Efficient Ventilation Improves Safety and Comfort and Reduces Costs

An Assistant Professor with Iowa State University says, by ensuring effective efficient ventilation in the barn, pork producers can maximise comfort and safety while reducing costs. "Barn Ventilation: Troubleshooting, Maintenance and Operational Management" was among the topics discussed yesterday as part of Day One of Saskatchewan Pork Industry Symposium 2021.

Dr. Brett Ramirez, an Assistant Professor in the Department of Agricultural and Biosystems Engineering at Iowa State University, says ventilation really does affect everything in the barn.

Clip-Dr. Brett Ramirez-Iowa State University:

It affects our air temperature, moisture level, whether or not we see condensation on surfaces, uniformity of that air temperature throughout the room. As we get into summertime it affects the air speed across the animals. It's going to affect odor, gas concentrations, dust, disease, organism levels, combustion fumes inside the room.

We bring fresh air in, we mix it, pick up all the things we don't want and use our exhaust fans to then pull it out of the room. The fundamental function of ventilation is, as the outdoor temperature increases, we increase our ventilation rate. In winter time or in colder weather our minimum ventilation is generally designed for moisture control and that generally keeps our noxious gas concentration to a reasonable level and then as it warms up outside, we eventually switch over to ventilation rate for temperature control to remove the heat produced by the pigs inside the barn.

At the point where the balance temperature intersects ventilation for temperature and moisture control, it's kind of an interesting one to think at and a lot of people don't really have an intuition of when does this really occur, how often do we really spend much time there. Generally minimum ventilation, we're trying to keep that humidity no more than 65 percent inside the room, 70 maybe if we're stretching it but for the most part, we're really trying to remove all the moisture produced by the pigs. It warms up we remove the heat.