Local pork producers on Smithfield Foods project: ‘For us, it means everything’
March 19, 2026
At 67, Ferlyn Hofer just got a big glimpse of how the future of his family business could take shape.
He’s preparing for his 33-year-old son, Nolan, to take over the family hog farm east of Canistota that his father started in the early 1960s.
“It’s time to start thinking ahead,” Hofer said. “He’s been here the last five years, and before that, he was a lineman in North Dakota and enjoyed that, too, but his heart was here on the farm.”
Like his father before him, Hofer sells nearly all the hogs he produces each year to Smithfield Foods.
“We’re a small mom-and-pop operation, but we have about 350 sows we farrow to finish and usually market over 6,000 head of hogs, mainly to Smithfield,” he said. “For us, it means everything.”
News that Smithfield plans to invest in a $1.3 billion new plant in northwest Sioux Falls gives him confidence the business will be there for his son.
“They know the hogs I produce, and I have a history behind my hogs and my farm, and they are concerned about what happens when I’m not doing it anymore. They want to meet my boy and have asked to meet him,” Hofer said.
“There’s been several times they want to meet the next generation on our farm, so they take it serious we’re going to keep producing pigs for them. I never felt my 6,000 head was just a drop in the bucket. You might think they’re a big company and we don’t mean anything, but I feel their focus has been more and more to this area. My boy has a future to take pigs to.”
Shane Odegaard sends two semis of hogs each week from near Lake Preston to Sioux Falls. Like Hofer, Smithfield Foods is his family operation’s primary customer.
He, two brothers and a cousin own Odegaard Family Farms, which goes back four generations.
“That’s one thing the Odegaards have always done and that’s raise pigs,” he said. “We’re diversified. We run a farrow-to-finish operation, so we raise them from birth to market. We run a few cows and corn and soybeans. Basically, the corn we raise on the farm stays on the farm and is used to feed the pigs, and we make all our own feed.”
He estimates that they market 16,000 head to Smithfield annually.
“This new facility is going to be state-of-the-art, brand-new and a single-story facility,” he said. “You can’t compare it.”
Losing the plant would be “devastating,” said Bill Even, commissioner of the Governor’s Office of Economic Development and prior CEO of the National Pork Board.
“The current plant processes 19,500 head of hogs a day, and the vast majority of the hogs that come into this facility are from independent pork producers,” he said. “It’s producers in North Dakota, South Dakota, Iowa, Nebraska who bring hogs. It would be very, very harmful to the pork industry in the Upper Midwest.”
In addition to the producers themselves, there’s a ripple effect in the trucking, feed and equipment industries — “a whole ecosystem,” Even added. “The Smithfield plant is the second largest in the United States. You don’t just find a home for these pigs very easily or at a very good price if it was to go away.”
Dave Uttecht has played out that scenario in his mind many times. The Alpena-based co-owner of Heartland Pork has partnered in the business with another area family for 30 years.
“There used to be a plant in Huron and Mitchell both, and that ended in the late 1990s when Dakota Pork closed, and it makes you wonder what kind of certainty there is,” he said. “This is a big step forward.”
His business trucks hogs to Sioux Falls every day, “sometimes multiple loads a day,” he said. “We usually send a load on Sunday night so they have something to start harvest with Monday morning, so people have work to do.”
This past weekend, hours before South Dakota’s interstate highways closed for a blizzard, they came a day early on Saturday.
“They buy most of our pigs, which is around 100,000 (annually),” Uttecht said. “I have a local buyer I talk to two or three times a week.”
All the hog farmers consistently do business in Sioux Falls.
Odegaard hires trucking help to haul his hogs here, and they often stop while in the city to get parts or truck repairs done. When he was behind the wheel, he would stop for planters and sprayers.
“When we deliver hogs, those trailers are washed out in Sioux Falls and disinfected before they come back to the farms,” he said.
Beyond that, he often finds himself in the city for meetings and tends to stay at local hotels and visit local restaurants.
“My concern was … they were going to close this plant. It’s so great for us in South Dakota,” he said. “For me to find another harvest facility, we’re talking having to go into Worthington, Minnesota, or Madison, Nebraska, and that’s assuming they have space to take on additional pigs. It’s huge for the state of South Dakota, the pork industry and likewise our neighboring producers in southwest Minnesota and northwest Iowa.”
Hofer also wonders how the market would react to a closure.
“They have a lot of (Hutterite) colonies they buy from, and the colonies have been very supportive of Smithfield too,” he said. “I don’t know where you go with 20,000 head a day more as tight as everything is with the number of pigs being raised.”
He often comes to Sioux Falls for health care, shopping and dining out. He envisions shopping more in growing northwest Sioux Falls once the new plant opens and it becomes an even easier commute for him.
Uttecht’s team also buys fuel, washes trucks and does other spending in town.
“Sioux Falls is the place to go,” he added. “We stay overnight, we go out to eat, we do a lot of shopping. It’s our go-to place. I’d rather go to Sioux Falls than Omaha or Minneapolis for sure.”
A past president of the South Dakota Pork Producers Council, he said the industry reaction to Smithfield’s announcement was almost disbelief.
“It’s just huge. It’s almost like a weight lifted off because we’ve always had that in the back of our head. Is the plant going to stay open? You go down and see they’re landlocked, and environmentally there’s not much more they can do, and aesthetically it no longer fits,” he said.
“It was built on the edge of town at one point, and that time has long passed. I always thought, ‘Will an announcement like that ever happen?’ And I couldn’t believe it when it happened. It truly is a partnership. We need them, and they need us, and we’re glad it’s going to continue.”
