Progress and the adoption of new technology often are accompanied by a steep learning curve.

The Boerboom family learned that when they built their first open-pen gestation hog barn.

“We wanted to be ahead of the curve,” Mike Boerboom says of the family’s decision to build a 3,400-sow barn with open-pen gestation, moving from sow stalls. That barn was built in 2016 and populated in January 2017. “New farms at that point, some were being built with stalls, some as pens, and consumer demands for pork that was from open-pen gestation was there, so that was our incentive to do it.”

From the first time John C. and Thresa Boerboom bought a farm in Lyon County in 1936, the Boerboom family and the farm along with it have continued to evolve to stay relevant with the times.

Greg, one of seven children of John and Thresa, and his wife Paula took over the farm operations in 1981. Greg and Paula narrowed the diversified farm’s focus to hogs, corn and soybeans, building the home sow farm in 1992.

The third generation, in the form of Greg and Paula’s children — Mike, Matt and Laurie — has returned to the farm. Greg has retired, and Mike’s brother Matt runs the feed mill, manure management and the grain operation. Paula is in the process of retiring, and Laurie is in charge of human resources and is taking over Paula’s role as chief financial officer.

Renovate ahead of the curve

With states such as California enacting laws dictating how livestock are to be raised, the Boerboom family again made the decision to stay ahead of the curve when they undertook a renovation and expansion of the home sow farm, converting those barns from stalls to open-pen gestation.

In addition to the learning curve with the family’s first venture into open-pen gestation with the 2017 build, the 2020 renovation/expansion of the home farm presented the Boerbooms another set of dynamics. The two projects also offered the family a good comparison of what works and what doesn’t.

Both barns have electronic sow-feeding systems: Nedap in the 2017 barn and Gestal in the 2020 conversion.

“There were definitely some growing pains with that,” Mike says of the 2017 barn system, “[including] understanding how to train gilts, understanding how to move and the software side of it, how every gilt’s turning into sows, and how your parity structure changed over time. All those pens changed, too.”

The Nedap-equipped barn was set up to have one feeder for 60 sows, and Mike learned that you could stray a little over 60, “but if you get up toward 70 head, it’s problematic. It takes so long for each animal to eat that if you put too many animals out there, it just runs out of time in the day for them to be able to all cycle through.”

In hog production efficiency is key, and Mike says more cost-effective solutions have become available since the 2017 building. The Gestal system suggests three feeders for 60 animals, offering producers more leeway in a possible feed outage. “If one of those were to go down, you still have two working,” he says. “The drawback to the system that we put in [in 2017], if one goes down, then you’re out.”

Both feeding systems have built-in alerts, notifying barn staff as an issue arises.

Old hogs, new tricks

That 2017 barn initially had 32 pens for all sows, and gilts were to be housed in two separate pens with five feeders total, “and run the gilts in a more dynamic system, where you’re constantly adding and taking animals out,” Mike says.

Fast forward to today, and eight of those 32 pens are run together, “and that’s where we house the P1s, and we still have the gilts in the other, bigger pens, and any of the older sows that are P2s and up are housed in the remaining 24 pens,” he says.

CLOSER TO CONSUMER: Mike Boerboom says the family’s venture to open-pen gestation barns was a conscientious decision to give consumers what they want.

The Boerbooms found that segregating by parity, especially the younger animals such as the P1s, is important. “Even when we housed them with gilts, we found that we had some issues, so just isolating them completely by themselves is the best approach,” Mike says.

Inventory management and managing productivity created what Mike calls a double-edged sword: “If your productivity is lower — let’s say you’re not getting your farrowing rate that you want. So, you’re breeding more sows, then you’re pushing pens harder, so you get more animals in them, but then your conception rate isn’t as high because you have too many animals in that pen,” he says. “As soon as you start getting higher conception rates and you’re able to stock with less animals, life gets a lot easier. … And the other thing with this farm is it was breeding, and then you were going right into the [electronic sow feeding]. Figuring out the best timing for that move was very important to getting to a point of higher productivity.”

The home sow farm expansion/renovation in 2020 allowed the Boerbooms to increase the number of sows at that farm from 1,600 to about 4,200, going from stalls to open-pen gestation. Mike says that transition in one sense was easier than the 2017 build because “we knew what we were getting into,” but it also presented challenges because sows were on-site that needed to be trained in the ESF system."

“Mature sows are much harder to train than young gilts,” he says. “Basically anything that had been a bred sow was not as easy.” From their experience, gilts can learn the Gestal system in about a week, whereas it takes sows 14 to 21 days to get it figured out.

Closer to the consumer

Today, Boerboom Ag Resources and its contract growers finish more than 550,000 hogs annually. They also have become farmer-owners of Wholestone Farms, which has a packing plant in Fremont, Neb., and, more recently, part of a joint venture with Prestage Foods near Eagle Grove, Iowa. “I don’t know if we’ll have a huge increase in the number of pigs we feed or the footprint of our business, but if we can grow the ability to become closer to the consumer, we will,” Mike says. He believes the Wholestone partnership allows that connection.

He admits it took nine months to a year “to really get things figured out — how the timing of everything should work, the timing it took to train, to the timing of breeding, to moving them into gestation — how all that synced up and what the best approach was and getting everybody on the same page to be working in the same direction.”

The Boerboom crew also learned that they weren’t training enough, and then “for periods of time we were moving sows into pens too quickly versus waiting a day or two after breeding to make sure they were no longer in heat. Those were all factors we had to work through,” Mike says.

In addition to the logistics of training gilts, sows and workers how to efficiently work in a group pen gestation system, Mike says these systems place a greater emphasis on feet and leg structure.

“That’s something that is very important at selection time, that if you have sows or gilts with poor structure, that you cull them before you even breed them,” he says. “Sow mortalities are up in the industry in general over this time period. But a big factor of that is likely open-pen gestation and moving sows from stalls to pens. … In a stall scenario, you’re managing one animal in one pen. This system definitely placed a new emphasis on animal husbandry, knowing when to address issues quickly.”