Biosecurity is a huge topic when drawing up new hog barn designs. Keeping barns clean and free of disease keeps your herd healthy. Many hog pen panels are now designed with polypropylene rather than PVC for a wide variety of reasons, one of which is hygiene and disease resistance. Using polypropylene panels rather than PVC throughout your facilities—not just in your sow pens—can help improve your biosecurity to keep your herd healthy.

Using polypropylene panels in places such as shower rooms, break rooms, and transition areas can help keep your hog barn free of disease.  

Thinking about converting to a group gestating pen design? Remember these 6 musts when putting your pig barn plans together.

Early group sow housing pens were known for high levels of aggression among gestating sows. This has been a counter argument on group gestation pens for years, but the amount of sow aggression depends completely on your pen design. To mitigate aggression, we must first know why the animals are aggressive, and then we can understand how to design a hog pen that reduces harmful behavior as much as possible. Hog pen designs have advanced since the early layouts in the 1980s, but there are still, and most likely will always be, aggressive sows in your herd. That is why it is vital to put your pens together with these four guidelines in mind.

Installing new hog penning and gating systems into your existing or new swine barn has a large impact on the quality and efficiency of the barn. When deciding what products to install, you have to make tough decisions on the strength and lifespan of the panels, as well as the health risk each presents to your animals. After working with both PVC and polypropylene products, we strongly recommend Paneltim polypropylene hog pen panels. Read more on how these panels compare to traditional PVC panels when it comes to hygiene and biosecurity, product strength, and environmental friendliness.

The Pig Hill gilt development unit (GDU) was built in Lester, IA, and is in its second year of operation. As we take you on a tour through the facility, notice how it was built to supply an Electronic Sow Feeding barn. In this GDU, the young sows are able to learn about the new equipment on their own time.

When choosing hog penning and gating products to implement in your hog barn design, you may struggle knowing what product your barn will benefit from the most. What products are the strongest, last the longest, and are easy to work with? At New Standard, our staff has an abundance of experience working with hog penning and gating products, and our team has found that PanelTim plastic hog paneling is the top product on the market. Check out these 3 reasons we suggest including plastic hog penning in your hog barn design.

How you design your hog penning and gating in a gilt developer unit (GDU) and the ESF training pen is key to making your gilts comfortable with the new environment of a group sow housing facility. As your gilts develop, we have to incorporate ways to naturally acclimate them and make them comfortable with what they will see and interact with in the ESF pens. Training the gilts to be comfortable with human interaction is essential when they are young, but as the girls mature, we should start introducing them to the equipment and processes they will see later on in a group gestation pen. This will make the transition to group sow housing much smoother for both the pigs and your barn staff.