swine facilities is granted. For those visitors who would like only to view the animals, but not necessarily go near them, the sow barn has also been equipped with a viewing gallery.
Visitors onsite can also look at the lactating sows through a window from the aisle, thus avoiding a showering-in procedure.
A National Pork Board policy The majority of visitors, however, do not physically visit the farm these days but access it from anywhere using a screen and headphones. Typically these tours form part of a larger programme including other speakers and a presenter. They last for about ten minutes, and they have roughly 30–40 peo- ple at a time. The road towards that concept has been a long one. The initi- ative to let swine industry professionals talk about their work has existed for more than 15 years and was set up by the US National Pork Board as “Operation Main Street” (OMS). The aim? Helping pork producers and veterinarians get better trained to tell their story – simply to go out and share the message in presentations to improve the image of pig farming. For that approach to be successful, the National Pork Board is relying on speakers bureau Eidson & Partners, based in Kansas City, KS, to train the swine professionals to get their message across. The bureau’s owner Al Eidson explains, “The whole idea is to take people in the industry, train them and deploy them. And of course, when Covid-19 was declared last March, a national emergency in this country, the whole programme overnight flipped over and became virtual.… Covid-19 made it acceptable to do presentations and tours remotely. It quickly normalised.”
Farm staff at gestating sows, being observed by visitors looking through the windows.
Those gestating sows kept in group housing are managed through ESF systems. 32
▶ PIG PROGRESS | Volume 37, No. 2, 2021
Video about showering The concept of virtual tours emerged several years before Covid-19 when SDSU student Maddie Schaefer Hokanson did a video about showering into a swine unit using the new barn. That sparked the idea of having her do live tours with her phone, Prof Thaler explains. “The programme just snowballed after that.” Plus, as Eidson says, “It’s very hard with a PowerPoint to con- vey what happens in a barn. You can do it with video and that helps. Our plan was to train undergraduate students, princi- pally in animal science, as tour guides and do live virtual tours of the farrowing barn. And it started as a great experiment. We had no idea what would come out of it.” Prof Thaler explains there are several benefits for SDSU to be part of the virtual tours. “First, one of president Barry Dunn’s visions for the new swine unit was to ‘demystify’ pork produc- tion. By utilising technology, we open the doors of modern pork production literally to the whole world. Secondly, pork producers across the region invested financially in our unit, and by helping educate the non-ag population about how we stress animal well-being and animal husbandry in everything we do, it will hopefully make it easier for responsi- bly placed swine barns to be built. Finally, it is an excellent
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