Swine Teaching, Research and Extension Center Opens

The department new Swine Teaching, Research and Extension Center consists of an enclosed building (left) for farrowing and starting young pigs, a research lab, student quarters, a small classroom, an office and feed storage room. A long outdoor pen building (seen partly on right) houses mature sows and boars and young pigs over 40 lbs.

A ribbon-cutting ceremony on March 13, 2001, celebrated the opening of the departments new $2.4 million Swine Teaching, Research and Extension Center. More than 150 people attended the event including Dean Neal Van Alfen, Provost Robert Grey, Vice-Chancellor Janet Hamilton, members of the Department Development Board, faculty, staff and students. The department drew up plans to relocate the facility several years ago when construction of Engineering 3 Building on the central campus required removal of several outdoor pens of the original Hog Barn built in 1913. The new Swine Center is located adjacent to the Feedlot east of Hopkins Road on the west campus. 

Each year, the Center raises approximately 1,100 pigs for teaching, research and extension purposes. Some 600 students, many of them undergraduates, use the facility annually Veterinary students also train there. The Swine Center is one of the department's principal research facilities. Dr. Trish Berger and her students conduct fertilization research with animals from the facility while Drs. Gary Anderson and Jim Murray and students have studied gene transfer research with pigs in recent years. Other faculty use the pigs for investigations in nutrition, reproductive physiology and behavior. Most of the pigs are eventually slaughtered, but many are provided to the School of Medicine for research and surgical training. Pigs serve as convenient models for human medicine because of their biological similarities to humans. 

"Although pigs are the original couch potatoes, they are quite bright," mused Kent Parker, who has managed the swine unit for the past 18 years and who assisted in designing the new facility. Kristin Griesbach, an Animal Science major who raised pigs in her 4-H club before coming to UC Davis, agrees that pigs are very intelligent despite their reputation for being dirty and smelly "People don't understand pigs at all," she remarked. Griesbach and students Amber Steinhauer and Abbi Bennett joined returning Hog Barn resident Rhonda Rhoades, this fall, living in the small apartment on the upper level of the old barn before recently moving to their new dorm quarters on the West Campus. The students feed and care for the animals and learn basic herd-management skills. They jokingly note that their friends don't seem to be coming around as often since they moved to the Hog Barn, but they wouldn't trade their experiences for anything. 

The new facility includes a long, covered outdoor pen-building to house mature sows and boars and young pigs 40 pounds and heavier. A large adjacent enclosed section includes areas for farrowing and starting young pigs, a research lab, student quarters, a small classroom, an office and room for feed storage. The stainless-steel pens all have concrete floors with gutters that are automatically flushed with water each day to remove manure. With the new facility's automated waste removal system, Parker is confident "most people won't even know we're here." 

An entirely new certified disease-free herd is being bred at the facility from 131 pigs shipped in from Kentucky, including 80 sows. The Pig Improvement Company in Berkeley donated the pigs. 

And so the doors on the old Hog Barn have swung shut for the last time signaling the end of an era. Because of its age and shingle-sided University Farm-era architecture, campus planners hope to preserve the barn for some new use so it can continue to remind us of the campus' agricultural roots.

       

	Kent Parker, Swine Center manager, inspects a young litter of piglets born to a sow donated to the department by the Berkeley-based Pig Improvement Company.
	Robert Grey (left), UC Davis provost, and Neat Van Allen, dean of the College of Agricultural and Environmental Sciences, participate in the ribbon-cutting ceremony for the new Swine center.
	Dr. Sbelley Cargill (left), postgraduate researcher in Animal Science and Entomology, looks over her handiwork with graduate students Tad Bender and Monna Hess. Shelley chaired the food committee for the Swine Center Open House.
	Gary Anderson (center), Animal Science department chair, discusses Swine Center matters with Department Development Board member Jeff Poston (left) of Jem-Dar Holsteins in Tulare while Rick Swantz, College of Agricultural and Environmental Sciences director of development, looks on at the Swine Center opening.
	The original Hog Barn, built in 1913, will remain standing on the south side of the UC Davis campus center.
(This article was adapted from a story printed in Dateline written by Patricia Bailey of the UC Davis News Service.)