Prior to the World Pork Expo I met with a group of Brazilian equipment dealers to review US swine ventilation for both curtain and tunnel wean-finish facilities. Part of the presentation included a discussion of deep pit manure storage versus … Continue reading
Summer heat has arrived in the upper Midwest. As happens every year, slaughter weights decline because hot pigs don’t eat. Every summer slaughter weights decline. USDA reports that for the past 10 years slaughter weights in July compared to early … Continue reading
Last week I wrote about the 2015 MetaFarms data summary for nursery, grow-finish and wean-finish sites. For feed utilization I cited both feed conversion (pounds of feed per pound of live weight gain) and feed cost per pound of live … Continue reading
A few weeks ago MetaFarms (www.metafarms.com) shared with me the summary of pig performance for all batches that closed out in 2015. This record system now has summaries released from 2009 to 2015 so we have a somewhat look at … Continue reading
This spring I’ve been involved with the planning/design for several new grow-finish research barns. At World Pork Expo I learned of several other planned facilities. When you combine these new barns with the existing facilities, the research capabilities of private … Continue reading
As I prepare this week for several presentations to various foreign visitors coming to the US for the World Pork Expo, I’m thinking about Expo. I think most people attend Expo for 2 reasons. The primary reason – it is … Continue reading
As Kent Bang from AgStar stated in a recent blog, we live in a dynamic time for the pork industry. Producers have strong equity, there are several new slaughter plants under construction and the world wants our product. The only … Continue reading
In the past few weeks I’ve worked on several water projects for breed-wean sites. In several instances on-farm water storage was being added in response to water flow issues associated with the rural water district sources for the sites. The … Continue reading
As producers of high quality protein for the world’s population, we often get challenged that our ‘system’ of production exploits limited resources and contributes to global warming. For most of us, finding or even having a basic understanding of the … Continue reading
In 1988 while driving to a swine records meeting at Swine Graphics (a then start-up record company), Dr Ron Brodersen and I got into a long discussion in my pickup of space utilization in production facilities. At that time we … Continue reading