Time Flies... (duplicate post)

...when you're having fun. It looks like my blog has mostly died in the past 2 weeks, but in reality, that's because of all the good things that have been happening around here. I've been super busy and while my busyness encompasses a broad range of stuff, I'll try to lay them out in a series of blogs. Since most of my life has been defined recently by grad school, this first blog will focus there.

I was originally supposed to start my pigs on project the beginning of July, but the project start has been a little delayed by the age of the pigs and their growth. It all is based on when they reach a certain age and so as the pigs were born a bit late, my research was once again inevitably delayed. We're planning now to start the beginning of August, but that is good because it gives me a lot of time to catch up on the other progressions with the project around here.

One of these includes the final formulation of the diets to be used in the project. After balancing out the potential diets, we determined that there was a need for another treatment for comparison and the deletion of a previous diet. Since my focus is still on the impact of organic production, we will be using a commercially available, organic supplement which is intended to benefit the pigs in a similar way to which antibiotics could be used without the actual use of antibiotics. This is a fun little bit of science, but please stay posted and I will either blog my class paper on the issue or I will create a page to upload it. It's too long for this blog already.

We also got a shipment in of pig feeders for use in the indoor housing with outdoor access treatment. Because these pigs were traditionally fed on clean ground we needed to buy and build new feeders. I need to be able to weigh back all of the feed to determine weekly feed intakes and weight change. This will help us get a numerical value for what we call feed conversion which is simply the amount of feed it takes for a pig to gain a pound in body weight. Because we're going to look at economic factors to consider in organic production, the amount of pig feed it takes to grow the pigs will be an integral value in this.


Assembling pig feeders turned into a 2 day process where I ratcheted, un-ratcheted and re-ratcheted all day. The feeder material was sheet metal folded and drilled and it didn't quite all line up. To further complicate the matter, the instructions were not written in the correct order for everything to line up. It took 3 times to finally get an order of assembly which worked. At the end of the second day, covered in dirt and grease, I was finally confident that the pig feeders would work and hold up to the abuse that pigs put on everything in their pens. Hopefully the straw bedding will distract them from demolishing the feeders.

I also got to do my first pig weaning last week. I know it seems odd but I never took a swine class in undergrad and so my trip out to the farm last week turned into another great educational experience. The pig industry is very numbers oriented with records on everything. So as we weaned piglets from their mothers, we weighed them. They were doing pretty well, since some were weaning out at upper 20s. After recording weights, we sorted them into groups of similar weights so that they could grow with other pigs of similar size. This helps to prevent bigger pigs bossing the little ones around and "hogging" all of the feed.

As I mentioned before, we're also using straw in the outdoor access pigs. So while we were out there we helped put straw up in the mow. Stacking straw in the mow (pronounced like "ow" with an 'm' on the front) is hot, dusty, sticky work. We used to do a bit of it when were younger, but I haven't stacked much since high school when I stopped volunteering for sub-minimum wage work. It capped off a super long week last week and gave me sore hands which will once again harden into callouses that I lost in college. Hard work is good for the body.

We've also been doing a lot of training and sponsor recruiting for the Pelotonia. Luckily this is going to start wrapping itself up so we can just focus on the training. People have been very generous; Amanda and I are grateful for all of their support and proud to be riding on behalf of agriculture this year.

Credit to D. Sturtevant for the photo.

Ultrasounding! (duplicate post)

Today was one of those where I am reminded about how great it is to be in school. There are so many knowledgeable and experienced professionals in this university and it is a privilege to work with them. Some days. And by the way, I Googled "ultrasound piglet" to find the images. Let's just say that I did a lot of sorting before finding a good one from Purdue. And I've seen tons of things I never wanted to or expected to see.

Back to topic, today was one of those days for learning great new things. We took a trip out to the farm where I will be conducting my research and brought the ultrasound machine along to preg-check the gilts there at the farm. Preg-check is just short-hand for checking them to see if they're pregnant. Since pregnancy and new life is a critical part of the economic chain on farms, it's important to know whether animals are pregnant and how far along they are so that you're not just sitting around waiting every day or randomly surprised when it starts raining babies.

I've never actually ultrasounded before, so I spent a good part of the first pens just trying to understand what I was looking at. Since you probably haven't done this before either, I'll try and make sense of it for you. If the image is in the right place, determining pregnancy takes less than 2 seconds. We are looking for round dark shapes in the image at this age. Each one of those round dark images is a piglet in the uterus. Where things get tricky is the correct placement of the image itself. If the probe is in the wrong spot, you can get cool (but useless) images of the GI tract which can be misinterpreted for a non-pregnant pig. I also a few times today got images which were blurred in some places by poor contact between skin and probe and these blurrs weren't helpful either.

We went through about a half gallon of vegetable oil today, lubricating up the probe. No, that's not because it was going where the sun doesn't shine. Lubricating the probe helps eliminate image blocking by skin and hair on the underside of the pig. We can better press up against the side of the pig and apply even pressure which leads to a better image. Surprisingly, while there were very few pictures of ultrasound images, there were tons of pictures of people ultrasounding, so I will include one here for you as well. The basic gist of the procedure is to oil up the probe, place it under the pig near the flank and to angle it at about a 45 degree angle through the pig. This should give a good view of the uterus.

This is by no means an easy thing to do, but it is very non-invasive and so it's important to become good at doing this so that we can limit the stress of the mothers and promote a higher pregnancy success rate for them on the farm. My advisor is unbelievably quick at this and was a patient teacher today as I stumbled through my first few before really grasping what I was doing. What a great day for learning!

No more videos! (duplicate post)

This past week marked a great milestone in my time as a graduate student. Since I arrived last summer, I’ve been assigned to video evaluation of pigs we recorded on farm visits. The main gist of the project was to evaluate a training program’s success in helping farmers learn to limit their pigs’ stress and thus to ultimately benefit the pig by lowering their stress level and improving the interactions with humans. There’s a lot of evidence that points to increased production value of animals which have more positive interactions with humans as opposed to negative interactions with humans and sometimes people just don’t quite understand what can make up a positive or negative interaction. Some things as simple as shouting across the pens to someone else can stress out an animal whereas moving through pens at a moderate volume level and occasionally gently patting animals that are in your way, etc., can help improve their interactions with the livestock caretaker.

So a part of this project consisted of us coming on farm, walking through the pens with a video recorder, and then me going back through later and counting the number of pigs visible in the frame every five seconds. Let’s review: We visit LOTS of farms and record pigs; then I watch the video, stopping every five seconds to count pigs. Yeah, I started last summer and have never caught up. Until now.

This week I finished video number ~130, each one of which took excess of an hour if it went right the first time. The whole time the camera view is being knocked back and forth by pigs on screen that ran into the videographer (not a fun job) so it’s a short matter of time before I got motion sick. There were weeks in the fall where I spent the whole week in a state of motion sickness and headache from so much video analysis. All of this was fit in between classes and other work, and on a time crunch because we’re trying to analyze the project data now. As much fun as that was, I’m very glad to have it done and the time freed up to help on something new. Projects need to be changed up every so often and that one’s been on my plate for over a year now.

Piggies!

I went out for my second visit to the farm where my project will be taking place, and it's all starting to seem just a little bit more real. Work with literature, designing, planning and the like can become so abstract and the chance to get hands on and take pictures and conceptualize where things will really be was pretty exciting. I went through the simple stuff such as claiming a locker to keep some things in, meeting the farm employees and designing the main ideas of how this is going down. Right now I'm still held up by people who haven't completed their animal handling training requirements so hopefully we will get a move on pretty soon.

We also dropped in to see the little piglets. If I had seen my first pigs as piglets, I think I would have a much more happy impression of pigs. They are so cute and little, almost fragile looking like Wilbur in Charlotte's Web. But little pigs grow up to be mean biters, cannibalistic towards their neighbors and aggressive towards anyone. And don't think that they were any better in the wild. Old Yeller might be a Disney movie but the vicious wild pigs in it are totally straight to character. Thankfully we found a solution for this, and it's called bacon.

Speaking of bacon, I helped with the Ohio Lamb Chef's Day this week and got to experience new twists on many old products. I love lamb for it's unique taste, whimsical rearing grounds (the definition of beautiful pasture was coined when someone saw lambs grazing), and for its ability to eat anything and turn it into food for me (best thing about ruminants). But I loved lamb even more after getting to eat it prepared by a master chef. And this chef wasn't just a master at preparing food, but a great guy to work with and help. He explained everything so simply and yet got such amazing results from relatively unskilled volunteers. Very impressive and my personal favorite from the day was lamb bacon. I will try and remember to take a picture and give a description of it when I fry up the leftovers that I have in our refrigerator now.

Finals Week Fun (duplicate post)

There's nothing quite like the life you get when you've been freed of the books and studying chaining you all quarter. Even getting up EARLY this week hasn't been able to put a damper on my mood although a severe cold is doing its best. So let me tell you about a couple of my days back in the research loop so you can understand what I do, and maybe also give you an idea of the efforts we put in to protect the food chain.

Yesterday I was up before dawn thought about the day. We met on campus and left in the truck around 5.30 to head North to a pig farm where we would be collecting samples starting at 7.00. This research is specifically for finding ways to better handle and treat pigs so that they are less stressed on a daily basis. Not only is stress reduction important to the consumer, but it is important to the farmers because they want to keep their animals as healthy as possible.

After sample collection, helping to save a pig from the abuse of its pen-mates and saying goodbye to the farmer, we were headed back to campus. I grabbed a quick shower and then hung out until I had a meeting in the afternoon. After the meeting I went downstairs to learn how to make the plug-ins for the thermometer we use in some experiments. This was frustrating work, but thankfully all I was doing was learning so in the time I made 1 successfully, Katie had made 5. At the end of a 12 hour day, I went home to Amanda and finally got to relax for the rest of the evening before an early bedtime in preparation for this morning.

This morning was pig slaughter/harvest. Because it's the end of the quarter, there were less students on the floor, but their vacancy was taken up by some researchers and their visiting colleagues from my alma mater who were collecting liver, jejunum and duodenum samples for a variety of research purposes. This just goes to further emphasize the critical value of animal by-products in the world around us.

My job this morning was to singe the hair and scrape any remaining hair from the skin of the pig. Hair can harbor bacteria which can later infect people, and even though we don't eat the skin, the skin comes into the meat lab where food products will be fabricated, so it's crucial to make sure we keep the area as sterile as possible. The removal of hair is so important and time-consuming that half of the crew today was dedicated solely to this purpose, with me at the end of the line, singing what hadn't already been spun off the skin or shaved by 4 people with knives. Following the end of harvest, we then proceeded to scrub down every inch of the facility, sterilizing and sanitizing the living daylights out of it to prevent any bacterial growth before the next time we use it.

For the rest of today, I'll be reading journal articles on subjects that potentially could be in my field of research next summer. All just a couple of days in my life... And yet, somewhere in the mix I also found time to find all of the gifts I needed for Christmas for Amanda, too. She's been so good about not spying or prying to find out what she's getting, I just hope she's pleasantly surprised in the end.

Just sitting

This morning we had harvest for 30 pigs here on campus. While this overlapped with my 11 am class that I would've been occupied by otherwise, it also took up a lot of my morning considering that we started at 6.00 am this morning. I like getting up early in the morning and my time working odd hours with Marcus was amazing. But what you have to do in that case is find a time for a warm afternoon catnap. What I don't like is the long day without any kind of rest. My new plan for this afternoon was to take a nap, but my position as a TA in a 2.30 recitation won out and I will be headed to the class shortly. If any of you expect to find me this evening, you will find me back here at Animal Sciences helping host the Fayette County 4-H group as they come in for a carcass show regarding the animals they had us harvest on Tuesday.

Speaking of 2 harvests in the same week I am sharply reminded of something my dad said a couple of years ago. I often have these sudden and short-lived urges to work out and build up my muscles. Exercise in the form of walking, running, basketball and biking are things that I have no trouble picking up at any time or getting into the habit of doing. However, in the case of actual muscle building, I usually don't last a week. Well, a couple of years ago Dad made the comment that some of the strongest people arre those that work in a slaughter facility or as butchers. He claimed this was because of the workload and how it was also built around a week so that different muscle exercise was performed each day.

Now that I am aching all over from the second harvest in a week, I am realizing just how right he was. The work that we do, even when I'm only moving carcasses down the rail (pushing or pulling weight) is very taxing and I am not in the kind of shape that I should be in to do this twice in a week. Tuesday was difficult, but the repeat on Thursday has pushed my muscles to a point where they complain to me when I try to drink a bottle of water. This is hard work, and good work. When I was asked today by one of the grad students today if this was what I thought I'd be doing in my Masters program, I said "Yes." I am learning new things every day and starting to fit into the work so that I don't feel uncomfortably out of place every day now. It's good to be challenged again, both physically and mentally.

Although my commentary on the following links will be limited, they are totally worth the viewing. Check them out and have a great day!

First off, if you know anything about Google maps, you've probably tried creeping on your house and seeing what you were doing when they took the image for their website. If you haven't, just take my word for it that they are real photos and I can even tell when they update them because the model or position of cars will change at our house. Well, apparently in Brazil, the images were banned after this happened.


Hungary continues to pollute the earth, even as we're still trying to sort out who we really are going to get away with scapegoating for the BP spill.

Finally, in case you haven't heard it often enough in recent news, here's the Daily Show's take on the non-witch GOP candidate.

I love Pandora radio and my ACDC channel has been one of the best choices I've made regarding my homework and project productivity.

Weekend already?

Darn, it's such a disappointment, but I know it can't be the weekend already. It feels like it should be, what with the long last couple of days on a pig farm down on the South side of Ohio and the heat. The weather has been absolutely unbearable and totally thwarted all of our efforts to reduce our electric bill. We've bought and installed (Amanda deserves the credit for that) a programmable thermostat, turned off the a/c whenever possible, closed the blinds to prevent sun heating, and turned off the lights any time possible. Yet our electric usage for the July - August was double that of the previous bill. But enough of that.

The nice thing about the heat is that with a cold pool and the bright, blazing sunlight the people at the pool have dwindled to the ugly, mis-behaved and myself/my family. Jeremy and I performed a serious overflow flood with a dual cannonball into the 5 ft. deep pool. It's probably better that most times people aren't around to watch us, I'll just leave it at that. And then yesterday there were two kids scantily clad/losing their swimsuits and swimming unattended. Absolutely awful, but even more so once their teenage mother showed up and they started vying for her attention and trying to break her texting habit by shouting and "falling" all over the place.

Tomatoes... I had some growing, courtesy of Chris's survivors from a small frost accident this spring. Some tough plants, because they even are trying to fight back after being sprayed by herbicide thanks to some highly-trained and yet negligent landscaping employee. I'm honestly so mad about it that I still haven't gotten up the calm to even call and complain. I'm worried I won't even have something appropriate to say and so instead I am forced to continue trying to water the plants and hope something good comes out of them. I had so many tomatoes growing on that little guy and now they're all shriveled up. :(

And still the thought of a weekend looms over me. It's almost time for school, I used my C-pass for the first time today and I have to admit I was pretty excited about that. With Marshall tomorrow and WNCI blaring away about football season and Labor Day weekend this week, I'm just excited. Hopefully all this excitement turns out to be legitimate.