Mikkel Pates / Agweek Compart Family Farms sells its premium products through restaurants, and to online customers through a store based on one of their farmsteads. Photo taken Dec. 14, 2021, at Nicollet, Minnesota.
BRED FOR TASTE
Minnesota hog producers market ‘the Black Angus of pork’
By Mikkel Pates | Agweek
W
hile COVID-19 nudged many livestock producers into branded meat marketing, one family — the Comparts of Nicollet — have been at it for 20 years. Compart Family Farms Premium Duroc Pork Inc. moved into marketing as a result of earlier production and market shocks. The Compart family over the years has shifted from a cropping to the purebred seedstock, expanded into commercial hog production, and finally into a branded pork program that today accounts for 50% to 60% of the family’s farm revenue. Shortened to “Compart Family Farms,” they sell branded meat cuts online, to restaurants, and through distributors, marketing a whopping 2,400 pigs a week (125,000 animals per year). They proudly label their products the “black
Page 14 – March 2022 – West Central Tribune
Angus of pork.” They are among the elite pork producers in a state that ranks in the top three in hog production. Along with their pig enterprises, the Comparts raise about 2,900 acres of crops in Nicollet County and near Princeton. About 60% is corn and up to 40% soybeans. They feed almost all of the corn to their pigs. They sell soybeans to CHS, about 25 miles away in Mankato, where they also buy soybean meal. The Comparts have faced challenges along the road to becoming a supplier of premier pork, now marketed as Compart Duroc. “A lot of times you come out stronger than when you went into them,” said Jim Compart, one of the partners in the business.
