"You cannot take the man out of management," Dan Wiseley said. But in Cass County's newest hog barns, you can get pretty darn close.
Members of the Howard family are gearing up to receive thousands of piglets into their two new hog barns located north of Logansport amid corn and bean fields in rural Cass County. Over the past year, they've been getting all their ducks in a row — or is that hogs? — filing paperwork, applying for permits, breaking ground and finally celebrating the barns' completion with an open house for neighbors last week.
What they were excited to show off wasn't just the barns, with their larger hog pens and new loading and unloading design — it was also the technology used to control them.
Wiseley, of Bellar Construction, was at the property just before the open house. As the contractor responsible for building the barns and installing the electronic controls, he set up the control panel in the northern barn after finishing work in the southern one. He explained the barn's operations including ventilation, heating, feed and water could all be monitored and adjusted from a panel somewhat like a breaker box located in the barn's entry hall.
It contained several toggle switches and a roughly 7-inch touchscreen, which showed logos like app icons from which he could access real-time data and diagnostics tools.
"This entirely operates the facility," he said, keeping the environment controlled within certain parameters. "These are basically the Marriott and Hilton of the swine industry."
It's also part of what sets the barns apart as demand grows for bacon and other pork products.
Brothers Mike, Dave and Tony Howard and their wives Cindy, Judy and Beth Howard together own Howard Swine Farms LLC, the couples' first hog farm of their own but not their first experience with hogs. They contracted with Co-Alliance to grow about 16,000 hogs per year — 4,000 in each barn, rotated out twice a year. The first trucks of 10-day-old piglets are expected to arrive Aug. 1.
It's Co-Alliance's second set of barns in Cass County, a company representative said. The cooperative markets upwards of 500,000 head of hog a year from a 12-county region. Seven or eight other barns in the region have the same type of controls that were installed in the Howard family barns.
"This program, or this system, will not become outdated technology," Co-Alliance swine contract manager Jeff Taylor said. While other control systems could become obsolete in a decade or so, "with this program you can continue to add updates."
The system has been around for about the last three years, Wiseley said. It developed after barn controls started with manual operations and progressed through controls similar to dial thermostats and "bag phones."
"We're still in the learning curve," Tony Howard said last week. He anticipates using the system's smartphone app to monitor and tweak settings as needed in the barns.
Both they and representatives of Co-Alliance, which own the hogs the Howards will be raising, can access the monitoring systems from an app, which will also notify them if something happens, like the power going out and the generator kicking on.
"Before you didn't know any of that. After a storm, you had to go check," Mike Howard said.
Even now, family members plan to look in on the hogs personally.
Evan Howard, 11, said that's his job — "checking the pigs and making sure they're all OK," by watching for unusual or tired behavior.
He doesn't mind. While he appreciates "that you get bacon from them," he also likes how working with the hogs has shaped him.
"I guess that they're messy, but you learn a lot from them," Evan said of the hogs.