Economic and Marketing Information
FOR INDIANA  FARMERS
Prepared by the Agricultural Staff of Purdue University, Lafayette, Indiana  
May  31,   1966
Swine  Growing-Finishing  Facilities
by John E. Kadlec,  W. H. M. Morris, David Bache, and Ronald
Crawford, Agricultural Economics
In 1962 Purdue University research workers began
a long-time study of hog buildings and management
practices.1 Plans call for the testing and improvement
of buildings, equpiment and management practices for
each stage of the life cycle of swine (farrowing and nursery buildings are now being compared and gestation
facilities will soon be constructed).
The first phase of this project, a comparison of the basic
growing-finishing building systems, has been completed.
The conventional or most generally used hog finishing
facilities were compared with the new slotted-floor enclosed systems. The accompanying figures are based on
the performance of 1,500 hogs which were fed in two
summer and two winter experiments between December
1962 and October 1964.
Description of the System
Buildings B, C, and D are identical aluminum shells;
their outside dimensions are 18 x 36 feet. These buildings
are insulated in the ceiling and side walls with a one
inch thickness of expanded polystyrene. They have
identical forced air ventilation systems controlled by
thermostats and timing devices.
Building B is divided into eight 4*4 X 14 foot pens
which housed eight pigs each. The pens contain a slotted
dunging alley; they are designed to be self cleaning.
Building C is divided into two pens with a solid concrete floor in one and a partially slotted floor similar to
the B house in the other. Each of the two sides housed
40 to 50 hogs.
Building D has completely slotted wooden floor and is
built over a lagoon. It is divided into two pens; one pen
has lV2-inch oak slats with % inch spacing while the
other pen has 4-inch oak slats (2 by 4's placed flat)
with % inch spacing. Each pen housed 40 to 50 hogs.
The A building which is described as conventional,
is an open-fronted, pole building with a front (South)
door that extends down to within 3 feet of the floor. It
is 20 X 36 feet with a 20 X 36 foot feeding floor on the
south side. It housed 100 hogs in two groups of 50 each.
1 Based on Purdue AES project 1284, a cooperative research
effort. Participants include H. W. Jones, R. A. Pickett, M. D.
Judge and H. Paarlberg, Animal Sciences Department; R. Peart
and A. C. Dale, Agricultural Engineering Department; E. O.
Haelterman, S. M. Gaafar, T. M. Curtin and P. N. Boehm, School
of Veterinary Science and Medicine; and W. H. M. Morris, J. E.
Kadlec, and D. Bache, Agricultural Economics Department.
an economic comparison
The E System makes use of portable housing on pasture
in the summer and a cement slab in winter. (We did not
have hogs in the portable housing in the winter. We assumed in our budget (Table 1) that performance in
portable houses on a concrete slab would be similar to the
performances  in the  A building.)
Results
The partially slotted B building and the A and E systems had similar costs per hog finished (Table 1). The
B building has the lowest costs (by a small margin) because savings in feed, labor, and bedding more than offset  the  higher  building  costs.
The C and D enclosed concrete floor and totally slotted
floor buildings tended to have higher costs per hog finished because higher death loss, veterinary and building
costs were not offset by other savings.
By changing the width of slat from 1 Vz inch to 4 inches
in the totally slotted unit costs were reduced $2.76 per
hog finished (Table 1). Hence, other modifications such
as number of pigs per pen might make the fully slotted
floor building competitive with the B house and with
the conventional systems.
Returns to labor
Returns to labor per hog were very similar for the B
and conventional systems (Table 2). However, since the
partially slotted B house reduced the labor per hog and
enabled the production of more hogs with a given amount
of labor, the returns per hour of labor were about $ .50
higher with the B system than with the conventional
systems. The enclosed system, however, required more
than double the capital investment of the conventional
system.
Implications for Swine Producers
The results of this study indicate that with good management, growing-finishing building systems with widely
different investments per hog result in about the same
cost per hog finished.
The design characteristics of the particular type of facility has greater effect on cost per hundredweight of pork
produced than do differences in types of well-designed
facilities. The particular type of systems, high-investment low-labor vs. low-investment high-labor depends on
the individual farm resources, the hog program and the
manager.
The high-investment building will tend to meet the
needs on a farm which has or is moving toward a high