Dr. Thomas E. Stein, CEO is renowned as one of the nation's leading authorities on the pork industry and pork-related technologies. He has served as the Chief Executive Officer and a Director of MetaFarms since its inception.

Born and raised in the Great State of California, Vice President, Information Technology, Alan Childs brings “totally new concepts” to the livestock industry. His experience on his surfboard off the California coast, combined with his geek-like expertise on the computer, makes Alan a great resource for MetaFarms customers.

Starting his computer development and consulting career in Hollywood, Alan’s clients have included Disney, Boeing, CBS, Larry Flynt, Skywalker Sound, and The People’s Court.

A sudden call from the mid-west was in Alan’s future, though. This call was hockey! Alan packed up and moved his family to the State of Hockey, Minnesota, to immerse his kids in the greatest sport in the world. Alan now coaches the infamous Ice Surfers from Savage, Minnesota.

Since moving to Minnesota Alan has worked for Barr Engineering as the Principal of the Information Technology business unit for 7 years. Projects at Barr included working for industrial manufacturing, environmental management projects, and high-end Internet projects. Under his guidance at Barr the business unit designed and developed ISEEK.org, MNVU.org, and Internet application projects for the State of Minnesota, Jostens, Inc., Koch Refining, 3M, and many others.

After this Alan went into his “.com” phase and worked for two .com companies, serving as Chief Technology Officer at Flowersandgifts.com and Resaleworld.com. Alan designed and developed elaborate web services and web sites for selling flowers and merchandise in the famous B2C (Business-to-Customer) and B2B (Business-to-Business) models. Business and web development partners included Yahoo!, Amazon, and eBay.

Then a call from Tom Stein changed everything for Alan. He saw the writing on the wall and knew he had to be working in livestock management. Now Alan tracks little piggies from “Crate to Plate,” including farrowing rates, growth curves, and dry matter consumed per day. If you’d like to discuss with Alan how a California upbringing, a geek’s outlook and the livestock industry actually fit together quite well, send him an e-mail at achilds@metafarms.com!

Jim Caldwell serves as MetaFarms Chief Operations Officer. Jim has 30 plus years experience in technology companies, both in technical roles and senior management positions. Jim was a founder, President and Chief Operating Officer of Fourth Shift Corporation, a NASDAQ-listed company that developed and sold enterprise application software to mid-market manufacturing companies. Prior to Fourth Shift, Jim spent 20 years with Control Data Corporation in a variety of executive management positions. His last position was Vice President Operations for the Peripheral Products Company, a $1.5B division of Control Data that manufactured disk drives, tape drives, printers and associated supplies. Earlier, Jim was a research mathematician at the Naval Research and Development Center in Washington, DC.

Dale Hiveley currently serves as our Product Development and Planning Director. His areas of concentration are Organizational Infrastructures, Project Management and Process Definition. Dale was born and raised in Iowa in the heart of the pork industry. Although he was mostly a “city boy,” Dale says you can’t help but have an appreciation for the industry and way of life by living smack in the middle of it.

After obtaining his education in Computer Science from Iowa State University, Dale was enticed to the Twin Cities area where the computer industry was growing by leaps and bounds. He began his career at Control Data Corporation in 1969, serving initially as a systems programmer and manager for one of the industry’s first timesharing operating system, which was a forerunner to what is now known as internet technologies. Through increasing managerial responsibilities and software release management at Control Data, Dale became skilled in process definition and formalization as well as facilitating productive team execution. He left Control Data in 1983.

Dale’s next challenge was to take these software development processes into a larger arena. This led to his stint as a Manager at ETA Systems (1983-1989), a manufacturer of super-computers. Dale was responsible for building the Development and Quality Assurance organizations from eight people to a peak of 120 employees. He also built the 24x7 operations staff that oversaw the computer lab facilities containing a vast array of super-computers, mainframes and workstations.

With the emergence of PCs, the next logical step for Dale was to take his software planning and organizational skills and apply them to the next generation of software technology. He accomplished this while serving as Vice President of Information Services at Fourth Shift Corporation (1990-2001). Fourth Shift’s main product was Manufacturing ERP software. Dale’s role included responsibilities for Quality Assurance for the Software Development Department, IT/MIS, Facilities Management (headquarters and remote offices), and Order Fulfillment. Dale’s team was responsible for developing and institutionalizing the processes and tools for the development organization to support configuration management and software productization. As evidenced by his expanded set of responsibilities, Dale’s planning and organizational skills were applied to more company areas than just software development. While at Forth Shift, Dale also served as COO for a consulting subsidiary that provided management and CRM implementation consulting services.

By early 2004 MetaFarms had grown to the point where increasingly formal planning and execution was needed to meet customer content, schedule and quality expectations. Dale was intrigued by the opportunity to take on yet another technology platform, that being the Internet Services delivery model. And reflecting back on his Iowa heritage, the challenge of doing it in the agricultural industry was also enticing. So Dale’s joining the MetaFarms team was the perfect melding of technical expertise and agricultural background. At the end of the day, Dale’s emphasis is placed on achieving quality objectives while also maintaining schedule adherence.

Born and raised on a Wisconsin dairy farm, Lisa Butler is our Project Manager. After leaving the farm for life in the “big city,” Lisa began her career in the hospitality industry with Marriott Hotels and Resorts and spent more than eight years working her way up from PBX Operator to Assistant Marketing Manager.

After marriage and the addition of a daughter to the family, she continued her career and added more than five years of marketing experience in the consumer packaged-goods industry with companies such as Grist Mill (Con Agra) and Malt-O-Meal.

Two years after the birth of her son, Lisa’s passion and interest in technology drove her into the “dot com” phase of her career in late 1999. Resaleworld.com gave her the experience of working with some of the best marketing agencies in the U.S. such as Grey Interactive in New York and Campbell-Mithun in Minneapolis. While at Resaleworld.com, Lisa was also responsible for helping manage a marketing budget of more than $2 million.

In February 2001 Lisa joined the MetaFarms team and continues to experience “life on the farm.”