ELSTOW, Sask. – Take a shower without getting wet, make phosphorescent powder footprints in a black light room or watch piglets sparring in play at the new Prairie Swine Interpretive Centre at Elstow, Sask.
The centre, set to open March 26, will literally offer a window on the world of modern large-scale pig production.
A series of 12 viewing windows set into a specially constructed attic corridor, lined with informational displays and games, overlook pigs in the barns below.
In addition to views of farrowing, nursery, gestation and grow-out rooms, windows to the outside show the distant manure lagoon and adjacent feed bins and mix mills.
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“The pigs will be the heart of the centre,” said Lee Whittington, who sits on the development committee with hog producers and representatives from the pork industry.
He said the interpretive centre is the first of its kind in Canada. A similar facility exists in Denmark and a smaller version is under construction in Alberta.
At the Elstow centre, informational boards and interactive displays will allow visitors to touch, feel, smell and hear the environment below. Visitors will learn how pigs view the world, from eyes on either side of their heads.
The footprints are meant to simulate how people can contaminate the biosecure barns, while the showers reinforce the need to keep barns clean and disease-free.
“Most people are surprised by the level of sophistication in farming,” said Whittington. He cited devices like waterers to hydrate pigs on demand and transponders around their necks that are programmed to dispense computerized rations.
The centre is housed atop a working research facility. Whittington said seeing the facility and its employees at work will put a human face on agriculture while educating people about pig production.
“It’s not just a big concrete and steel construction, but there’s a lot of people working in there having face-to-face contact with the pigs,” he said.
Visitors will be met at a reception room, shown a short video presentation and guided through the centre.
Smell from the 6,000 pigs raised here will be discussed before they enter the building, said Whittington.
Manure handling is followed in charts from barn to injection sites in farm fields. The charts draw comparisons with what happens to human fecal waste.
There’s even a “Where’s Waldo” display, which asks where agriculture is located on a town and country landscape.
Visitors will be able to study and judge the differences between large group housing versus crates in gestation rooms, now a focal point of animal welfare campaigns and those opposed to large scale swine operations.
Whittington said there are pros and cons to both types. Aggressive pigs often end up getting all the feed in larger groups, while those in crates get more individualized care.
Most ideas for the displays and their contents came directly from industry and from producers’ desires “to get people in the barn and more familiar with what it’s all about.” Biosecurity precautions mean few get inside ordinary working barns, said Whittington.
Admission to the centre will be free but available by appointment only. It is expected to appeal to school and conference groups and create part-time employment for local people interested in work as guides.
Whittington hopes to collaborate with other potential attractions like the nearby potash mine, in hopes of creating day-long field tours in rural Saskatchewan.
The centre has raised $900,000 of its $1 million fundraising objective for the centre’s construction and operation.
