The center draws across several departments and partners with other agencies and entities to provide the latest in research and educational information to growers.

The goal is to share the most efficient pork production technologies in Iowa, to help maintain Iowa’s leadership role in the pork industry and to strengthen rural development efforts. The center offers workshops, seminars, distance education programs, consultations and more.

Jason Ross, director of the center, said the center coordinates and synergizes the efforts of all the swine programs at Iowa State University, and interacts and collaborates with industry stakeholders across the state and country.

“Iowa has roughly 50 different faculty programs across multiple colleges and departments, all doing work in one way or another that relates to the swine industry. Part of the center’s efforts are to bring that all together to be more impactful to the industry,” Ross said. “A lot of the faculty across campus will publish research that we then incorporate into trainings, workshops and other educational materials for producers to utilize. For example, with everything happening with African swing fever, our Extension program specialists and swine field specialists have taken the initiative to work with faculty programs across the university like biosecurity and vet medicine to share information. That way, we are prepared if it gets here.

Ross explained that the relationships the center has cultivated also have created opportunities that otherwise might not have happened.

“We’ve expanded our research collaborations through the center with other universities. Right now, the pork industry center is guiding faculty from different departments at ISU, Kansas State and Purdue, allowing us to expand collaborations beyond the boundaries of ISU and work with experts across the country to bring the most relevant information home to Iowa farmers.”

Because the faculty and staff who are part of the IPIC are already educators by profession, that component offered by the center comes naturally.

“We share information on topics relevant and helpful for producers and others in the industry through a variety of methods, including meetings, workshops, individual consultations and collaboration with internal and external partners. The in-person certification opportunities are for Pork Quality Assurance Plus 4.0 for producers and individuals and Transport Quality Assurance, both of which are offered through the National Pork Board,” said Sherry Hoyer with the IPIC. “Specialists work with producers, companies, industry representatives, extension colleagues, youth and others in their areas to determine educational and programmatic needs, and to respond appropriately to those needs and desires.”

One particularly popular tool, PORKLine, is a toll-free phone line provided by the IPIC to help Iowa pork producers with answers to their questions relating to swine production, management and marketing. In addition to information from campus specialists, PORKLine responses are supported with data from several sources, including ISU Extension and Outreach publications, scientific and producer journals and periodicals, livestock industry reports and marketing sources.

To help improve piglet viability, the Improving Pig Survivability is a five-year project encompassing research, education and extension efforts with the goal of reducing overall mortality in the U.S. commercial swine industry by 1 percent or more per year of the project. The project is funded by the National Pork Board and the Foundation for Food and Agriculture Research (FFAR).

An interdisciplinary team includes faculty and staff in research and extension, including animal science, veterinary medicine, economics and microbiology. The team members hail from Iowa State University, Kansas State University and Purdue University. The IPIC also collaborates directly with the swine industry, including producers and allied industry partners. Research efforts in this project seek to identify factors contributing to swine mortality in commercial production and to develop strategies and information that can be used to reduce mortality and maximize pig survivability.

There are also swine ventilation workshops that offer producers a mechanism to develop a progressively deeper understanding of ventilation system management and troubleshooting to create an environment for healthy and efficient pig growth.

This program uses both lectures and hands-on activities to demonstrate the critical points to optimize pig growth and efficiencies in a sustainable way. The center-point of the hands-on activities is a 24-foot trailer equipped with a functioning ventilation system to simulate fan, inlet and controller management, which enables swine producers to learn about ventilation without compromising bio-security by going to an actual production facility. The program series is comprised of three levels, which are progressively more advanced.

The IPIC also offers the Ag Decision Maker fact sheet and Excel spreadsheet that compares manure nutrient values to commercial fertilizer. The Crush margin calculator can be used to estimate the margin of return for cattle or hogs placed on feed at a user defined date. Chicago Mercantile Exchange futures data on feeder cattle, finished cattle and corn are used in the cattle portion, and lean hog, corn and soybean meal are used for hogs to generate the margin.

The margin provides an estimate of gross return that will need to cover the other costs and profit goals.

The report detailing the economic impact of swine operations highlights the dynamic income and expense activities created by pork production farms, and provides categorical revenue and expense components that highlight significant economic impacts in the local and regional communities from those farms. The manure nutrient value calculator includes P-index information for Iowa producers and the OFFSET calculator is an Excel spreadsheet based on Minnesota climatic conditions intended primarily for Minnesota producers. The SDSU Distillers Dried Grain with Solubles is an Excel spreadsheet to help producers determine the cost of using distillers dried grain in swine rations.

The water usage chart graphs daily water disappearance as a measure of the growth process for groups of pigs. Another spreadsheet focuses on wean-to-finish crowding impact that provides producers with a method to evaluate pig space balance by evaluating wean-to-finish and conventional finishing where reduced production efficiency, especially how throughput can negatively impact a pork production system’s efficiency.

One calculator provides estimates of the economic value of manure based on manure type, application method, soil nutrient status and crop need.

The economics of weaning age calculator helps producers evaluate whether it pays to reduce breeding herd inventory to increase weaning age, and to determine how much the breeding herd inventory must change for alternative weaning ages to ensure that the farrowing capacity of the farm is not exceeded.

There’s also a genomic selection spreadsheet offered by the IPIC that can be used to estimate the total costs associated with genome-enabled selection and see how much improvement in a weaned pig will be necessary to break even on the costs associated with genome-enabled selection.

The sow longevity spreadsheet helps determine optimum times for keeping sows in an operation. The optimum maximum parity calculator helps figure out the optimum maximum culling parity for commercial sow herds by estimating the economic value for the genetic improvement that occurs over time.

There’s the breeding and farrowing schedule to help determine optimal breeding and farrowing dates, the budget cash flow spreadsheet to evaluate different scenarios, the group tracker spreadsheet that evaluates a current or potential swine producing facility and the pig profit tracker and sow tracker that analyzes operational costs.