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University of Minnesota Extension Swine team gives research updates through podcasts.
Sarah Schieck Boelke: Hello and welcome to Minnesota's Swine and U podcast series, a University of Minnesota Extension swine program. Today's podcast is on ventilation basics with a focus on summer ventilation. As here in Minnesota, we've noticed the weather has quickly turned to our summer temperatures from our cooler spring. My name is Sarah Schieck Boelke, your host, and I'm an Extension Swine Educator with the University of Minnesota. Joining me today is Lyle Lange and Mike Walker from Lange Ag Systems.
So welcome, Lyle and Mike.
Lyle Lange: Thank you.
Mike Walker: Thank you.
Sarah Schieck Boelke: So Lyle has over forty six years of experience in the livestock industry, and Mike adds twenty six years of experience. To get us started, Lyle and Mike, would the two of you briefly introduce yourself and discuss a little bit about what you have going on at Lange Ag Systems and kind of how does it fit into our basics of ventilation for summer here?
Lyle Lange: There's just a lot of little things that people need to be looking at today. Just are they moving enough air to keep the animals comfortable? Are they maintaining so that they don't have fans working against the air coming into the building and it's creating suctions inside the building? Do they have the staging set up right? And one of the things that I've always seen in my career is trying to help people with this.
You see so many people that, and you talk to different people as well, and they say, well, the building was built fifteen, sixteen years ago, and no one showed us how to run it. And if they did, they set the controls and no one's touched them for that long. And it's kind of a shame because the controls are in there for multiple reasons. And as a owner/operator, it's to control your costs, number one, and every owner/operator is very concerned about their livestock. And these are the two main things that you want to have.
Some of the problems happens is what does it do to the facility if it's not operating correctly? That's another huge factor. So some buildings you can go in and they're managed right and they look excellent after fifteen, twenty years, and the next one might not be quite as nice.
Mike Walker: Yeah. I think, Lyle, you hit some key things that we're gonna cover today for sure. I think really about, as far as Lange Ag Systems go, we do a number of different things here. And obviously, from Lyle's further introduction, you can tell one of the passionate things that we focus on is is really the ventilation, and that's not just for the swine dairy. We've also done other things, projects at at small zoos, goat milking parlors, and things like that.
So a wide variety of some of those experiences. And then we also focus on new construction, remodel. And then we also have a very, a very successful and popular bagging portion of the business for not only silage bagging and the equipment to fill those bags and empty those bags, but also on the grain side as well. And so good variety of of things that we can we can talk about, but as Lyle started off, one of the things that we're most passionate about is making sure that all our customers that we interact with, and just really the industry as a whole, understands one of the main basics that, the livestock need, and that's appropriate air. The old adage is air-feed-water, and they say it in that order for a reason because the feed and water seem to be easier for everyone to understand, and the air is one of those things that may be overlooked from time to time.
Sarah Schieck Boelke: So it sounds like here at Lange Ag Systems, you do a variety of things. But like we mentioned, today we're going to focus on summer ventilation for swine facilities. So to start that discussion, what are some key terms that folks should know as we go through our discussion here?
Lyle Lange: Well, if you ever talk to anybody in ventilation, they might use this three letters CFM. And CFM is cubic feet per minute of air. And, you know, you say, what is a cubic foot of air? Well, it's a one foot by one foot by one foot cube of air, and a fan is designed to move X many of these CFM going all the way from a 12-inch fan to a 56-inch fan. And it's all these testing is done by all fans by the University of Illinois at BESS Laboratories and it's not just agriculture fans, they test all of the commercial fans that's used in different places.
Probably one of the biggest issues that you see with people is they might be replacing a motor in an old fan, and you say, how old is the fan? Well, might be fifteen, eighteen, twenty years old. And if we just think in other parts of aspects that we work in the ag industry, you probably don't wear things quite that thin in other parts of the industry as what we do in the livestock industry. And there's a lot of wear and deterioration on fan blades.
And they're dirty. They're pitted. And if you sent them back to BESS Laboratories, and this has been proven, and a lot of tests have been done, that if you send them back, they aren't going to produce near what they were when they were brand new. And shutters aren't moving correctly and they're resisting or the fans are dirty and they've we all know that a fan that's dirty probably is producing 30 to 40% less CFM. But the bad part about it is, it's also drawing more amps and costing you more energy to operate it. So our goal is trying to explain this and educate people on this.
Hopefully we can make their operation more economical.
Mike Walker: Yeah, so the other thing that can affect your CFMs dramatically is something called stack pressure. As Lyle and I talk it, the suck factor. Right? So, yeah, if you've ever walked into one of your barns, whether it be a farrowing room, wean to finish, and that door slammed shut and you're you're moving your hands so fast to make sure it doesn't get shut in the door, that means your static pressure is set far too high, which will also overwork those fans. And then if you compound that with a dirty fan, now you're really making it work.
So a good stack pressure, Lyle, that you would say each finishing barn should have would be about
Lyle Lange: Point o five.
Mike Walker: Yeah.
Lyle Lange: And I like to say, and this isn't documented by anybody but probably myself from experience, I'll take and show a customer, and I'll put my fingers in the in the door jam and let the door come shut. And if it pulls shut and don't break your fingers, you're probably okay. But when it slams you in the rear and your butt gets red, that's maybe a problem. So you say, what can we do? How can we fix this?
Well, first of all, the air's gotta get to the area of the inlet. Whether you got a when you got a ceiling inlet, the air's gotta get there. So it usually comes in through a soffit. Well, unfortunately over many years in our industry, it didn't, soffits didn't get built correctly. They put a whole soffit underneath on the soffit with little punched holes.
And it's gotta be a plastic or a stainless steel wire mesh that lets the air in. Okay? So now what about the cobwebs? What about all the chaff that builds up around there? And we'll see soffit inlets that will have sixty, seventy, eighty percent blockage.
So you say, okay, everything is all clean, it's all good. Now where? Well, now the air's gotta come in that soffit, and it's gotta go up above the plate above your wall.
People say, oh, didn't think of that. So you gotta have as much opening in the soffit and then above the plate. So then the carpenters, when they built the building, were trying to do their best, and they put an insole stop in there so the insulation couldn't block up that opening. But when that got put in, that might have reduced that opening to maybe two, three inches, and you needed six inches to twelve inches. So now there's our bottleneck.
There's our restriction. We've got to fix that.
Mike Walker: And that can be where you start seeing your static pressure going up.
Lyle Lange: That's correct.
Mike Walker: And so some of the best ways when we talk about CFM, static pressure is is A has to equal B has to equal C. Oftentimes people go, well, I'll just add another fan. Well, if I'm moving 20,000 CFMs, my inlets, that are in the ceiling, have to be able to provide that 20,000 CFM, and then the soffit opening or the gable end openings…
Lyle Lange: Mhmm.
Mike Walker: Need to be able to provide 20,000 CFMs. Otherwise, you will always short circuit. So sometimes it's easier for people to understand water than it is air because they can see it. And so you don't necessarily want to go from a half-inch pipe up to a one-inch pipe and expect the same amount of volume to be able to pass through there if you're expecting a one-inch amount of volume coming in. And so sometimes it's easier for people to understand that as well.
The other the other term that I think is very important as we talk about the basics of ventilation, especially heading through the transition that we went through from, I think, with still spring to, you know, it's definitely summer, is fan staging. And the the uniqueness of our industry is we've got everything from completely enclosed buildings that are power ventilated from ceiling down to tunnel ventilated barns where we're pulling from one end to the other. And then lastly, the curtain barns that were had tremendous amount of those built in the late eighties through the early two thousands. And so it is very important as we talk through and as a person's working on their ventilation to make sure that they have the proper fan staging all the way from minimum ventilation to max ventilation. The other uniqueness of the industry and how the swine industry has been built is there are components in each of those three different ventilation systems that all touch each other.
So I will start power ventilating, move to more of a natural vent, and then in some cases go back into power ventilation, but my inlet's no longer through the ceiling for the air, it's through the end of the barn where I'm pulling that wall of air that Lyle talked about when we started talking about CFMs.
Lyle Lange: That's that's that's so true, Mike. It's people just you know, if you got that shortage of air getting into the attic, now the air can't get in through the ceiling inlet because there's no air there. So then your ventilation control is trying to cool the building down. So what happens? It it can't cool it at this, so then it another it warms up, so another stage kicks on, and another one does.
But we've defeated it because we can't get any air in, so now that door is creating a tremendous amount of suction, and that's the easiest place for anybody to see in a building. There's a number of things, but it's just trying to pinpoint and help people to get that figured out.
Sarah Schieck Boelke: So we've defined or I should say you two have defined for us our CFM, static pressure, fan staging, gotten into a little bit of things to look that might adjust those things. So what are some foundational things that producers should be evaluating for summer ventilation?
Lyle Lange: I'm going to throw out one thing first that a customer a number of years called me and a good, very good operator. And we always tell people if you ever have a question, just ask us. We're here to help you. But he put in wieners into his new finishing barn. And it was about 45, 50 degrees outside.
He could tell that the fan was kicking. It should have been running about 40% on first stage, and it was running on Stage 3. So so that meant two more fans than should have ever been running. And then it didn't work very well. So I said, tell you what, can you do you've got pit fans?
Do you clean them? The average person will always say, yes, do. I kick them and they go clunkity clunk and everybody laughs. And we go on. But he I I got him to go out with a pressure washer and wash them out.
I says, let me know when you when you get this done. He called me at 3 o’clock in the afternoon. He says, Lyle, the fan is now running 40% on low speed. He just saved two more fan electrical costs running, plus working much harder, pulling way more amps when it's pulling that amount of a suction. So just little things like that can really help.
But cleaning fans, cleaning fans. I mean, it's been proven that you can re you'll reduce the CFM capacity by 40% easily on a dirty fan.
Mike Walker: Yeah. I think that's a good good point for sure, Lyle. And the other thing I know I've heard you talk to customers over time is making sure, like you said earlier, the soffits are also clean. And and as we think about being summer ready, right? Summer ready is making sure the fans are all ready to go. So all the winter preparation we did in in Minnesota to make sure that we saved on LP, winter doors, plastic, all that is off.
Everything can operate as it should. All fans have been turned on, tested. We know that belts are tight. We know that the fans are clean. Shutters are opening and closing the way they need to.
And then as we've gotten into newer barns on on the soffits, especially, we've put winter doors on them.
Lyle Lange: Yep.
Mike Walker: And winter doors are a wonderful tool for the winter, but they're detrimental if you don't have them opened in the summer. And the other thing that we see oftentimes on winter doors is they will trap that fall debris and other things, corn stalks and whatever else the 60-mile an hour winds catch in the winter. And and so making sure that those doors are open, that's washed, all that chaff has been removed from there, I think is an important aspect of making sure that the starting point of airflow into the barn is set correctly, and then the exhaust of that airflow is also set correctly.
And then we just have to worry about the middle of the ventilation cycle, don't we, Lyle?
Lyle Lange: That's correct. And you brought up a very interesting point about belts on fans. Belts older fans did not have belt tensioners. A lot of times we can put a belt tensioner on an existing fan and that will help immensely, but that still even has to be maintained.
Maintenance is something that doesn't take a long time but needs to be done in any part of the ag industry, we all know. The other thing is, like what Mike was mentioning, another item is your pit fans. The pit covers, are they tight? Is there a lot of gaps? You surely don't want the air going in through the pit cover or the fan has pulled away from the transition and is short circuiting and doing absolutely no good inside of the building.
So that's another topic that we'll talk about sometime on winter air and what that will do for airspeed coming into the building. But there's no sense running a fan and you spending money on electricity if it's no value to you.
Mike Walker: I think the other thing as we think about the ventilation cycle and being summer ready, that is important. And and Lyle touched on energy savings. Whether it be a curtain barn or a tunnel barn, at some point, we want the pit fans to shut off. Once we have went into full curtain ventilation or we went in full tunnel mode, then there's almost all curtain machines will have something called a whisker switch. And you have to make for sure that is set correctly so that on a curtain barn, you have at least eight to twelve inches of opening before the pit fan shut off. Otherwise, you'll end up with curtains bouncing up and down and fans turning on and off.
On a tunnel barn, we wanna get through at least stage five. Correct, Lyle?
Lyle Lange: That is correct.
Mike Walker: And make sure that we have plenty of airflow and good air exchange in that setting, and that simply can be moved within the curtain machine.
Proper safety needs to be taken, powered killed to the curtain machine when you make that adjustment. On some older curtain machines, very old curtain machines, they were not equipped with those, but you can buy an aftermarket curtain whisker switch to install on each of those. And some of the oldest actually, when the first curtain move happened, it killed the power. That that's not good, but you can do an aftermarket on that one as well.
Lyle Lange: And then you wanna make sure on a tunnel barn or a curtain barn that your fans don't run too long this time of the year, and there's not enough air inlet coming in, and they suck the curtain against the wall of the bird netting that you've got there. So then all of a sudden, you don't get any air inside the building, and you're just creating more suction again back inside that building, and that easily can happen for people.
Mike Walker: Yeah. So we've talked about the beginning. We've talked about the end. Now let's talk about the middle.
Lyle Lange: Okay.
Mike Walker: In the middle of of it is the inlets. We have to make for sure that all inlets are calibrated. And then why that's important goes right off of what Lyle talked about at the the end there is if I don't have my inlets set correctly, when I do go to tunnel, and that tunnel curtain starts dropping, you have something called curtain hang-up syndrome. And what that is is just like when we talked about the door and the static pressure, the suck factor. Right?
It'll try to pull the curtain through the two by fours. That means you don't have the right static pressure or the right amount of air coming in to match what the fans are pulling out. And so easiest way to calibrate inlets, run them all shut, make sure all the strings are tight, and then as you go back through, if you know you need two inches of opening for the right amount of air on that inlet for a certain stage of fan, go back into the controller and program it accordingly, and then watch it. Put the system in auto and allow it to operate it how it needs to. And when you do that, at least during the transition phases, so if you did it four times a year, winter to spring, spring to summer, summer to fall, you would at least make sure that middle part, which often seems to be probably the most overlooked areaWouldn’t you agree, Lyle?
Lyle Lange: Yes. Very much.
Mike Walker: It's taken for granted, and that is typically where you'll see short circuiting of of the ventilation system.
Lyle Lange: And you brought up a good point. You take this time of the year right now, and if people don't have their ceiling inlets set properly for the stage that the fans are on, and we get a cooler evening of 50 degrees or whatever in the evening, and the air is coming in too slow, the opening is too large, so the air doesn't come in with the proper speed, then it drops down and creates a cooling effect for the little pigs.
Mike Walker: That's right.
Lyle Lange: So that's why you do that. Now the simple method to be able to do that is there's just a simple air meter for airspeed, and you would just use that air meter to get about 825 to 850 feet per minute of airspeed coming in through them inlets at each stage. So it it you don't just set it at this much until you once know how your barns operate, and then you can go to that, like Mike was saying, like, two inches for this stage and another two and a half inches for the next stage and so on. But an air meter is is a great resource for a lot of people.
Mike Walker: Lyle, you and I both have been out on sites and we haven't had an air meter.
Lyle Lange: Yep.
Mike Walker: And not everybody's gonna have one of those.
Lyle Lange: That's right.
Mike Walker: But the old rule of thumb is if you stand X amount away from an inlet, and it hits you square in the forehead.
Lyle Lange: 12 feet away.
Mike Walker: That's right.
Lyle Lange: 12 feet away. Hits you in the forehead, you're doing a great job.
Mike Walker: That's right. One of the interesting things, and granted with this is summer ventilation, but sometimes in winter ventilation, it's easier to understand that because you can see that cold air coming in, the steam, and you can see where it's coming in fall. And so, as we think about that, there's sometimes these little tricks that we've learned over the well, between the two of us…
Lyle Lange: Yeah
Mike Walker: Almost seventy five years,
Lyle Lange: Right
Mike Walker: That the tools are excellent things for us to have, but you can figure some of these things out even with some of kind of the the shortcuts that we've learned over the years to at least dial some things in and do it in an efficient manner.
Lyle Lange: We worked before Dr. Mike Brum retired, we worked very closely with him with a number of our customers, and it was always fun to watch Mike because he would stand about twelve feet back and he could tell just immediately as well.
Sarah Schieck Boelke: Sounds good. You've talked a lot about ventilation, but how about if barns have, like, cooling systems? Are there some things there to mention?
Lyle Lange: Yeah. Well, basically, we don't use much cooling for evaporative cooling, but we do use water for cooling. And really, when you're spraying and you're getting this animal wet, what you're really doing, and most people can imagine is, just say that you went to a lake and you went swimming and you came out of the water and you were wet and there was a breeze blowing. You thought, oh, this feels cool. You're drawing the BTUs off of your body.
And that is the same thing that we do with I I like to dumb things down. I apologize, but that's just what I do. But give an example, and and that's that really is what cooling spray systems are doing. You don't wanna keep them soaking wet all the time. You want it to get wet, dry off 50-60%, and then have it on a timed basis, and most controls are capable of doing that.
Mike Walker: Yeah. Like Lyle said, and I'm sure most of the listeners know, pigs can't sweat. So we have to be able to help them on some of the brutal warm days. Now when it's not, when it is humid, sometimes the worst thing you can do is add more water. Really it is about the air exchange and drawing the moisture away from them off of their bodies.
But on those drier days, adding some water through a misting system and typically a larger droplet instead of like a true mist so it touches the animal
Sarah Schieck Boelke: Mhmm.
Mike Walker: And then allow the fans to to remove that moisture. In a tunnel barn, simple. You're already tunneling, right? In a curtain barn, when you've went from that power where the curtains are up, now we've went to natural, now we need to have stir fans to be able to push that air off of them.
Now fortunately, we're in Minnesota, so we don't have a lack of wind typically, but on those humid, still days, that is when it's probably the most dangerous for some of those larger animals, especially because that environment and that moisture and humidity is not leaving. So, that's where stir fans on a curtain barn become so critical on those on those hot, sticky days.
Lyle Lange: One of the other things is when we're talking about maximum amount of air. is about eight years ago, there was quite a bit of study done that the fifteen years prior to that, they found out that animals are producing about 10 to 15 more percent of heat because their body is in the production of producing meat. So sometimes there can be cases where barns are under ventilated and you're not moving enough air to get all that heat out of the building.
Sarah Schieck Boelke: Right. Because we have to think about the pigs are creating heat…
Lyle Lange: Yes.
Sarah Schieck Boelke: themselves.
Lyle Lange: That's right.
Sarah Schieck Boelke: And especially with them being really efficient these days.
Lyle Lange: Yeah. Well you know
Sarah Schieck Boelke: Lots of heat generated.
Lyle Lange: Yes, very, very, very true, Sarah. One customer I know, a number of years ago, called me and he says, Lyle, why doesn't my ventilation system run just like my house? So that when it gets so cool, the furnace kicks on, when it gets a little bit warmer, the air conditioner kicks on. And I said, well, here's the difference.
In your house, there's three to six or seven people in the house. And you might have a thousand or fifteen hundred or whatever square foot. If you take a hog barn, there's an animal every square foot that might weigh 300 pounds. And at that point, you'll get a temp rise much faster. And we don't want to have a drastic where everything kicks out at one time. So that's why we have fan stages.
Sarah Schieck Boelke: So you've talked about some of the things to look at in terms of for ventilation as well as our adaptive cooling systems. You've also mentioned, you know, a few things that may need to be looked at. How often should people be testing or calibrating this equipment?
Lyle Lange: For sure, every spring and fall.
Sarah Schieck Boelke: So for sure, two times a year.
Lyle Lange: For sure, two times a year. We'd like to see it oftener or but…
Mike Walker: Ideally, they would be going through and doing that calibration at every season change to make for sure that that's there because some of the other pieces that seem like to short circuit things are some of those things that are there to help protect us and, like, backup thermostats.
Lyle Lange: Mhmm.
Mike Walker: Backup thermostats are a great tool, not the most calibrated thing. They can get out calibration pretty easy. Five degrees is not uncommon.
But making sure that it's set appropriately for the weather that you will be experiencing in that season is a very important piece of that. And then we talked a significant amount about just making sure everything's clean. Everything needs to be clean and functional.
Lyle Lange: And one of the things that's has come about in the last number of years in the industry is variable speed large fans instead of using belts on 48 or 56 or 54 inch fans is direct drives on them and a lot less maintenance and a lot more forgiving for the operator and takes a lot of load off of him of having to be concerned about that.
Sarah Schieck Boelke: So Lyle, you talked a little earlier about, you know, if fans are dirty or belt's not tight, but what are some other common issues that might cause the ventilation system or other systems in the barn not to work the way we want them to?
Lyle Lange: Well, we talked about the very good points, Sarah. Soffit. If you're bringing a power ventilation system where all the air is coming in through the attic and the inlets are plugged, that's another problem there. Are the curtains on a tunnel barn, are they dropping down properly? Are they staying part way part way closed? That could be a real detriment inside of there.
I've gone enough times and you go into buildings and you look at their large fans that are might be four large fans and one or two of the belts are missing. You just you just cut out 50% of all your air that should be moving. It is not moving. Now, new controls today can monitor the amp draw and will give you a warning and tell you which fan it is. So we do have that, but we've got way more older buildings that do not have that that we've got to take care of.
Another thing is is your curtain machine, whether it's on the sidewall or on the ceiling inlets. You know, we'll go out there and it might be ten, fifteen years later, you know, something has gone wrong in the curtain machine. And we just ask the person, do you grease them regularly? And you know the comment is with a deer in the headlights, well how do you grease them? Well there are seven grease zerks in a typical inlet machine that should be done once or twice a year, depend upon if they're ceiling they're going be run all the time in the winter and if they're sidewall they're going to be in the summer. And just a little TLC goes a long ways.
And we try to help with people on that. And just a friendly reminder.
Sarah Schieck Boelke: And I know sometimes talking about curtains, sometimes I've seen birds nests.
Lyle Lange: Yes.
Sarah Schieck Boelke: Or something that might be made really close to the pulley system.
Lyle Lange: That's correct.
Sarah Schieck Boelke: I'm sure that has an effect
Lyle Lange: That has an effect.
Sarah Schieck Boelke: On those curtains going up and down the way they should.
Lyle Lange: Yep. If it doesn't now, it's gonna be later, so it's gonna happen.
Sarah Schieck Boelke: So how would a person test for some of these issues? I know you mentioned, Lyle, that some of the new controllers these days will monitor for the amps and stuff like that, but maybe you don't have a new controller. What are some ways?
Lyle Lange: Well, you can just your your ceiling and that's can be with that simple monitor if you wanna. And it's it's a 60-70 dollar little item, but very, very handy, and then you know where you're at or you can tell someone, well, this is where I'm at. Is that adequate or inadequate for that reason? Just checking all your fans to make sure that they all do get cleaned. Pit fans, especially, that they do get cleaned.
What Mike was saying with the the whisker switch on there so that they are shutting off. There's absolutely no reason for that pit fan running anymore once your sidewall curtains are down that you're just using that electricity. That's another item there. The door, as we mentioned, you know, are you do do you think you've got a a cooling time? You know, a simpler a simple sprinkler system could be a soaker combination sprinkle. So or or or cooling.
So you can use the same system and just run a solenoid for cooling or for soaking down your building, which will also help wash your building down a lot faster if you do that. So just things such as that.
Mike Walker: Yeah,I think the other thing, Lyle, you'd mentioned earlier, especially when it comes to pit fans because we know that wall fans are much more efficient at moving air than the pit fans, but most of our barns were built with pit fans. And so that's what people are used to is making sure that you have the proper blade tolerance. And as fans come out of the winter season, may have gotten froze up, may have done some of that stuff, you end up losing little corners here and there and the blades, which are typically some sort of plastic type material, just end up being shorter. And for a for replacing those fan blades for a pretty small price, you can improve your fan ventilation pretty darn quick. And so one of the things that old rule of thumb is as you're doing that springs/early summer pit fan washing and wall fan washing, also evaluate to look at the condition of of the belts that we talked about, the the blades, and then the shutters.
Are they opening easily or not? And usually some of those smaller things just will get the barn back to operating as it was originally intended to be.
Lyle Lange: Well, when when BESS Laboratories tests all these, they tested them with a clean shutter.
Mike Walker: That's right.
Lyle Lange: And they tested them with a brand new blade, and they tested them with a brand new shroud. Nothing was dirty. Nothing was worn for ten, fifteen, twenty years. The shutters were all working properly. Two, three of the veins aren't stuck shut, so so the air can't blow in that spot.
So now that made that fan more inefficient. You know, when we talk about this, we, I almost feel like we're talking about a lot, a lot of different things. But you know, it just takes, just takes to get into the groove of doing these things. And it's kind of like the, I gotta be careful how I say this, but, it’s you know, the crop end of it, they go, the crop farmer goes through his machinery in the winter. We've got to go through our things, our settings, not making fans work harder, all these types of things as well.
Sarah Schieck Boelke: Yeah, I was just going to say it's almost like if you think of for your house like spring cleaning.
Lyle Lange: Yes.
Sarah Schieck Boelke: To get it, you know, fresh and cleaned after the winter, kind of the same thing with our Swine Barns, the same thing.
Lyle Lange: And you feel good when it's all fresh and clean, when you wash it down and it looks nice and it makes you feel like you want to come in there and you want to do something in there. That's correct.
Sarah Schieck Boelke: Mhmm.
Lyle Lange: And having good air quality inside the building is not only good for you, but it's good for the animals. And that will be a better feeling.
Sarah Schieck Boelke: You've talked and touched a little bit about, you know, if you pay attention to the fans, how they're operating, cleaning them so they're efficient. I'm guessing based off of both of your experience, that you have found that producers have had some positive results based off of these corrections or just paying attention to things and doing timely maintenance. So can you share what are some of those maybe it's cost savings or something that producers have noticed based off of just that TLC of the barn and the ventilation equipment?
Mike Walker: I think Lyle had a great story earlier with with his experience with the customer on running Stage 3, getting those fans clean, and now we're running at Stage 1. I think the other thing other examples I've seen lots of times is something as simple of you'll walk in and the shutters on the big 54 inch fans aren't quite opening up enough. That usually means that your belt is too loose. So either the tensioner is let go
Lyle Lange: Mhmm.
Mike Walker: Or you just need to take a single link out of that that belt.
Lyle Lange: Yep.
Mike Walker: All of a sudden, the air exchange happens much quicker, and now I have one less extra fan that's kicking on and off repeatedly because it was trying to make up for what the other fan was doing. So quantitatively, not necessarily, well, if you do this, this will result next. But we just know that if the barn is operating as designed and you're running the equipment that you need, that means there's other equipment that's not having to run that's draining your pocketbook that you don't realize until when next month's bill comes up.
Sarah Schieck Boelke: Mhmm.
Lyle Lange: Very well put.
Sarah Schieck Boelke: So we're getting to the end of our discussion here. Do you have any closing remarks?
Lyle Lange: Well, the thing that I emphasize is there's never a dumb question. You need to get that out because people don't want to admit of something. But you know the most important thing for us, or for me in my industry, and I started in the early seventies, for my customer to be profitable. And if he's profitable, we keep our farming community going.
And that also helps us.
Mike Walker: Yeah, I think one of the biggest things when it comes to ventilation and shoot, some of the other areas of the business that we've mentioned earlier, is all we really wanna be is a resource. And there's tremendous amount of experience that we're willing to share. And, Sarah, wanna thank you for the opportunity to join you on the podcast and be able to share some some good reminders. I think as we live in a world of even greater technology, sometimes it's the simplest things that can improve how the barn and the operation operates, and it doesn't necessarily have to be something new and shiny. And so I think some of these some of these things, hopefully, the listeners can can apply.
And even if it's just one thing and one listener, we know we've made an impact, and that's really what we wake up every morning trying to do.
Sarah Schieck Boelke: And I think, to close us out here, a good point is if they haven't done their fine tooth spring cleaning yet, that they need to make sure that they do a walk around the barn, pay attention to all of their ventilation equipment, make sure it's working the way that it should, it's clean, belts are tight…
Lyle Lange: There’s still…
Sarah Schieck Boelke: pulleys are able to go up and down.
Mike Walker: Yeah, there's still a lot of hot days coming at us.
Lyle Lange: It’s coming.
Sarah Schieck Boelke: Right. Well, thank you Lyle and Mike for sharing your knowledge on summer ventilation basics for swine facilities.
Lyle Lange: Thank you, Sarah.
Mike Walker: Yes. Thank you, Sarah.
Sarah Schieck Boelke: And thank you to the folks that listen to the University of Minnesota Swine and U podcast. This has been Sarah Schieck Boelke, Extension Swine Educator, along with Lyle Lange and Mike Walker, both with Lange Ag Systems out of Willmer, Minnesota. To further connect with the University of Minnesota Swine Extension, please visit the Swine specific web pages on our website at www.extension.umn.edu/swine. On those pages, you'll find connections to our blog and our Facebook page. To connect with our faculty in veterinary medicine, please visit their Swine in Minnesota blog at www.umnswinenews.com.