Life and Times with the Ehingers: farming

I figured out how to get these pictures on quick, so I thought I would quick post while eating lunch! I got pictures of my video shoot from one of the people who came. Here they are!

The primary purpose of the video was to inform consumers about sow housing. The secondary purpose was to talk about the We Care initiative that pork producers follow. It is six ethical principles that we as an industry and we at Dykhuis Farms live out. They are:

We care about food safety and producing safe food
We care about the well-being of our animals
We care about and for the environment
We care about public health and our management practices help protect this
We care about our employees and the safety of the people who work on our farms
We care about the communities that we are a part of

If you want more about pork and pork producers, you can check out the pork.org website or the We Care website.

Here we go with pictures of the day! This is me and Teresa. Teresa was the one who works for National Pork Board and put together the video. She asked the questions that I had to answer. Here we were reviewing the questions while the video crew set up.

This is Bill, the videographer, and me before the shoot. See that black thing? It's the Diva Light 400! Shining light on the diva of the day! Haha!

We did a bunch of filming with me in the pen with the sows. Bill and Teresa were on the left. The woman in the middle with her back to us also works at National Pork Board, the guy knealing down is one of the guys who owns the video production company. Mary from Michigan Pork Producers took this picture. That was the group that followed me around and helped me sound compitent as a pork producer.

Everything that I said had to be filmed multiple times so it felt a lot like reciting lines. It was somewhat discouraging at first because I felt like I was sucking, but Bill was really good about telling me I was doing great.

Bill got in the pen with the camera for a while too.

They took some still pictures too for their stock picture file.

I lulled them to sleep with my monotonous talking!

Jeff, the unit manager at this site, joined me for some footage that will be in the background while I do voice over about training or something like that. Doesn't it look real? Like we are really talking about work?

After being in the rooms with pens, we moved to the room with stalls to talk about this type of housing. Mary must have gotten sick of taking pictures because I have very few of the rest of the shoot.

We also did some video outside. It was really windy and the cars by the office were quite loud.

Overall it was a lot of fun. I told them I would do it again, but not right away. They told me they probably would ask me again... yay... I'll post the link to the video once it's edited. Teresa thought it would be the end of November.

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Check out the completed videos here:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iQf6YOZVeUA

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HachwkjOUJA

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ij3QyIP-xZ4