Meet the Campbells

Welcome to Campbell Family Farms!

Larry & Judy
Chris, Jennifer, Casey, Emi Lou & Cole

I can’t wait to show you around our farm but we do have just a couple of rules:

1. No Dirty Boots In The Barns – if your boots have been in any other hog barns please don’t wear them in our barns – web translation: kick up your feet and enjoy the tour!
2. No Photography!  Web translation: the pictures here are mine please don’t use them without my permission!

So sit back and have a look around our farm!

We farm 2000 acres of corn and soybeans and have a farrow to finish confinement hog operation where we sell 2000 head of fat hogs a year.  The home farm is a Hoosier Homestead; we are multi-generational farm and are proud to say that our kids will be the 7th generation to farm this same ground if they choose to do so.  I am very proud of this fact in that I also come from a multi-generational farm, my nieces and nephew  will have the opportunity to carry on that farm as well if they choose – so Chris and I both know and understand how special that bond to agriculture is.

This is our primary set of grain bins – it sits on the home farm between our home and my in-laws.  Nearly all the corn we raise is handled thru this facility; our scales to weigh semis, as well as our corn dryer are located here – on an average year apprx. 180 thousand bushels of corn pass thru this facility.   All soybeans that are not sold straight out of the field also pass thru here.  We can store 140,000 bushels of grain (corn or soybeans) here.  The fields we farm are scattered out over Johnson and Shelby County’s and range from 7 acres to 225.

The corn and soybeans we raise are used for a variety of purposes.  We use a portion of our corn in the feed we grind for our hogs, the rest of the corn we sell and haul to National Starch  where it is made into corn starch.  Most of our soybeans are sold and hauled to Bungee in Indianapolis. Bungee has facilities where the soybeans are pressed into bean meal for livestock feed and the oil that was removed is then sold for various end uses such as the vegetable oil we cook with.

 

Here at our house we also have our cattle barn.  Our “cattle operation” is really just a 4-H project run-a-muck!  We started 7 years ago with the oldest starting 4-H with one steer to test the water and see how she liked it – this year all 3 kids will show, we have 5 cows (all bred), 1 heifer, 1 steer and currently looking for next year’s “show string” – a steer for each kid and two heifers – and least we not forget Luke our adopted dairy calf!

 

Down the road, west a half mile is our hog barns, shop and 2 more grain bins!  This is where all our hogs are as well as where we work out of.

The hip roof barn in front was originally a dairy barn, we converted it to house our sows during breeding and this is also where we artificially inseminate and naturally breed all our sows.

We have a well equipped shop where we do most of our own repairs on equipment and all our maintenance.  Next to the shop are 2 more grain bins and our feed grinding center.  We grind all our own feed; we grind about 7 different rations (recipes) depending on the age and size of the pigs.

The hog barns are behind the shop, we have 2 farrowing barns where we farrow (pigs are born)  22 sows every 5 weeks.  We have a 2 room nursery barn, when the piglets are weaned at 25 days, weighing from 12-15 pounds.  Each room in the nursery has 10 pens and we sort them by sex and size to allow even competition.  After 60 days in the nursery they move to one of our 2 finishing rooms, this is where they stay until they are ready for market, approximately 280 pounds – it takes about six months from birth for a hog to reach market weight.  The last room in our hog barns is the gestation room; we have enough room for 72 sows in this room.   After breeding we move the bred sows into this barn from the front barn.  This ensures that each sow get her required amount of feed without competition, this minimizes injury and ensures that she is well cared for.

Well there you go – short of a tour of Chris’ office that is our farm!  We love our life and what we do – if you want to read more you can check out my blog and you can also keep up with the farm on Facebook!