Ten years ago, Sean Dolan and his father, Jim, hooked up with Aaron and Kenny Cook to invest in equal shares of Newton Pork, a 625-sow, breeding-gestation site near Coggon, IA. In 2002, the Cooks built another sow unit and sold their shares to the Dolans.

Like most hog facilities, the Newton Pork operation's gestation stalls and feeding system began to show plenty of wear and tear after a decade of use. The 1997-vintage breeding-gestation barn's cement troughs were leaking and feeding tubes were badly rusted, making feeding more “by guess and by golly” than the individual sow feeding they were designed for. Additionally, Sean felt the 22-in.-wide stalls were too narrow for big sows. “We knew we had to do something,” he relates.

Dolan's search for remodeling options began in earnest in late 2006. A key consideration was their shared finishing capacity for 6,000 pigs — Sean and his brother, Mark, each with a 1,500-head, wean-to-finish barn, and their dad with a 1,000-head nursery that flows pigs to two, 1,000-head finishers and another 1,000-head wean-to-finish barn. All barns are divided into 500-head rooms.

“In January 2007, we moved from continuous farrowing to group farrowing in a two-week rotation because we saw the benefits of having single groups going into the finishers,” Sean explains. Two rooms of 24 crates each are filled every two weeks.

Although he prefers gestation stalls, having sat through numerous meetings of the National Pork Producers Council's animal health and food safety committee and the U.S. Animal Health Association's animal welfare committee, Sean saw some major changes in sow housing coming. “Dad has always instilled in us to try to stay ahead of the curve, so I thought I would get a jump on the pen-style housing,” he explains.

Various group pen configurations and electronic sow feeding were considered. In the end, Sean chose a large pen design with a trickle-feeding system. The extensive remodeling plan was set in motion on June 1, 2007, and what followed was a series of sometimes “hard lessons” that he shares openly in hopes that others might benefit from what he has learned.

Hard Lesson No. 1

The first lesson came with the decision to temporarily move the sow herd into two outside lots. Breeding and feeding challenges ensued, and the penalty for this decision showed up later in the form of much lower farrowing rates.

“The sows were strung out when we moved them back into the gestation barn, so we were behind the eight ball right from the start. Looking back, if we could have found a finisher for temporary sow housing, that might have been better,” Dolan says.

Remodeling Package

The first remodeling challenge was that there were very few trickle-feeding systems installed in the country, so first-hand knowledge about installation and management was hard to come by.

Dolan turned to local equipment and service providers he was familiar with. The first order of business with the large pen design was the ability to identify, track and sort sows easily and effectively. Eastern Iowa Pork (EIP) Mfg., Earlville, IA, had equipped other buildings, and they helped coordinate a package that included the Automatic Gestation System (AGS) manufactured by Schick Enterprises. Automated Production (AP) Systems and Big Dutchman provided feed drops and delivery lines.

Four rows of gestation stalls (448 stalls) were removed. Feed delivery lines, feed drop boxes and controllers were installed. The AGS sorter was positioned over a slotted floor, adjacent to an alleyway that runs the length of the building.

Here's how the system works: Each morning at 6:30, the system automatically turns on the feed delivery augers to fill the adjustable drop boxes with 2.25 lb. of feed. At 7:15, the controller actuates the automatic cable system (like those used for natural ventilation curtains) to raise the drop box balls and engage the starter motors. As the feed drops into the second feed line (below the drop boxes), the auger turns at a rate of 3.5 revolutions/min., slowly moving feed to an offset feed drop tube that delivers feed to an 18-in.-wide concrete slab, divided by 18-in.-long gates anchored at 22-in.-wide increments. The feed drops at the rate of ¼ to ⅓ lb./min. A timer allows the sows 20 minutes to eat. The feeding cycle is repeated in the afternoon, thus allocating 4.5 lb./sow/day.