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FARM VISIT ▶▶▶


way to develop leadership and communication skills in our students.” The first online visit started on 7 December 2017 – and grad- ually the concept drew more visits. In 2019, the year prior to Covid-19, there was on average one virtual tour per week – and since the pandemic, the tours have become more fre- quent for targeted audiences. Currently there are two or three per week, each attracting 30–40 attendees. Early in 2021, the 250th virtual tour was approaching fast.


The presenters at the SDSU swine farm At SDSU, roughly six tour guides are available to take their au- diences on a tour through a barn. The majority of tour guides are women. Prof Thaler says, “Most of the students grew up on pig farms themselves. It’s an area they are passionate about and they love to tell the story and help the pork industry.” Eidson adds, “What we look for is students who are intently engaged in their career in ag science. We want serious stu- dents who will take this seriously. And they see it as a chance to learn.… The experience as a tour guide is viewed as a solid addition to a student’s resume.” The tour guides are assisted by a moderator at a distance, lo- cated in Kansas, who is in the middle between the tour guide, the programme presenter and audience. All the hardware the guides need is a mobile phone and a gimbal stabiliser. Eidson says, “We’ve tried a lot of different things and the most success we had in terms of connectivity and the best resolution is the current generation iPhone or Android phone and fantastic cell coverage near the barn. We go directly from the barn all through the internet. After several hundred presentations, I can’t think of one where we had catastrophic connection problems.” Eidson adds, “When we first started this, someone had the idea: Isn’t a hog barn going to be very noisy? Don’t we need noise cancelling microphones? And then the first time we walked in the barn and found all these content animals. The sound of a content sow tells a huge story. So we learnt that the ambient sound in the barn tells its own story, because it’s quiet and it’s orderly.” The virtual tours are carried out in the two barns near the campus, as the major limitation is wifi access, Prof Thaler notes. Yet the farrowing/lactating barn is most in demand anyway. He says. “Everybody wants to see baby pigs.”


The audience watching the tour The audience attending a virtual tour can be diverse, with the majority of attendees never even having considered visiting a pig farm before. Usually, it’s the National Pork Board taking the initiative to set up virtual tours by reaching out to various audiences such as human dietitians, members of the medical sector such as nurses (because of their interest in nutrition and antibiotics) and people from education – from high


schools, community colleges and even schools of veterinary medicine. Eidson notes that in 2020 many questions were re- lated to Covid-19 and how that had impacted food supply. Prof Thaler says, “With Zoom, suddenly a programme that had been ‘in person’ in largely 12 states generally in the Midwest and North Carolina, now has a national footprint. And we have reached audiences on both coasts. The further away an audience is from the Midwest, not surprisingly, the less the audience is even aware of pork production. It’s like a different country to them, to see how these animals are raised.” Responses have been very good, both Prof Thaler and Eidson explain, as they often use surveys after the virtual tours. “We can see opinions change; we ask them before and after and we see a shift of 20–30% towards a positive view of pork production.” And obviously, the audience learns a thing or two. If they joined Katelyn Zeamer’s tour, they will surely never forget the answers 12-14, foster sows and 2½.


South Dakota: Many animals, few people


, South Dakota is about the size of Belarus but has only 885,000 inhabitants – an average of 4.42 people per km2


, making it the fifth least populous state in the US. In


the west of the state, mountainous ranges and higher alti- tudes dominate the landscape; most pigs (2.3 million) and beef cattle (4 million) are kept on the eastern border, where the state borders both Minnesota and Iowa. That is also the location of Brookings, where the SDSU campus is found. Not surprisingly, the university’s curriculum reflects the state’s emphasis on agriculture.


▶ PIG PROGRESS | Volume 37, No. 2, 2021


A relatively large portion of the population in South Dako- ta works in agriculture. With an area of almost 200,000 km2


The virtual tour guide team dur- ing a training session, with Katelyn Zeamer on the left.


www.pigprogress.net/ worldofpigs


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