Technology clears the air for pork producers

MILFORD, Ind. — Renovating and remodeling isn’t just for houses. Pork producers across the United States, facing rising costs of everything from building materials to energy, are turning to remodeling pig barns.

And one of the first upgrades is changing and improving how barns are ventilated.

“A lot of producers are looking at remodeling and one of the first things they look at is these higher tech fans,” said Randy Curless, producer services manager with PigTek, a division of Chore-Time, based in Milford.

When he talks about pigs and maximizing profits and minimizing costs for producers, Curless speaks from experience. He was a pork producer for almost 40 years before exiting the business in 2017.

And the pace of technology in the U.S. pork industry has advanced so fast that many of the products that Curless now deals with weren’t even on the market when he was producing pigs.

“A lot of the newest technology that’s come out in the last few years was not available in 2017. It’s come out that recently. A lot of the high tech ‘smart’ controls, those were just starting to come on the market back then. I had not changed any of my controls over to those, but that is something I probably would have done as we remodeled rooms and barns,” Curless said.

One of the most popular upgrades now is to high-tech fans.

“These fans feature permanent magnet motors. They are direct drive fans so you don’t have to deal with belts and tighteners. They have permanent magnet motors, which means you are not using electricity to generate the magnet that is needed to spin the motor,” Curless said.

The new fans can be attached to smart barn controllers, like PigTek’s PigCentral Controller.

“Instead of having your minimum ventilation fans running and then, all of a sudden, this big 36-inch fan kicks on and sucks all the heat out of the barn and shuts off, so now your heaters have to come back on and warm everything back up and you have this seesaw effect with the environment inside the barn, these new smart controls ramp those direct drive fans up slowly. You can have more fans running, but at a slower speed, like 35% or 40%, and you’ll have a much more even environment pulling air across your pigs,” Curless said.

The new fans and controllers can be especially effective in the Midwest spring and fall, when temperature swings can wreak havoc with energy bills.

“With our Midwest weather, where it might be 40 degrees in the morning, but 70 by the late afternoon, those fans ramp up slowly and you don’t have those surges where a 36-inch or 48-inch fan kicks on and causes a multiple-degree drop,” Curless said.

Curless said changing out the old fans for new ones has been a popular first step for producers looking to boost energy efficiency and improve the barn environment for their pigs.

“Producers are looking at remodeling some of their older barns and bringing them up to date with new technology. They will go in and change out the fans, put in these direct drive fans. They are stainless steel so they will last. They put those in and a lot of times they upgrade their controllers, too. There are new advancements in heaters. We’ve got heaters that are more energy efficient, so they can lower their heating costs,” Curless said.

Producers also are looking at changing how barns are ventilated.

“We are seeing more people go in and actually close up their curtain barns and go with fan ventilation. They can close up those curtains, put six inches of insulation on those sidewalls to hold that environment tighter inside and then go in and make it more of a mechanically-ventilated barn,” Curless said.

Health and welfare of their pigs is paramount and Curless said updating ventilation is one of the ways that producers continue to focus on pig health.

“They look at it this way — if I can keep the environment more stable, I can keep it better for my pigs. If producers can keep their biosecurity tight, keep disease off their farm and keep the environment in their barns stable, they can keep pigs healthy and they can get by with fewer or no antibiotics and that is a big improvement,” Curless said.

Another issue that improving technology can address is the ongoing labor concerns in the swine industry, at the farm level.

Technology ranging from sensors, that are able to monitor everything from pigs coughing to the levels of humidity and ammonia in barns, to cameras, that allow producers to keep a real-time eye on their livestock from their phones, will help producers who face labor challenges.

“As we get more and more high-speed internet out to rural areas, I think we will see more use of these camera systems, where producers can monitor those pigs and keep an eye on them, and sensors, where computers will help producers monitor the health of their pigs. There are a lot of new and exciting tools and technology on the way for the industry,” Curless said.