Rural Issue

Stalled Out: The next round in the sow housing fight (Part 2)

 

Producers take a cautious approach

How is the pork industry responding to the calls for gestation-stall free pork?  Brownfield’s Ken Anderson asked that question at the recent World Pork Expo and found that most producers are taking a cautious approach.  Here’s the second report in his four-part series on the sow housing issue.

AUDIO: Stalled Out series: second of four reports (1:03 MP3)

COPY:

The trade show at this year’s World Pork Expo featured a wide array of sow housing systems.  We asked Tom Stuthman with Advanced Production Systems what he was seeing and hearing from producers.

“Everyone is tire kicking, for certain—everyone is looking at their options today,” Stuthman says. “We’re seeing gradual conversions, but most of those conversions have to do when people are doing expansions—then the expansion will be pen.

“Whether or not they’ll switch to total open pen in the future, it depends on what the market requires.”

Howard Hill of Iowa Select Farms, president-elect of the National Pork Producers Council, says those new systems require a significant investment.

“I, for one, don’t think that we’re going to have a mass conversion,” Hill says. “Right now producers are not making money—we’ve got red ink—and so I just wouldn’t expect anybody to jump in and do a wholesale conversion.”

But Hill says another factor is that most pork producers are still convinced that gestation stalls—or individual maternity pens—are what’s best for the well-being of the sow.

More on that in tomorrow’s report.