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After his daughter Melissa died in 2003, Iowa pork producer Dale Reicks said work became part of how he grieved. A 2017 Successful Farming profile traced how the family’s farm expanded in the years that followed—and how that growth brought new production practices, employees, and community commitments. Its figures describe the operation as reported in 2017, not its present-day scale.
How did the Reicks family respond to Melissa’s death?
Melissa Reicks, 21, died in a crash at a rural intersection near Calmar, Iowa, on August 11, 2003, according to Successful Farming’s May 17, 2017 profile. Her father, Dale, described work as one part of his grieving: “Part of my grieving process was to go to work.”
The profile presents the farm’s expansion as one way Dale and his family moved forward. That is their account of a deeply personal loss, not a formula for overcoming grief or a claim that business growth erased it.
How did Reicks View Farms grow?
The farm’s rise began well before 2003. The 2017 profile reported a progression from 10 gilts in 1977 to 1,200 sows in 2003, then 15,000 by 2009 and 32,500 at the time of publication. Those are historical figures reported by Successful Farming; they do not establish the farm’s size today.
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Production and business figures in the same 2017 account show the operation’s breadth:
- A 2,499-head finishing barn and 20 hog-finishing barns built in the five years before the article.
- About 10,000 acres farmed on the crop side.
- 240 employees, with about 70% reported to have grown up within 30 miles of the farm.
- Payroll exceeding $10 million in the prior year, as reported in 2017.
- About 85% of feed milled at farm headquarters, while the grain operation supplied roughly one third of the hog enterprise’s corn needs.
After 2003, the farm expanded sow operations and contract finishing. Dale said he recruited contract producers among friends, neighbors, and relatives; the company built 85% of the barns in its contract production system. The article said staff could reach each facility within about an hour and a half, a detail that reflects how the company managed its network at that time.
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What farming practices did the farm use?
Health, genetics, and disease control
The family’s account linked growth to managing herd health. Disease had been a challenge, the profile said, until the farm repopulated to a specific-pathogen-free herd and adopted all-in/all-out production in the early 1990s. Dale learned artificial insemination and later sold gilts; by 2017, the farm was a PIC multiplier. Brady Reicks, Dale’s son and a fifth-generation operator at the time, summed up the business emphasis: “Our competitive strength is our herd health and genetics.”
The profile also described filtered sow farms as a disease barrier and recounted Dale’s response to porcine epidemic diarrhea (PED): he ordered trailers, used heaters at truck washes, and heated trailers as part of the farm’s biosecurity response. These are practices described in the 2017 article, not a current operating guide or a guarantee against disease.
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Barn filtration and cooling
A 2,499-head finishing barn, designed with help from Iowa State University researchers for an odor-reduction pilot project, used air filtration intended to capture dust and reduce odor and ammonia emissions. The profile attributed a 50% reduction in odor and ammonia emissions to that system; it did not identify this as an independently verified or universal result. The barn also used a cool-cell system, in which evaporation cooled incoming air, with the aim of reducing energy costs. Dale said the design was modeled on barns he had seen in Belgium and Germany.
Feed and crops
The farm experimented with feed ingredients including distillers’ dried grains with solubles (DDGS) and wheat middlings, and with cover crops. Dale described one successful planting of radishes and turnips, as well as an unsuccessful attempt to seed radishes by helicopter. In the account, the farm’s grain operation supplied about one third of the hog enterprise’s corn needs, with the remainder purchased locally.
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The profile also reported that manure from one finishing barn was used to fertilize 180 acres of corn in a year. That is a figure for the barn described in the 2017 article, not a general estimate for every hog barn.
Independent reader supportYour contribution helps us test, update, and keep practical guides available for everyone.How did the farm connect with its community?
The 2017 account described a large local workforce: 240 employees, including seasonal workers, with about 70% having grown up within 30 miles. It also identified labor needs as a significant management challenge. These workforce details belong to the period covered by the profile and should not be read as current staffing information.
Dale and Laura Reicks provided seed money for improvements at the Howard County Fair in Cresco, including a modern hog-finishing barn, farrowing display, show arena, dairy barn, and milking parlor. The profile said the fair drew 40,000 visitors and that the replacement fairground hog barn offered pens for 35 local 4-H and FFA youth projects. The family also established the Melissa Lea Reicks Foundation to support community organizations and scholarships.
What the 2017 profile can—and cannot—tell us
Successful Farming’s profile documents how the Reicks family described the years after Melissa’s death and the farm’s development through May 2017. Its sow counts, staffing, payroll, production methods, and community figures are a snapshot from that period. They do not confirm the operation’s current scale, workforce, or practices.
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