corn fed, country raised

i can hardly believe i've already been in iowa for a week!

things here have been fantastic. we went to farms on monday, tuesday, and thursday. wednesday was set as downtime in between farms, and we were able to have our "orientation" (just a few days into things...)

the farm we visited on thursday was much smaller than the ones we were at earlier in the week. monday and tuesday we saw barns with 1500 pigs/barn, giving 15,000 pigs on one site. the weather was less than ideal, but the pigs were seemingly content in the barns.

tuesday was my birthday. tuesday was also the first time in my life i euthanized an animal. the pig i euthanized was sick and was almost septic. after humanely euthanizing the pig, i posted it. the necropsy revealed that there was a strangulating intestinal hernia and the pig was unable to move any food through it's intestines. it was very interesting to see, and i learned a lot from this experience.

thursday was our first day by ourselves. i am in a group with kate (my hostess with the mostest here in ames) and seth (a student from penn), and it was just us. we were responsible for thorough evaluation of all of the barns on-site, and if any pigs were experiencing disease we were responsible for posting representative pigs and collecting sample tissues. lucky for the pigs, none of them appeared to be sick and we only needed to draw blood for PRRS status testing.

friday the 3 of us worked together (at the school) to put together a powerpoint presentation for the group of our findings from the previous day. we also had to write a case report. our presentation went well, and led to discussion of challenges producers face with managing large (or small) scale swine operations.

we had the weekend to ourselves, and it was delightful. i couldn't have asked for better hosts! kate and phillip are great, and i'm incredibly thankful to have stayed with them this past week.

tomorrow morning, the 5 students will head to minnesota where we'll stay for the week. there is a production system that is experiencing some issues that we need to help evaluate. still split into our teams, we are responsible for going to upwards of 30 farms in 4 days between the 5 of us. we are to collect samples and evaluate each site. it's quite the opportunity and i'm very excited to go there! this is the best hands-on rotation, and i can't imagine not coming here for it!!!