There are 150,000 hogs on feed in North Dakota. If that was 2 million hogs, they would consume only 12 percent of the soybean meal produced by the new soybean crush facilities at Casselton and Spiritwood. NDSU Extension Livestock Development Specialist Jon Biermacher said there would be no shortage of feed, but there are other hurdles. “One is economic feasibility, it’s pretty expensive to build one of these barns.” Construction costs are also higher in North Dakota than states like Iowa. “We’d have to bring materials up, we don’t have a lot of that here and we’d probably have to import the labor to build them and operate them.” Biermacher was part of the NDSU Outlook Conference for Ag Lenders. Listen to the full interview with Jon Biermacher here.
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