of books currently. I've been reading some on business Acumen and Leadership and leadership styles but a book that I like that dr. Turner my boss who I just thoroughly enjoy working for or working with he's just a great individual a great hug, man, but a great person at our all meeting last year gave a lot of us in production on the production team a book called grit by Angela Duckworth and she's a psychologist who has an interesting background, but it really looks at and analyzes and studies the ability the ability of a person to persevere to push through the hard work to be successful when the odds are against you and she defines that by a major of a person's person's grab it their The hunker down and get stuff done and persevere and in the face of hardship and I think that's so much what explains and very relatable to what we do in agriculture that a lot of times the mark markets are against this the weather's against this health is against us very good. I love it hard about that book haven't read it yet. Very nice Kyle. And on the next question what separates successful fund professionals from those that are not on in your opinion. I think it comes back to your ability to communicate Wayne cast always says I may not be the smartest person in the room, but I bet I have somebody's phone number who is the smartest person about that topic and I've always thought that that was extremely insightful because I think networking and your ability to make friends your ability to make contacts and colleagues and working friendships. The people that I've come across My life but it will always continue to help you and I think to be successful you have to be humbled and you have to be realistic with what your abilities are always push yourselves. I think that's the one thing that really separates successful in any industry is just their ability to communicate and create lasting relationships because we all help each other we didn't get to where we are by herself and we won't get to where we're going without ourselves without by ourselves. And so I think it's just communication is key very very cool. Ooh Kayo, very profound and makes total sense being resourceful. And that's that's the ultimate skill. Absolutely very nice. Well Kyle. Thanks again for your time. I really appreciate that and and we'll be in touch. Thank you very much Marcio. Have a good day. Thank you.
Today’s episode will cover the Importance of feed execution and how a production nutritionist values it. “Our main goal, as swine nutritionists, is to get the right feed, to the right place, at the right time.” – Dr. Kyle Coble. Our guest is Dr. Kyle Coble, another bright mind of the Global Swine Industry. Dr. Coble is a Swine Nutritionist for JBS, USA, and before that worked for New Fashion Pork in Jackson, MN. In 2010, he earned his B.S. in Animal Science at Oklahoma State University followed by a M.S. in Animal Science with an emphasis in Swine Nutrition in 2012. He graduated from Kansas State University with a Ph.D. in Swine Nutrition in 2015, investigating the effects of different by-product withdrawal strategies to decrease negative impacts on carcass yield and copper supplementation in finishing pigs. In 2014, Dr. Coble was awarded the International Ingredient Corporation Pinnacle Award for Outstanding Young Swine Nutrition Student. In 2015, he was selected as an American Society of Animal Science Young Scholar. What you will learn:   How he got involved in pig production and the development of his career;  Definition of Feed Execution;   The importance and the biggest challenges of Feed Execution;   The value of feed execution;   How to structure a nutrition department and the kind of team roles needed;   How he gets the production staff on board with feed execution;   What separates successful swine professionals from those that are not. Kyle’s favorite swine-related book: Swine Nutrition (Lewis and Southern) Kyle’s favorite book unrelated to swine: Grit Edited by Lauro Faccin 