A Technical Services Director with PIC suggests, by ensuring ventilation equipment is regularly maintained, pork producers can ensure the atmosphere within the swine barn promotes the health, comfort and productivity of the pigs. The role of ventilation in the swine barn is to make sure the pigs have enough oxygen to breath easily and perform well and to maintain consistent humidity, ideally between 50 and 65 percent. Nat Stas, a Technical Services Director with PIC, says proper maintenance is critical.
Quote-Nat Stas-PIC:
We need to make sure we keep it clean and we need to keep it functioning, whether that's replacing fan motors or fan belts and we need to make sure we're able to bring fresh air into a barn, whether that's a gable end opening, a soffit opening, a curtain into a hallway that goes into the room. We need to maintain our equipment because it's designed to bring air in in a certain way.
We need to seal gaps up that may have been created over the years, seal doorways, door handles missing, missing louvers on fans because that's robbing air coming in from our inlets. I always say the first step toward understanding ventilation is understanding when it's wrong and tell someone about it. Once we start to troubleshoot, PIC does have some troubleshooting guides that'll walk you through.
If you think there's a fan issue or an infiltration issue or an inlet issue, it'll walk through all the steps to check. There might be five, six, seven, eight different steps to check. We want to keep our fans clean would be one. We want to make sure we seal up any gaps in any part of our barn. If we see daylight where we shouldn't see daylight, we want to seal those up and we need to make sure our equipment is greased and functional.
Just because we check one item and improve it and fix it doesn't mean there might not be another item that's contributing to it.Make sure we keep our system clean and we replace necessary equipment, whether that's motors, fanbelts, inlets, springs on an as needed basis to make sure our equipment is working well and ventilating our barn well.
Stas encourages anyone looking for more information or advice on ventilation to visit PIC.com, click the resource tab and search ventilation.
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Source : Farmscape.ca