New hog facility near Rockford opens doors to visitors

By Bob Steenson, bsteenson@charlescitypress.com 

It’s not every day you invite people to an open house at a hog facility. But for the owners of a new operation northwest of Rockford, it was more a question of “why not?”

“We’ve been in business since 1980 and never had an open house,” said John Pearson, one of the owners with Ken Trettin and Todd Seibert of H.E. Trettin Inc., a family-owned farm corporation.

“We thought it would be a good idea to have people see what we consider a modern finishing facility,” Pearson said.

The open house Wednesday had the help of the Farm Bureau and a couple of companies that played roles in building the facility. A large crowd wandered through the bright building and enjoyed a barbecue lunch served up by Farm Bureau members.

Becky Meyer, with Floyd County Farm Bureau, made sure diners knew the meat being served in sandwiches for lunch was pork.

Pearson said the family farm corporation operates six hog facilities in addition to the new one: two north of Rockford, one on the west edge of Rockford and three southwest of Rockford.

Other family members are involved, including Pearson’s three sons, and they have 18 employees, he said.

“The main thing is that we have units all over, on both sides of Rockford,” he said.

“We’re proud that we get along with all our neighbors, and we do our best to be good neighbors,” Pearson said.

He acknowledged that the biggest issue with hog operations is the smell.

“We do our best to minimize that, and it hasn’t been a problem,” he said. “We pride ourselves on being good stewards.”

He said efforts are made to avoid storing manure in the buildings for months. It is either scraped out and injected into the soil or taken to a holding facility away from neighbors until it can be applied to the land.

The new building is a farrow-to-finish operation, Pearson said. They sell about half of the piglets they breed and finish the other half to market.

This latest addition to their operation has a capacity of 2,400 hogs and features power cross ventilation and electronic monitoring of feed, water and air conditions.

The building will have pigs in it within a couple of weeks.