Swine

At WCROC we feature a nationally-unique forum for swine research. On site we maintain conventional and alternative swine rearing facilities, which include a confinement nursery, conventional farrowing and finishing barns, and deep-bedded group housing systems for gestating sows, lactating sows, and finisher pigs.

Our conventional and alternative facilities enable our scientists to compare and contrast conventional and alternative rearing methods through a wide range of subjects-farrowing, nutrition, animal management, and animal behavior. Evaluating and improving animal welfare is a main emphasis on the WCROC swine activities.

Our swine research and outreach efforts focus on the production of high quality of pork within sustainable systems. Current research or outreach projects address important issues challenging pork producers such as: methods be minimize environmental impacts, improving the social acceptability, enhancing animal welfare and maintaining profitability of pork production systems. High quality pork requires a keen understanding of swine nutrition. Our nutrition program monitors the nutritional levels of highly productive breeding sows, weaned pigs and market hogs in a diverse range of housing systems. Much effort is dedicated to efficient use of co-product feeds such as those from the bio-fuel industries, ethanol and biodiesel.

Our research faculty include Dr. Lee Johnston and Dr. Yuzhi Li.

Swine Research at WCROC

Conventional Swine Systems

Alternative Swine Systems