An unusual tour

Update: I was asked by a person who manages this facility to remove the pictures of the interior because they might give information to potential or current competitors.

A couple of weeks ago I received an e-mail inviting me to tour the almost completed phase one of the Premier Biosource facility north of Rensselaer. After watching this project proceed through regulatory hearings and going to the groundbreaking ceremonies, I was eager to go.

The facility will raise hogs for biomedical research. (For background, follow the two links in the above paragraph and this one.) The part of the facility that has been completed is phase one of four. Construction of phase two will begin in the next two months. When completely built out, the farm will have about 5000 hogs but this building is only designed for a couple hundred, and I believe that it will need the space in phase two to complete the raising of pigs.

  The tours were scheduled on Monday from noon until 3:00 and I arrived about 1:30. I found the door locked and I had no idea how to get in. Fortunately, someone was leaving soon after I arrived and escorted me into the building and took me to a farrowing room where I joined the in-progress tour.

 The first piglets are scheduled to arrive on April 10. They will be surgically delivered and brought to the room above, where they will be placed in the plastic tubs and hand fed. That may seem a strange way to begin, but the goal is to establish a completely disease-free population. When these first pigs reach breeding age and give birth, they will nurse their young.

We continued down the hall, past a room on the north that will serve as a lab for testing and whatever else needs to be done and then into a group of rooms through which feed and other supplies enter. Items come into a first room where they can be fumigated. They are then moved to a second room where additional decontamination can be done. Feed enters the facility here and is transported to the pigs by means of pipes using augers.

 Initially the feed will be purchased from specialty suppliers. Ultimately the farm will build its own feed mill. Someone on the tour asked if they would purchase locally and was told that they would buy corn and other grains from local farmers, but only from those who did not raise hogs. They want no contamination from any other hog operation.

The control for the door to the fumigation room is similar to the control on the door to the facility. It is operated by a card swipe. Only those with a card can open doors and the control system records who opened doors and when.

 We proceeded down the hall to the gestation rooms at the far west of the building. This hallway runs east-west for the entire length of the building. The pipes are left exposed so that if there is any problem with them, they will be easily accessible for repair. Under the hallway is an empty space through which air circulates back to the air handler.

 There are two gestation rooms. One is for regular hogs. Some medical research is done with the same hogs that are raised for meat and some uses a special breed of dwarf swine called Yucatan pigs. There are strange looking containers that are part of the feeding system. The feed arrives via the pipe with an auger running through it and these containers measure out a set amount of feed. When they are all filled, a flip of a switch will empty all of them into the feeding troughs for the pigs. This room will hold 100 pigs.

 There are slots in the floor that allow pig manure to drop down and be collected. It also allows air to circulate. Fresh air enters from above and old air goes though the floor and returns to the air handler via the air passage under the hallway.

 Across the hall is the gestation room for the Yucatan pigs.

 We then went back down the hall with a quick stop at the second farrowing room, this one on the north side of the hallway.

 We continued to the east end of the hallway and at this point the three people who were on the tour when I arrived left. One of them was a woman who had been busy taking notes. She writes for a national hog magazine. I had asked her if this hog barn was like a normal hog barn and she said that it was completely different. I will be looking for whatever she writes and if I can find it, I will post a link. I am sure she noticed a lot of things that I missed.

The tour continued with three people who had joined the tour after me. At the north side of the east end of the hallway was a storage room and the utility room. The utility room was dominated by a huge air handler. Air from the outside travels along the top going through two filters, the second a HEPA filter,  and a heat exchanger. Air from the facility flows along the bottom, also going through a filter and the heat exchange. In the summer the heat exchange will take heat from the incoming air and transfer it to the outgoing air. In the winter it will take heat from the outgoing air and transfer it to the incoming air.

The entire facility is air-tight and will be pressurized. When the outside door is open, one will feel a breeze flowing out. This is one of the many measures taken for biosecurity.

Several men were working on  pipes in the room connected to two boxes that provide the heat for the entire complex and also supply the hot water. I was amazed that such small units, combined about the size of my home furnace, could heat the entire complex.

Before the animals arrive, the entire building will be cleaned and disinfected. There was a lot of dust on the walls, probably from finishing some of the floors.

We ended the tour in the employee break room. One of the employee perks will be free meals. The provided meals are another measure to prevent contamination.

Leaving I went out the same way I came in but this time the passage out made more sense. Coming in I had to step over the edges of a shower room. I assume that each worker will have to shower and change clothes when they come to work.

Before I left I took a picture of the facility from the west side.

I will never again be allowed in the building.

(I saw a robin on Monday, the first one this year.)