Jim: Welcome back to Swine Insights unleashed market momentum insights from the 2024 hog building report and facility trends. Brent Hershey – welcome back to the program.
Brent: Good to be here.
Jim: Exciting news you have a new construction complete in compliance with prop 12. We have some photos to share from your venture as we share what’s going on with your new building I want you to comment on the photos and explain to our audience the process and procedure and why you expanded.
Brent: So, this farm was a 2000 south farm and we decided we wanted to change it to prop 12. A couple things happened – we had already went to large pens in the original barn post-breeding but now we have had to get rid of all the gestation breeding crates. With that took up a lot of space. We’re using a system called Condos 45 square feet by 48 square feet so every three or four gestation stalls becomes a condo. So, we needed about 35% more of facility square foot square footage. 35-38%. So what happened here is the two barn complex to the left there is the original gestation barn that housed all the gestation for 2000 outh. We built this barn to the right and connected it with a corridor so that we could have that additional square footage we needed to spread the sows out to 24 square feet. And to also implement our sow condo breeding. This new barn is 8-foot with a deep cement pit underneath. It has 4 foot cement sidewalls entirely around it so the sows are around that cement sidewall and it’s an insulated from there so you can see that corridor that connect. The ventilation system is tunnel plus design. We are utilizing the scove product for all direct drive fans for ventilating the barn.
If you keep going Jim, the next picture right there we are not using curtains. We are moving away from curtains to a scove inlet door. It’s an insulated door. The top opens first and the bottom second. We really like this product. Again it’s a scove product and this part has these doors on it and saves us closing up in the winter. Much tighter seak and less maintenance.
Here is the inside. If you look at the top of the ceiling you see black inlets. That is all ceiling inlets. The first 30% of ventilation comes through the attic before it transitions to the tunnel.
Another thing we are doing in here is using tunnel plus system so that incorporates using those blue fans that you see see there. They are about every 60 feet through the barn and they blow down on the animals and we have water systems on them. We found this to be extremely effective. We like it better than evaporative cooling cells. It’s lower maintenance, simpler and it operates a bit more cost up front but the effective cooling of it and the water we have no degradation of environment for our 400-foot long building. From end to end. It’s just as cool middle 100 feet before the dans as it inlets with the system.
We have this system in two gestation barns already and we put it in 5 years ago. Now we have this in a new farm. Here is the center alleyway that we access the barn and so it’s a center alleyway end to end. We’ve got pens on either side and feed staunch around it.
There’s a typical pen and something I want to point out here is the feed trough we used the flat stainless steel liner so that space counts in the square footage. We’re just dropping feed on a flat liner it’s about 20 inches deep. Second thing, I want to point out that we used a new lighting system. We are using the HATO lighting system H-A-T-O DC led lighting system. It has automatic dimming, long-day lighting, and it’s a pretty nice system. We didn’t need to run all the wires. Conduit in Pennsylvania it’s a seal-tight wire system. The lights are sealed right. That lighting system comes with an 8-year warranty. We investing more in lighting and more lighting. We’re running a higher lighting intensity and we’re updating the old gestation with a whole new lighting system in it. There’s a HATO lighting system we are putting in right now to beef up that lighting.
Just some nice things we are doing. You can see the sows are against concrete up four feed and from there on is an aluminum-covered wall. Right there to the left in that picture, you see a fan poking in.
That’s one of those fans we use every 60 feet. We put a water system on there. We spray the water on the animals we’re sweating for the animal. It keeps the air down on the animal. It’s a very effective way to cool these sows with this system. We have been through heat waves of 102 degrees for 4 days straight and we haven’t seen production drop through that. We are seeing in fact a steady production. It’s amazing how successful that system is.
Jim: So successful all around Brent. Thanks for taking the time to share the journey and photos with us.