Over the past 11 years, New Standard has designed, equipped, and continues to support nearly 60 group housing swine barns. Through these builds and remodels, we have had the pleasure of meeting and working with hundreds of brilliant producers, barn staff members, builders and managers. Without the input from the people who use the barns every day, our hog barn designs would not be as complete and efficient as they are today.
Why Each Swine Barn Makes the Next One Better
As every company grows, they learn from previous experiences and continue to improve upon their work. We know this is true of our hog barn designs and equipment installs. We truly believe our group sow housing solutions are the best in North America, but we will never stop learning or improving our work. After each barn is up and operating, we remain in close contact with the producer and barn staff. We help educate and train, and we also listen to their feedback. We listen to what is working well and what could be improved to make their operations easier. While not all barns or operations are the same, there are general strategies, rules and practices that can be applied to every barn.
As we routinely visit and continue to support our swine barns, we learn something new on each visit. When we learn of a new way of doing things, we take the time to consider how our hog barn designs and equipment cater to the needs in each barn. Each build and equipment install is influenced by something we learned in previous swine barns. We not only like to pass the tips and wisdom we learn on to the next producer, we also share this knowledge with our past clients.
Learning From a Previous Barn
We recently visited a 4,400 head sow barn that we designed a few years ago. They shared with us that they do not spend extra time looking for animals in any given pen when vaccinating. Instead of wasting time tracking down the missed sows, they just note which sows were vaccinated and create a list of those they could not find. Then they input the missed sows into the system to be auto sorted into a holding pen after passing through the electronic feeders the next day.
We know the people in the barn everyday are the ones who know how to improve operations. That is why when we put any design together, we first sit down with the barn staff and the producer. Each swine barn is custom designed to fulfill the needs and ideas that are brought up in these meetings. We have general rules that we must follow for each barn, but there is always room to input suggestions that will make each barn's operations easier and more profitable.
Ultimately, our belief is that every project should inform us in some way on how to improve the next project.
