BarnTools is the first and only digital biosecurity platform to help you oversee your farms from your computer or phone. BarnTools helps you manage farm access using geofencing technology to aid in limiting the introduction and spread of disease by controlling movement of employees, contractors, visitors, pigs and drivers.

As every farm is different, Veterinarian Clayton Johnson asked BarnTools' Jim Ryken about the customization of the system relating to health status. "What are my options say for a disease like PRRS?," Johnson asked.

"We've prepopulated a number of common diseases in the swine industry as part of BarnTools, including PRRS and PED and Myco," Ryken says. "Then we give producers the ability to add their own diseases. In the case of PRRS, you could add a specific strain of PRRS into the system so you could separate and segregate the different strains where that might be occurring in your system."

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PowerStart Solo from Hubbard Feeds delivers nursery pig performance in one simple step. Formulated for pigs weighing 13 to 25 pounds, PowerStart Solo provides the right blend of nutrients to help young pigs adjust to dry feed, while also avoiding the second-stage transition pigs face with traditional feeding strategies. With only one stage, feed budgets and deliveries are easier to manage.

Brett Ramirez, panelist from Iowa State University, asked Stewart Galloway, Hubbard Feeds senior swine nutritionist, if there is a "hump" that producers may maneuver as they adopt this feeding strategy.

"The hump for many producers is changing their mindset that a single-phase program will work.  Solo came from thinking about the larger systems where the pigs are brought in on different days and those last little guys are the ones that oftentimes don’t get as much of that first diet," Galloway said. "Solo has been a really big plus to meet the needs of these pigs."

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Maintaining feed flow from the bin can be difficult in varying environments. AP offers a solution with its Flex-Flo Unloader. Its modular design and 30% larger opening improves feed flow and reduces bridging. To keep water out, tube anchor and transfer plate gaskets are made of Ethylene Propylene Diene Monomer. 

Mark Knauer, panelist from North Carolina State University, asked Brian Rieck, AP senior manager of protein product management for North America, if the 30% more surface area reduces feed bridging events, would it also lend itself to "potentially go to a finer grind size with a feed using this unloader compared to other unloaders out there?"

Though Rieck admitted as of yet no tests have been done with a finer grind size, "but I would tell you my experience, I don't think that's going to be an issue. Basically, we've opened up that throat in the unloader so we should have more flow ability of all the free-flowing materials that you'd want to put in the bin."

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The Titan 2 from Bazooka Farmstar is one of the widest toolbars on the market with the largest model in the series ringing in at 60 feet wide. It is equipped with 700 series center section and 550 wing gauge wheel flotation tires, to ensure compaction is not compromised. 

Marcus Davis, equipment specialist at Bazooka Farmstar, said one of the things that producers wanted from previous versions of the Titan Series Toolbar was to have more row units and a larger machine to cover more ground with each pass. Davis said larger flotation tires have been added to the Titan 2 to reduce compaction and counteract the natural weight of a larger toolbar.

Panelist Pork Producer Gregg Hora questioned Davis on the producer feedback from this resulting larger toolbar.

"When it came to the test phases of Titan 2, the main questions we were addressing across the industry was ground conditions, more specifically, will you be able to penetrate the ground in certain conditions?" Davis said.

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Pit-King is Agri-King's new manure digestant containing a proprietary blend of enzymes, microorganisms, co-factors and Agri-King's patented Bacillus strain. Pit-King's multi-enzyme blend creates a rapid breakdown of undigested manure solids.

Gregg Hora, Fort Dodge, Iowa, pork producer on the panel, wanted Dave Spangler, Agri-King's director of Research & Development, to elaborate on the improvements in the barns for the pigs and the people.

"Ammonia obviously is a big factor here. What we've done is we've put together a package of bacteria and yeast that assimilate ammonia. They do that by incorporating the nitrogen, from the ammonia, into the amino acid structures and then further on to proteins. And that helps with air quality. From that standpoint, we've run multiple tests to see that we are in fact reducing that ammonia," Spangler says. "We've also started the process and are looking at manure foam and then things of that nature as well to help, reduce methane production."

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Olmix reaches to the depths of the ocean to create a "cocktail" using sulfated polysaccharide molecules from marine seaweed and macro algae extracts with biological properties that are combined to make a product called MSP Immunity.

AlgoShield is the result of combining MSP Immunity with a complex of vitamins, amino acids and minerals and trace elements for improving performance and herd health through all phases of swine production. 

Clayton Johnson, the veterinarian on the panel, asked Jake Erceg, Olmix head of Swine Technical Services, about the timing of using the AlgoShield product relative to vaccination events.

"We're going to start the day before, in this specific instance, any vaccination event," Erceg said. "And really what that does is  start the ramp up or the release of the mediator, to start the immune system."

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MetaFarms Insights is the analytics solution for the MetaFarms Ag Platform, that analyzes data to help producers and packers uncover trends and find correlations to help make decisions. As part of the MetaFarms platform, it offers the most comprehensive advanced decision-making tool on the market for packers and producers.

Panel member Clayton Johnson asked if producers would need to first purchase a Power BI license before being able to use the MetaFarms platform. Brandon Osborn, MetaFarms Customer Success and Product Marketing manager, said “MetaFarms has integrated PowerBI within its platform so licensing fees don’t have to be passed on to the producer and they can have unlimited users. So within the current costs of the MetaFarms service, comes free dashboards (finishing, sow and sales currently). Now the experience to build custom views, as some of our larger producers need, carries an additional fee as we will need to consult with the customer on their reporting strategy."

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SmartGuard provides the technologies necessary to automate and augment farrowing management, allowing for reduced labor and energy costs as well as sow and piglet mortalities. This is accomplished by leveraging voice recognition and smart cameras.

SmartGuard has been proven to reduce piglet crushing by 30% and overall piglet mortalities by 25.3% on a large commercial sow farm in Iowa.

Brett Ramirez, Iowa State University engineering professor on the panel, asked Matthew Rooda, SwineTech CEO and president, about the system's accuracy "if you had to look at a confusion matrix of false positives, true negatives, et cetera, what does that look like?"

"So we're right around the 97.3% on true positive," Rooda said. "Our false positive rate ends up being around 7.1%. We look at that, but we also don't want false negatives either. And so that's been a big part of our overall goals as well."

Producers chose SmartGuard to be this year's Producers' Choice award winner through online voting.

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