The Iowa Stater
Dec. 15, 1995
Weight watching for pigs
Inventors always have bugs to work out in their inventions.It makes it a little more difficult when the bugs weigh 300-some pounds and are as smart as pigs. In fact, they are pigs.
ISU animal scientist Mark Honeyman and ISU agricultural engineer Steve Hoff had a plan for an automatic sow feeding machine. Part of a Leopold Center for Sustainable Agriculture project on low-cost group housing of sows, the machine would allow producers to manage diets individually while maintaining the group lifestyle.
As designed, the machine would let sows in one at a time, weigh them, then put them on either a pig-out or a lose-weight-now diet.
"It directs them to what we call the salad bar or the dessert tray," Honeyman said.
Sounded simple enough. But getting pigs through an automatic feeding system isn't as easy as, say, placing mice in a maze. Mice will obediently scurry off to find the cheese. Pigs aren't naturally inclined to be a willing cog in any such system, as the researchers found out.
The sows butted down, chewed up and weaseled around, through or under early versions of the invention. But the researchers persevered. After almost three years of trials, they created a sow--proof prototype.
The system -- a collection of whirling wheels, swinging gates and automatic opening and closing devices -- looks like a page from Rube Goldberg, but the idea remains simple: A hungry sow enters the system and is weighed. A computer identifies the sow by reading a transponder in its ear tag. The computer scrutinizes the current weight, calculates the sow's nutritional needs and then directs the animal to the appropriate feeder.
"Our results indicate that the system can effectively maintain a sow's body condition for future reproductive performance," Honeyman said.
The researchers have applied for a patent.
-- Brian Meyer, Ag Info Service
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