By Celeste Baumgartner

Ohio Correspondent

OXFORD, Ohio – When David Korb was a kid, he used to hide boar stud catalogs in his math books and study them when he was supposed to be studying other things. However, it paid off. Korb, who graduated from college in 2015, and his dad, Mark Korb, sell show pigs all over the country. Plus, David is a much-in-demand judge for some of the top shows in the nation.

It all got started working on his grandpa’s – Hank Korb – farm, with a lot of cousins, raising crops and livestock. Both David and his dad were drawn to the pigs.

“I think the main thing grandpa taught me was how to enjoy each day,” David Korb said. “He was always in a positive mood and excited to get to spend a day on the farm. That’s where we got started. He liked the pigs, but obviously my dad liked them a little more, and I like them a little more than my dad.”

Korb was drawn to the competitive side of raising pigs. He played sports in school, but once he realized he would not be a major league pitcher, the next obvious choice was going to school, judging livestock, and meeting other like-minded people.

“That put me into a junior college, Illinois Central College,” Korb said. “The way the judging program works, if you go to a junior college, you can judge competitively on a team in your sophomore year. If you went straight to a senior college, you can only judge during your senior year.”

That way you learn for your freshman year, then you can work under a coach, judge with a team and then actually judge during your sophomore year, Korb said. Korb went on to Western Illinois University, where he got more judging experience. His major was animal science with a minor in ag economics.

Korb graduated in 2015, went back to Ohio, and worked for Lean Value Sires under Dr. Gene Isler until his death and then with Mary Pavelko. During this time, he continued working with his dad.

Then in 2017, Korb Farms sold Leaps and Bounds, a purebred Yorkshire boar for a world record-setting $350,000. That, and a few other things, allowed Korb to come back home and work with the pigs full-time. Since then, Korb Farms has become nationally known.

“After he got out of college and traveled around the country, it expanded his horizons and his focus to a different level,” Mark Korb said. “He took us from a medium-sized, medium-competitive show pig world to one of the top 10 or 15 in the nation pretty quickly. That helped drive all of the extra business. We were doing OK, but he got involved and drove the genetics to the next level, and it just blew up. We sell as many pigs in Texas and Oklahoma as we do here in Ohio.”

Show pigs from Korb Farms recently won the Grand Champion Crossbred Barrow at the Expo in Indianapolis, and at the Springfield National Team Purebreds Junior Livestock Show. Their pigs also won the Reserve Crossbred Barrow at the National Junior Summer Spectacular and they had a Grand Champion at the Michigan Livestock Expo.

Said David: “From a pig-raising standpoint, that is about as good as we can do.”

From a judging standpoint, Korb judged his first show in 2015 and has since judged in more than 30 states. Pigs evolve and change every year and that is the hard part about this industry, he said. People find new ways to present them, how to breed them. They can reproduce so fast a producer can change the direction they are going quickly.

When judging, the same general things stay true as when he first started, Korb said. He is still looking at balance, design, soundness, squareness with all the extras of bone, muscle, width, and look. How they are presented is a different story.

“In 2017 with Leaps and Bounds, we would clip the whole body,” Korb said. “Nowadays, we keep a lot of hair on our pigs to make the illusion that the animal’s bone is bigger. The more hair on the body the bigger the body is going to look so we try to create that illusion of the stoutness of the animals with more hair. We’re clipping them and treating them like they are mini-show steers now.”

There is more paint and glue being used than there ever was, he explained. Competitors will groom and paint the whole body to make it look as pretty as possible, although painting is mostly outlawed in Ohio. Competitors brush the legs back to make the hair stand one way and glue it so it holds there.

Korb also manages Korb Farm’s website and FaceBook pages, but he admits to not being too good at keeping up with that. He takes all the photos and videos, with help from a local high schooler, Blain Sorrell, for the online auctions they have several times a year.

Plus, all the cousins are still around and Uncles Hank and Jim help along with a neighbor, Bob Mahlerwein.

Korb learned from his grandpa to enjoy it all.

“I enjoy the competitive nature of the show pig business,” Korb said. “I am a competitive person so that is what drives me. I like to win. I do just like raising pigs; trying to figure out what boars to breed to what sows to make the very best pigs.”

Some of his biggest judging achievements include working at the major Texas shows, San Angelo and San Antonio, and at the Youth Expo. 

“You have to be asked to do those things,” Korb explained. “So other judges wanted me to judge with them. For me that was kind of the biggest compliment, getting to judge with people I looked up to. Then standing in the ring right in front of the best pigs in the country and getting to line them up is an accomplishment and also an honor.”