Tools, tech support and shoes: how pork producers drive Southeast Iowa’s economy

WASHINGTON — The direct impact of the swine industry is widely known in Washington County, where hog farms provide hundreds of jobs, buy thousands of pounds of local grain, and bring in money from across the globe as consumers buy hundreds of millions of pounds of pork every year.

What many don’t realize is the other side of that coin. Producers say their impact on area businesses, well beyond agriculture’s typical sphere, goes well beyond what locals might expect.

“We roughly have a million dollars a day of expenses,” said Rob Brenneman, owner of Brenneman Pork in rural Kalona. “I would say that $500,000-$600,000 of that, a day, has a direct impact on Washington County. From the jobs to the truckers to the employees, to the people that supply corn … half of our expenses stay in the county, in some fashion.”

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That money pours into every sector imaginable.

In the last year, Brenneman said the business had spent around $400,000 on IT services, to equip every facility with Wi-Fi routers. Add on 28 apartment unit rentals for employees on the company card, hundreds of contracted construction personnel to build new facilities, something like 10 replacement refrigerators, washers and dryers, and an amount of corn that takes roughly 100 square miles to grow, and the big picture is a complex network of business transactions across the community.

Erin Brenneman, the company’s public relations representative and farrowing specialist, said the pork industry, unlike other types of producers, could almost never afford to cut people out of the process. People who continue to spend, save, and exist in the broader community.

“Every day of the year, all year long, we’re at the mercy of mother nature, no matter how you slice it,” she said. “There’s an element of that technology is never going to be able to replace. So we will always need people.”

The spending footprint is not lost on store owners in the community either.

The Brennemans estimate their yearly expenses on shoes for employees at around five figures in the average year. Most of that business runs through Brown's Shoe Fit, some 20 minutes down the road from the pork producers’ office headquarters.

Brown’s Owner-Manager Josh Schaefer said the business could single-handedly make a business day for the store.

“They’re a great customer, we appreciate their business, they’re a great part of the community for sure,” he said. “It’s happened before on rainy days, that Brenneman Pork’s sent in a bunch of guys and got boots and turned around what could have been a slow day.”

Hardware is another big ticket item.

Many pork producers flock faithfully to Ace-N-More in Washington for that need, where General Manager and Owner Craig Jones said they bought everything from tools to farm scrubs to feed augur parts.

“Electrical supplies, plumbing supplies, there’s all kinds of things these hog buildings take to keep maintained day-to-day,” Jones said. “There’s a lot of fingers in what we do every day here … a big magnitude of products that we rely on, and the farmers rely on us to keep it in stock.“

Comments: Kalen.McCain@southeastiowaunion.com