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JBS and IFB leaders capture Indiana AgriVision honors

 
By ANN HINCH
Associate Editor

INDIANAPOLIS, Ind. — For the first time in its nine years, the state government’s Indiana AgriVision Award is shared by two recipients. As it happens, they also share the same first name.
Lt. Gov. Sue Ellspermann bestowed the awards on Dr. Donald Orr Jr., president emeritus of JBS United, and Don Villwock, president of the Indiana Farm Bureau (IFB), in a ceremony last week at the Indiana State Fair. She marked their leadership in state agriculture, which she said is a $44 billion industry for Indiana.
“Now more than ever, we need leaders, certainly in agriculture and in Indiana agriculture,” added state Agriculture Director Ted McKinney.
Orr – who earned two of his degrees from Purdue and Michigan State universities – was working as an associate professor of animal science at Texas Tech University and director of its Swine Research Center in 1984 before he was hired as United Feeds’ (now JBS) first full-time Ph.D. He said there was no full-time research director at the time, but the company had two research farms.
Now there are four farms and 18 Ph.D.s. At the time he started, Orr, 70, said United Feeds was a $40 million, 75-employee company; now, JBS United is a $500 million firm employing 360 people in the United States alone, with a presence in Asia, Europe, South America and Central America.
Expansion began, he said, when he took the company into the Philippines in the 1980s. He was made JBS president in 1997 and officially retired to emeritus on May 31 this year.
While it still focuses mostly on swine research, it has also added dairy and poultry. He said JBS primarily supplies pre-mixes and similar supplements to livestock producers for feed mix, and nutrition for baby pigs. In fact, he cited that 20 percent of all U.S. piglets up to 25 pounds are fed JBS product.
Orr accepted his award not far from where he showed his first state fair pig 60 years earlier, as a boy from Tipton County. There, he grew up on a farm and was a 10-year 4-Her. His second year at the state fair, he said he won Champion 4-H Poland China Gilt; today, he and his wife, Pamela, own a purebred Yorkshire swine operation.
AgriVision is the latest in a string of awards Orr has won over the years, including Distinguished Ag Alumnus of 1999 at the Purdue College of Agriculture and the Distinguished Hoosier Award in 1982. 
“It was just a real honor for me to be selected,” he said, adding, “I tried to devote my career to young people furthering their career in this area.” Right now, he explained young people in agriculture have a “great opportunity” to get in with companies like JBS and render a major impact on the industry and the food chain.
Ellspermann talked briefly about working with Villwock on ag policy and government issues during her time in office and described him as the state’s “leading farmer and advocate for agriculture” before extending her best wishes on his retirement at the end of this year.
But Villwock, 64, is hoping for something more like a short vacation, since the election for American Farm Bureau Federation president will be Jan. 12, 2016 – and he’s aiming to capture that seat next. 
“If things go well, I’ll be retired for 12 days,” he quipped, adding it’s enjoyable to get outside Indiana’s borders and talk with aggies in other states during his campaign.
A third-generation farmer on the same land near Vincennes, he grows white corn for export as well as to sell to a tortilla/flour processing plant in Evansville. He also grows soybeans for four different companies and, in lesser amounts, crops such as popcorn. His grandfather was a hardware store owner when he started the farm. Down through his father, Villwock said, “I ended up owning the whole shebang – well, me and the bank.”
In 1972, he graduated from Purdue and returned to the farm with every intention of staying there full-time. After all, he didn’t grow up political; his father was an introvert, “not a joiner,” other than going to local seed and fertilizer meetings. But in 1979, he and his wife, Joyce, decided to store soybeans instead of selling right away, thinking by August there would be enough of a shortage that they could sell at a higher price.
In early 1980, President Jimmy Carter enacted the Russian grain embargo. U.S. grain prices plummeted; Villwock said market prices dropped the maximum limit three days in a row, wiping out any potential profit on their beans.
“That was the whack on the side of the head to tell me my farm income was determined as much by people in Washington, D.C., as much as my skills as a farm manager,” he explained. He wrote letters to his legislators; later, he got involved in Indiana Young Farmers and found out more about the IFB.
It is important, he added, that farmers have someone to defend their interests in government policy and laws. Political awareness, he said, is “a big part of being a successful farmer today.”
Besides his current office, he once served as state executive director of the Agricultural Stabilization and Conservation Service and was liaison for former U.S. Sen. Richard Lugar of Indiana to the national Commission on 21st Century Production Agriculture. Villwock is also a former chair of the Indiana Institute of Agriculture.
Despite his efforts to help hold down property taxes in Indiana, he said the next IFB chief is going to have to keep working with the state legislature toward a permanent solution. Another concern should be crumbling roads and bridges across the state – a problem echoed nationally as well.
What he calls rural-urban interfacing should stay on the IFB’s radar going forward, too. As more urbanites move into the country, Villwock said it’s important to work with producers to educate and be transparent with their new neighbors about agriculture so they understand the realities of it, rather than pushing back against farm operations.
While he’s honored by the AgriVision Award, Villwock is just taking care of it for all Indiana farmers – since he credits them as the ones who do the work that has enabled his job for the last 14 years.
8/27/2015