A Wabash County hog farm, Cinder Trail Farms, located southwest of North Manchester, Indiana, is set for production next month in a state of the art hog building that was designed and produced by AirWorks, a division of Whiteshire Hamroc in Albion, Indiana.
An open house was held Friday, March 24th to highlight the new energy efficient hog building which features a patented ventilation system that produces a consistent fresh air environment. Shane Dale with Cinder Trail Farms says the new building is a different model than what you see on most hog farms today. “Our big thing is our herd health because that’s where you make the majority of your money. The pigs stay super healthy in this system, the air is good plus we can run more pigs on the footprint than a normal tunnel barn can. We’re just going to get more return on our investment.”
The barn, which is 107 feet by 420 feet long can house up to 6000 hogs. Dale said they’ll start populating the barn in the first or second week of April. These new buildings feature a patented Vertical Ventilation™ system. Charlie Lemmon, the designer of the AirWorks system, says the main goal is to keep the animals healthy. “To do that, we want to move the contaminants, gases, bacteria and viruses as much as we can from the pig space. We bring our patented duct system that distributes the air within the pig space very uniformly. Once the air exits the ducts, most of the dust and pathogens get drawn down to the floor into the pit and we use gravity to help us do that.”
Lemmon says they’ve tweaked this system over the past 30 years of development. They have 50-60 of these barns across their trade area of northeast Indiana. They are international as well with barns in South Korea, Canada and have 30 to 40 of these barns in China. “The footprint or the pin layout can be whatever you desire, and we are unlimited in length.” said Lemmon, “For instance, in China, we have some buildings that are 930 feet long. We are able to do a lot of things that some conventional systems have limits with.”
Shane Dale said a key selling point for him was the patented ventilation system which in turn leads to a better return on investment. “We’ve had a lot of experience with tunnel barns and conventional barns, cross ventilated barns and you always see a lag from one end of the barn to the other on the same aged pig. We would see a 10 to 15 degree temperature change from the air inlet to the exit fans on a 250 foot barn. When we toured some of Charlie’s barns, the pigs were even, you don’t see that lag you see in a tunnel barn.”
To learn more, you can visit their website www.airworks.org.