Nate Taylor Celebrates 20 Years with Iowa Select Farms
posted on Thursday, April 23, 2020
Congratulations to Nate Taylor for celebrating 20 years with Iowa Select Farms!
Born and raised in Grand River, Nate has been working with pigs his entire life. In fact, he remembers castrating and bottle-feeding pigs when he was just five years old.
“This was way before temperature-controlled farms like we have today, so on really cold nights we’d bring them inside the house with laundry baskets,” he chuckled. “I would feed them using actual baby bottles. I’ve been working with pigs for as long as I can remember.”
Nate’s first job with Iowa Select Farms was as an animal caretaker at Davis Sow 21. His Dad, who also worked at the company, encouraged him to apply. That was 20 years and nine farms ago.
Today, Nate manages Decatur G045, a multiplication farm just south of his hometown. He takes a lot of pride in raising quality pigs and treats the farm, and animals, as if they were his own.
“I think that’s what I love most about the company,” he said. “They really empower us to do the best we can for our animals every day and part of that is ownership. We can make decisions and operate as if it was our own farm.”
In addition to handling all daily chores, animal care and routine upkeep, Nate spends his days alongside Randy Abell and Barry Schuster. The three work together on large projects, whether maintenance or animal health, together at Decatur, Cooper #1 and Cooper #2.
While he knows it’s been said in previous stories, Nate can’t deny that his favorite part about his job is also the people he gets to work with and the unique challenges that each day brings. His farm is slightly different in that he gets gilts as nursery pigs and care for them until they’re ready to go to a gilt developer unit.
“We’re a family here and everyone’s got each other’s backs,” he said. “And its fun to get to work together every day to solve problems, fix things and raise the best gilts we possible can.”
Some days Nate misses breeding pigs (he used to breed 250-300/week by himself and averaged 87% PCP), he loves the flexibility working on a multiplication farm brings. It allows him to set his schedule and do things outside of work like camping with his wife, Toni, hunting and baling hay. Every year, he puts up about 4,000 large round bales for cattle feeders in the area.
Unlike most, Nate knew Iowa Select Farms would evolve into the company that it has today. Although the company only had 15 sow farms when he started, he could tell immediately that the company was doing things right.
“When you got to a farm, you could tell things were run well and that people knew what they were doing,” he said. “Things were smooth and from day one, I knew it was going to be a successful business.”
For Nate, working in agriculture is a dream. Heck, it’s in his blood.
“I was born and raised in Grand River and get to continue living here doing what I love most—working on a farm,” he said. “That, along with the awesome people that I get to work with and the activities the company offers us every year like gatherings at the Iowa State Fair, it doesn’t get better than that.”
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