Christensen Farms’ response to founder Bob Christensen’s death in 2012 rested on a combination of family backing, experienced pork-production leaders and broader corporate-management expertise. In a 2019 interview, then-CEO Glenn Stolt described how the company paired that leadership continuity with a more formal approach to systems, selective growth and reinvestment.
Continuity came from combining family support with experienced leadership
Bob Christensen recruited Glenn Stolt as CFO two years before Christensen died. Stolt brought 22 years of experience in large, publicly held organizations, but said he was “not the pig guy.” The company’s family members and employees supplied deep production knowledge and a direct connection to the founder; the leadership team helped staff and stakeholders understand that this expertise remained in place while the company added broader business-management experience.
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Stolt credited the family’s backing as central to the transition: “It worked because of the family support, which has been unwavering to this day.” He said the family did not manage day-to-day operations. In the 2019 account, Mary Ann Christensen and Lynn Christensen served on the board alongside Stolt and the family-trust trustee. Successful Farming’s 2019 interview with Stolt is the direct source for this account.
The company changed its management approach as it grew more complex
Stolt described a shift from a culture led by entrepreneurial instincts toward one with stronger systems, technology and administration. His argument was not that production knowledge mattered less; rather, managing a more complex enterprise also required broader organizational and financial expertise. This division of strengths—production experience among the people closest to the farms, paired with corporate-management experience at the top—helped the company maintain continuity while changing how it was run.
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Vision 2020 balanced selective growth with efficiency
After Christensen’s death, the company developed its Vision 2020 direction during 2013. Stolt described four connected priorities:
- Strengthen live production: improve the performance and foundations of the farm business.
- Grow selectively: pursue expansion where it offered strategic value, such as better biosecurity or geographic advantages tied to feed milling. Stolt cited the 2014 Exetare acquisition as an example.
- Integrate production with processing: build on the company’s role as an original shareholder in Triumph Foods and its related partnership activity with Seaboard Triumph Foods and Daily’s Premium Meats.
- Diversify: seek greater stability and financial capacity rather than relying on a single part of the business.
The plan reflected a distinction between getting larger and growing in ways that supported the enterprise. As Stolt put it, “We are not interested in getting bigger for the sake of being bigger.” He also discussed contract production and efforts to help long-time producers bring younger generations into the business.
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Efficiency gains were directed back toward the farms
In the 2019 interview, Stolt said live-operations costs had improved by more than $16 per head over the preceding decade. He connected that progress to throughput and efficiency, including an aim to produce roughly the same number of animals with a larger sow base than in the past. These are his historical figures and description, not current operating data.
Stolt said about two-thirds of the improvements captured since 2013 had been reinvested in farms. He cited biosecurity upgrades, equipment and replacing aging farms as uses of that money. The approach linked efficiency to reinvestment: cost improvements were not presented simply as a reason to expand, but as a way to strengthen the production base.
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Scale and integration shaped the company’s position
Stolt said Christensen Farms had grown from 11,000 sows in 1994 to 148,000 in 2019. The latter was the interview’s then-current figure; neither number establishes the company’s present size. The 2019 article also reported that Christensen Farms had appeared every year on Successful Farming’s Pork Powerhouses list since the ranking began in 1994, one of only a dozen companies said to have done so.
At the time of the interview’s strategic analysis, Stolt said about 40% of the company’s pigs went to Triumph Foods. He described the packing business as capital-intensive, including the challenge of building a second plant in Sioux City and ramping up production. Those plant details describe the circumstances discussed in 2019, not necessarily present-day operations. The broader strategic point was that integration could connect the farm business to processing, but it also involved substantial investment and operating complexity.
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Stolt’s 2019 risk list shows what the strategy had to manage
Stolt described animal health and biosecurity as continuing priorities. He recounted a historical move from farm showers toward filtration and fumigation rooms, and emphasized prevention, vaccines and biosecurity amid concerns about antibiotic use. He also identified labor recruitment, trade uncertainty and competition from meat substitutes as challenges at the time of the interview.
On African swine fever preparedness, Stolt said the industry was conducting exercises and coordinating with state officials and producers around surveillance and the possibility of mass depopulation. These were risks and preparations he discussed in 2019, not a current assessment of the company’s circumstances.
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The legacy was part of the continuity story
Stolt said the company intended to preserve Bob Christensen’s legacy while continuing to build for the future. He pointed to Christensen Farms’ role in renovating the swine barn at the Minnesota State Fair, which was subsequently named the Robert A. Christensen Pavilion. In the interview, legacy was not framed as a substitute for change: the company sought to honor its founder while adapting leadership and operations to a larger, more complex business.
The evidence here is Stolt’s account as CEO in 2019, reproduced by Christensen Farms and reported in full by Successful Farming. The figures and descriptions above should be read in that historical context, not as independently audited or current company data.
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