PHOTO: SDSU
PHOTO: SDSU
FARM VISIT ▶▶▶
Opening new avenues for pig promotion
BY VINCENT TER BEEK, EDITOR, PIG PROGRESS
Demystifying the pork industry – that is the goal of the virtual tours through the swine education and research facility of South Dakota State University (SDSU). The research farm is the only academic facility in the US to offer a live look behind the scenes to a wide range of audiences. Since Covid-19, demand for the visits has soared. Time for Pig Progress to take a look as well.
“H Profile
Name: Prof Robert Thaler. Location: Brookings, SD, United States. Farm: The SDSU Swine Education and Research Unit consists of three barns on two sites, all dedicated to education and research. The onsite facility is a 150-sow farrow-to-finish unit with, directly adjacent, a 1,200-head capacity grow-finisher unit. In addition, there is also a commercial style offsite grow-finisher unit with an- other 1,200 places. The research facility runs roughly 20–25 trials per year. Apart from a swine unit, the university’s College of Agri- culture, Food and Environmental Sciences also has a new cow-calf unit, in addition to an existing dairy unit, sheep unit and beef feedlot.
ow many piglets does a sow have each time?” “What happens when a sow has more piglets than she has nipples?”
“How many litters does a sow have per year?” To anyone in the swine business these questions will proba- bly sound familiar – these are typical for outsiders who gen- erally are oblivious as to what goes on inside swine barns. And that’s exactly why these questions are placed prominent- ly at the beginning of this article. The questions were asked live to Katelyn Zeamer, graduate research assistant in Animal Sciences at SDSU, while she was standing inside a farrowing barn filming herself in a promotional video for the US Pork Checkoff. At SDSU, virtual visitors are welcome to come and take a look inside the facilities at the university’s Swine Education and Re- search Unit, located in Brookings, SD. Whether they hail from Los Angeles or New York and whether they work in agriculture or not, they are all welcome to join for a “virtual barn tour”. Visitors come from all over the United States. They can be thousands of kilometres away from the barn, yet for ten or 15 minutes they can suddenly enter the world of sows, piglets, lactation pens, phase feeding and corn and soy diets – elem- ents that are normally only vaguely understood if not com- pletely unknown to visitors. First of all – what will they see?
The university facility The animal science faculty at SDSU has traditionally focused on animal nutrition and meat science research. For many years, the university has had swine farm facilities for teaching and (external) research. In 2011 an entirely new swine re- search facility was approved, as the previous facilities had be- come outdated. A new facility, worth US$ 7.4 million, and paid for by gifts from pork producers and allied industry part- ners from over 125 companies in agriculture, was eventually opened in October 2016. The research unit consists of three barns on two sites. The first two barns are about 400m from the SDSU campus. To- gether these two are a 150-sow farrow-to-finish operation. The first barn houses the breeding animals in five groups of 30, with gestating sows being kept in both individual stalls as well as pens, to be able to show both systems. In lactation,
30 ▶ PIG PROGRESS | Volume 37, No. 2, 2021
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