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.
Shower Rooms
Showering in and showering out is a great first step to keeping your barn's biosecurity at its best; adding polypropylene panels to your shower rooms will make it even better! This will make sure dirt and diseases don't get trapped in your shower room walls and floors. Polypropylene is easily cleaned with a simple power wash. Plus, an added bonus: anti-slip panels are available to use for flooring!
Break Rooms
Your workers are going in and out of break rooms throughout the day. If disease starts spreading through your property, you're going to want to be able to clean every inch! When a kid comes home from school with lice, you don't just clean their room. You clean the whole house!
Transition and Sanitary Areas
We've all heard horror stories about contaminated products or people coming into a farm. You don't know where the people coming onto your property were before they came, and it only takes one simple mistake for something bad to happen. Using polypropylene hog pen panels in your transition rooms and sanitary wash areas can lower the chances of contamination from other places.
These panels do not allow dirt and disease to embed in the surface. Simply power wash the panels to keep your rooms clean. You can even install these disease resistant panels (with traction grip) as flooring in these rooms.
Basically, if you want to have the best biosecurity possible, you should be using polypropylene panels in more than just your hog barn designs; you should be using polypropylene panels everywhere disease could be transferred from an external source to your pigs.
We know that you will do anything you can to protect your animals, but sometimes contamination is hard to contain. Using polypropylene hog pen panels can help you create a barn that is optimized to keep your sows healthy.
At the New Standard Group, we use polypropylene panels in our hog barn designs because we know the importance of having happy, healthy sows. Click below to learn more about how we design barns around the needs of the sow.