DES MOINES, Iowa — The switch to open housing can bring unexpected challenges for hog barn workers and reveal previously irrelevant deficits, says a leading researcher.
However, new workers with the right skills are appearing just as open housing is taking over the hog business.
“You are looking for people who are both technical and animal oriented,” Harold Gonyou of the Prairie Swine Centre near Saskatoon told a presentation at the recent World Pork Expo in Des Moines.
“Can you attract a technical person to your farm?”
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Open housing systems for gestating sows that rely on electronic sow feeders (ESF) require barn workers who are willing to work with computers.
Gonyou said that has been a problem for some producers in the early stages of open housing. A farmer told him that a good and valued barn worker was likely going to leave the job because he hated working with computers.
“He does not interact with them. He does not want to sit down with a computer,” the producer told Gonyou a few years ago.
“The staff member did not fit the new system, or the new system did not fit the staff member.”
ESF systems work well to keep gestating sows from fighting. Each sow receives only a specified amount of food per day, which means there is no reason for the sows to fight after an initial commingling period.
However, the system has to be monitored to ensure that all the sows are eating enough. If one or more are not, it might mean they are sick. The system will reveal the problem, but the barn worker in charge of monitoring the pigs needs to be willing to look through data on a computer. It’s a job that most barn workers did not have to do before open housing systems with ESF were introduced.
However, Gonyou said the problems aren’t as bad as they were a few years ago because young barn workers don’t tend to be afraid of computers.
“This 10 years ago was a much greater issue,” he said.
“Today we have more tech-savvy youth and we have better systems.”
However, he said a willingness to work with computers still isn’t automatic in the countryside.
“Can you find a person who likes working with computers and also likes working on a pig farm?”
