The fix is in; according to Brad Hennen the award-winning inventor of the new Pig Chute designed to save time, money and wear and tear on the hog producer’s body while doing an even more proficient job.
Hennen, who has a finishing barn outside of Ghent, MN that holds approximately 750 pigs did so with a pig conveyor chute that restrains pigs and makes it much easier to vaccinate them. The new chute also helps to reduce broken needles that sometimes occur during the vaccination process when pigs are difficult to manage.
This project started almost five years ago as part of a National Pork Board Task Force charged with eliminating broken pork needles. The industry came at it from several angles including better pork quality assurance training for the operator making better needles that don’t break, detectable needles and better detection equipment at the processing plant. The task force even looked at needle-free injection equipment, which the industry did not adopt widely due to dust and humidity in hog barns.
“It’s not a widespread problem, but even one in a million needles is 120 times a year in the United States pork industry, right? So that’s too many.”
While approaching it from those different angles, people needed help to properly restrain large numbers of pigs in a timely and humane manner.
While at the meeting in Atlanta, GA Hennen thought about helping his brother vaccinate thousand-pound steers in his feedlot and never bend much less break a needle.
“And it isn’t because a steer is calmer about receiving a shot. It’s because we restrained the steers. So I needed to figure out a way to restrain pigs.”
Vaccinating a thousand cattle in a day is a big day. But processing a thousand pigs in an hour, most farmers would say, “That’s too slow. Get that thing out of here. I will go back to doing it the way I was.”
The biggest challenge from the start was the throughput challenge. A Tyson Foods member on the task force invited him to watch how they stunned pigs electrically since they switched over to CO2 stunning. When doing electrical stunning, this conveyor idea Hennen uses is similar to what they used for full-size pigs for stunning purposes.
How does it work? The chute has two conveyors each going around several pulleys, so to speak, with drums at the end. The conveyors are side by side several inches apart and formed in a V to be closer together on the bottom and wider apart on the top at roughly a 50 or 55-degree angle.
“We chase the pigs into it, and they have just a slight jump up so that their feet are off the ground. And once their feet are off the ground, they’re wedged in and there’s not a lot they can do except watch the world go by.”
The conveyor’s length is six feet; typically, a skilled crew of two or three vaccinates the pigs as they go by. The speed is adjustable for the learning curve of the operator. It’ll go near zero at its slowest range, and then the top speed is two feet per second, which works well for an experienced vaccinator. It’s also adjustable for width and height to accommodate different-sized pigs. So it’ll handle anywhere from a 10-pound pig to at least a 40-pound pig.
When contacted for this article Hennen and his wife were in Puerto Rico this week because the American Farm Bureau has a yearly contest that tries to identify and give recognition to companies or individuals who are innovating in areas related to agriculture.
“I was awarded a chance to be a semi-finalist in this contest with ten chosen semi-finalists.”
While not making the final round, his Pig Chute invention allowed them to enjoy a good holiday, all expenses paid. •
— By Harry Siemens
