Farmscape for January 4, 2006  (Episode 2014)

An eastern  Manitoba based agricultural engineer suggests straw based modified environment housing offers an economically viable option for raising swine, if the scale of these facilities are kept relatively small.

Over the past five years St. Andrews, Manitoba based DGH engineering has been involved in the construction of between 30 and 40 swine housing facilities which utilize a combination of deep bedded straw and modified environment housing.

Agricultural engineer Dennis Hodgkinson estimates the potential is to construct facilities that can be as much as 25 to 30 percent cheaper than the conventional total confinement systems but he warns the use of automation to handle manure in straw based systems will continue to be an expensive approach.

Clip-Dennis Hodgkinson-DGH Engineering

It can be very simple if you're prepared to handle straw and manure in simple ways.

If you're prepare to do it periodically, do it with front end loaders, bobcats, things like that, it can be relatively straight forward but, once you take a straw based system though, and try to build in very much automation of this whole process of bedding and cleaning and so on then it's hard to preserve any economic advantage.

If you're at a scale and in a location where there's an abundance of straw and interested in providing the manpower, human inputs, into that system I think it can be very viable and actually I think very rewarding.

It creates a beautiful environment for pigs.

Hodgkinson says some of these modified environment extensive housing systems are economically feasible and people are finding a reasonable balance between using bedding to preserve conditions while keeping the process working so he's confident there will be many more of these types of facilities.

However, he suggests, larger producers who want to rely on contract labor might be better placed to look at some of the more conventional total confinement systems.

For Farmscape.Ca, I'm Bruce Cochrane.

       *Farmscape is a presentation of Sask Pork and Manitoba Pork Council