I’ve been asked to be on a panel at an upcoming meeting of swine nutritionists where I give my thoughts on what’s new and upcoming in swine housing. As I think about this I’ve come up with several items worth … Continue reading →

At the 2017 South Australia Pig Industry Day, Dr Roger Cambell recently compared the cost of production between several countries producing pork. His goal was to highlight why Australian producers have to be the best in the world at what … Continue reading →

Ag buildings, including swine production facilities, are generally exempt from the UBC (Uniform Building Code). Along with this exemption comes confusion as to how to rate ag buildings as it relates to various fire codes. Currently each insurance company applies … Continue reading →

I had planned to write this blog last Friday but I ended up spending the majority of the afternoon at the doctor’s office with my handicapped daughter. While waiting to be called in to see the doctor I got to … Continue reading →

As I was driving to a producer meeting yesterday in central Iowa I had time to look back at my career in the pork industry. I realized that I’ve been giving presentations to producer groups for at least 40 years … Continue reading →

In the past 2 months I’ve worked on new breed-wean projects and done ventilation audits on breed-wean sites with ESF feeding stations and large pen housing. A common problem with the ESF stations and the large pens (165-275 females/pen) is … Continue reading →

On Monday prior to the Minnesota Pork Congress I had the opportunity to be part of a swine nutrition discussion group that meets quarterly in southern Minnesota. The topic of this quarter’s meeting was to share experiences after the first … Continue reading →

The winter trade show season has begun. Last week was the South Dakota Pork Congress, to be followed by Minnesota this week, Iowa the following and Illinois on February 1. While these shows aren’t as big as they once were, … Continue reading →

With the start of the new year I’ve spent part of this week updating the automatic graphing that I use on several of my historic data sets. This includes not only USDA hogs and pigs inventory numbers but also mandatory … Continue reading →

Last Friday’s USDA Hogs and Pigs report caught many by surprise with both the magnitude of corrections to previous reports and the size of the current inventory. US producers reported a December 1, 2016 inventory of 65,410,000 pigs. This is … Continue reading →