Iowa State professor offers best practices to improve safety and reduce costs for hog producers

By Bruce Cochrane, Farmscape

An Assistant Professor with Iowa State University says, by ensuring effective efficient ventilation in the barn, pork producers can maximize comfort and safety while reducing costs at the same time.

Dr. Brett Ramirez, an Assistant Professor in the Department of Agricultural and Biosystems Engineering at Iowa State University, says ventilation really does affect everything in the barn.

He was a guest speaker on Day One of Saskatchewan Pork Industry Symposium 2021 for the "Barn Ventilation: Troubleshooting, Maintenance and Operational Management" session.

”It affects our air temperature, moisture level, whether or not we see condensation on surfaces, uniformity of that air temperature throughout the room. As we get into summertime it affects the air speed across the animals. It's going to affect odor, gas concentrations, dust, disease, organism levels, combustion fumes inside the room. We bring fresh air in, we mix it, pick up all the things we don't want and use our exhaust fans to then pull it out of the room.”

Dr. Ramirez’s research and extension program encompasses swine and poultry production systems with a primary focus on ventilation systems, natural resource and energy efficiency, environmental control and precision livestock farming.

“The fundamental function of ventilation is, as the outdoor temperature increases, we increase our ventilation rate. In winter time or in colder weather our minimum ventilation is generally designed for moisture control and that generally keeps our noxious gas concentration to a reasonable level and then as it warms up outside, we eventually switch over to ventilation rate for temperature control to remove the heat produced by the pigs inside the barn.”

“At the point where the balance temperature intersects ventilation for temperature and moisture control, it's kind of an interesting one to think at and a lot of people don't really have an intuition of when does this really occur, how often do we really spend much time there. Generally minimum ventilation, we're trying to keep that humidity no more than 65 percent inside the room, 70% maybe if we're stretching it but for the most part, we're really trying to remove all the moisture produced by the pigs. It warms up we remove the heat.”

Dr. Ramirez says, when the outdoor temperature is less than 36 degrees Fahrenheit, producers are ventilating for moisture removal and for the times of year when temperatures are above 36 degrees, producers should be ventilating be for heat removal.

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