Ryan Grubb woke up every morning and walked the barns. He had to get the pigs up.

How was the water running? Was the feed moving correctly? What about the ventilation? Then the animals themselves: How did they look? Any that appeared sick? Grubb walked the pens to look for any problems.

That’s how the new Alabama football offensive coordinator launched his professional career: pig farming.

Grubb didn’t get his first job in coaching football. Instead, he spent 6 1/2 years working in Kingsley, Iowa, a town of about 1,400 people about 30 minutes from Nebraska, on his family’s hog farms.

The experience, which included management and chores, gave him a unique foundation of hard work on which he built his rise to the top of college football. After a year running the Seattle Seahawks offense in 2024, Grubb returns to the college game where he will call plays for Alabama’s offense in 2025. Spring practice starts Monday.

He won national championships at Sioux Falls and orchestrated elite offenses at Washington, but there’s nothing on many coaching resumes quite like managing 80,000 hogs.

“When you’re moving pigs and you’re literally standing in manure because you’re pushing pigs, it’s pretty humbling,” his sister Nicole Nearman said. “All you’re doing is the job.”

‘You’ve got some agriculture in your blood’

Iowa might as well be called the hog state. No place in the country produces more.

Iowa farmers sold $10.9 billion worth of pigs in 2022, per the USDA. The next closest? Minnesota ($3.6 billion), North Carolina ($3.1 billion) and Illinois ($2.1 billion).

Jack Grubb, Grubb’s father, grew up on dairy farms. They had pigs and chickens, but dairy was the emphasis. Later, Jack Grubb decided to make pigs the sole focus. He was working in financial planning at the time but saw a prime business opportunity in hog farming.

“Once you’ve got some agriculture in your blood, you can’t hardly ever get away from it,” Jack Grubb said. “It seems like you’re pulled into it.”

It happened to Grubb. He was around farms going back to his childhood.

In college, he played football and was a captain for Buena Vista University, a nearby Division III school. He graduated in 1999 with a bachelor’s degree in business administration. Then Grubb was set to become a teacher and a coach. Or so Jack Grubb thought. But it didn’t happen that way. Conversations soon began about Grubb getting into the hog business.

Well, we’ve got plenty of work. That’s not the problem. I’m not sure where this is going to lead. But you’re more than welcome.

The Grubbs were building their hog farming business. Grubb and his Buena Vista teammate and friend Bart Boustead had already been part of it. Grubb and Boustead helped build barns for the Grubbs and others in the area while in college. It made for an easy decision to hire them full-time.

“I know how hard both of them work,” Jack Grubb said.

Grubb and Boustead each put classroom careers on hold; Boustead even left the job he already had at a Catholic school.

“(The Grubbs) offered me a little more money than I was making there,” Boustead said. “I said, ‘Well I’ll give it a shot.’”

‘Not easy labor’

Grubb had multiple techniques he could use to herd about 170 pigs, each weighing about 280-290 pounds, onto trucks to go to market.

A panel can be used to usher the hogs toward the exit of the barn. Sometimes a gentle push with the panel can be required if a pig is lollygagging.

“You do not hit them, you do not strike them,” Nearman said, “but you’re allowed to push.”

A rattle can be another tool. So is light. Pigs will go toward the light, so Grubb could put one over the door to get them moving.

“There are different strategies to move these animals in a healthy way,” said Nearman, who worked on the same farms Grubb did. “You don’t want them to get hurt.”

This process is called a loadout. It’s a common occurrence on pig farms. Loadouts happen at any time of day, even 2 a.m., as many as four times in one 24-hour period.

“That doesn’t mean you don’t have to work your regular day, because you do,” Jack Grubb said. “You still have to do all the chores and all the other things that are involved.”

Grubb had no strict hours; He worked as long as it took to succeed. Problems don’t care about time of day.

An alarm could go off in the barn any time of day, prompting an automated phone call to Grubb that wouldn’t stop until he handled it. Maybe a heater was out, or the auger line broke.

The 200-foot line was how the feed was transported to all of the pigs in the building. Grubb would have needed to fix it, either welding it, repairing it or putting in an entirely new one.

“That’s not easy labor,” Nearman said. “You’re pulling this piece of steel, this coiled steel through a 200-foot line. And you have to do it. There’s no one else.”

Farmers must be versatile, able to do everything from fix water lines and gas lines to complete slight electrical work. A Grubb family philosophy is that they wouldn’t ask someone to do something on a farm they haven’t already done themselves.

“You don’t do titles,” Nearman said. “You do work. That’s Ryan in a nutshell.”

Work, paired with attention to detail. Every day on the job demands it. Maybe the water in one spot isn’t dispensing properly. All of a sudden, there’s a pen of pigs without hydration.

“It doesn’t take long for them to go down,” Jack Grubb said. “Just like a human.”

Pigs are the product, and Grubb wanted to raise them in the best condition possible.

“We’re not just out here as the movies portray, throwing a bucket of slop into a pen,” Boustead said. “It’s an agribusiness.”

From pigs…to pigskin

Later in his days as a hog farmer, Grubb started coaching high school football on the side.

He worked as the offensive coordinator at Kingsley-Pierson from 2003-04. At one point during that time, Grubb held an important conversation with his dad about coaching football.

I think I really enjoy this.

Jack Grubb wasn’t surprised. He knew how much his son loved the sport. He remembers Grubb, even when out of football, going back to Buena Vista a few times a year with Boustead to take in games.

You need to do what you enjoy doing.

“What more surprises me is he didn’t do it right away,” Jack Grubb said.

So in 2005, off Grubb went. He left the farms for South Dakota State. There, his days coaching college football began.

Nick Kelly is an Alabama beat writer for AL.com and the Alabama Media Group. Follow him on X and Instagram.