2012

I think it's fair to say that 2012 was a pretty quiet year overall. I haven't forgotten about this blog, but I have had far less inflammatory issues to talk about and I've been too busy doing agricultural work to take time to tell you about it. Sure, lots of things happened, but they weren't enough to get me all fired up. No huge legislative issues passed through, besides Strickland's emergency passage of exotic animal regulations in Ohio. I learned not to get all fired up about the little stuff and I was too busy doing the big stuff to sit down and tell you little pieces and parts of my research.

For the specifics of my new PhD work and personal life, I've started a new blog. My master's is now complete and I will be sure to share the publications with you as they come out, but for now you will have to wait on the results. I will only say that the research did not show what we expected, but it was surprising in ways not anticipated. I am for one just glad to be done.

I hope that everyone who reads this had a great 2012, and I will be sure to check in every now and again. Don't worry - I will be back when the time calls - maybe as early as the final passage of the long-anticipated farm bill. If only congress could learn to get something done.

Beginning of classes (duplicate post)

Well, just like that the Delaware County Fair is in the books again. We'll have the carcass show tonight for the few animals which were purchased and slaughtered and that will be the official end for one more year. There's a lot of pictures from the fair showing up on the website, so check them out. Not only are there great photographers entering in the show (including my wife, who won 3rd place!), but it seems there were a lot of good pictures shot by fairgoers and submitted to the site throughout the week.

As we sort through all of Amanda's pictures, mine have been posted to the Picasa album. Suprisingly, Picasa has not been cooperating well with her Google-brother Blogger, so I'll include the link to the album so you can go there straightaway. In the end, only 25 pictures made my cut onto the site, but as I fill up that site I'm trying to weed out some of my less good shots, including a cut yesterday on some pictures which lacked clarity or subject focus and were just on there for sentimental reasons.

I also began a new photo website which I like less, but they tricked me into joining with a contest for the best geocached photos. I'm a sucker for contests like this so hopefully I'll win something, and if not I've at least put in a little ad online for the Delaware County Fair. Yahoo's Flickr is just a little bit too glitchy and gimmicky for me to use it much yet.

Class is started here on campus and so now i have to adjust to a new schedule once again. I have yet to remember that I TA a class in the morning, so luckily it's for my forgiving mother-in-law because I haven't showed up to it on time yet. Coffee gets me through the long days of adjustment and by November my pigs should start coming off trial. Looking through the fog of chaos to the future of lab work and predictable schedules. Well, here's to hoping anyways...

Squealing... (duplicate post)

... like a stuck pig. This quote has immensely more meaning to me now than it did a month ago. With the start of my project came the blood draws which had been written up in my protocol and approved by the animal care and use committee. Those blood draws seemed fine on paper - take blood every 2 weeks, but in reality, the restraining and bleeding of over 100 pigs is just a bit out of hand. And it doesn't go nearly as fast or efficiently as I would've hoped. My first day at the blood draws I didn't even wear ear plugs, and the ringing in my ears for the remainder of the day was a hard-hitting lesson I haven't forgotten. It might go without saying that we have revised the protocol to require less blood draws from the pigs and I think we can still get enough data to draw some conclusions.

The blood work actually has some very important repercussions for the pigs themselves. I'm looking at blood tests which tell me how much the diet and living conditions are changing stress levels in the pigs, and how their health is holding up over the trial. Many of the assays are similar to what is done on humans to determine their health as well. But most humans don't scream when they give blood for a test.

Pigs are pretty funny creatures. I can say this now because I'm also watching hours and hours of behavioural recordings to determine the effect of the dietary and housing treatments we've imposed. They have a very strong desire to be free to do whatever they want, but not knowing what they actually want they are quite prone to roam aimlessly - stirring up trouble along the way. Pigs play rough and often are to blame for the death of one another, even with maximum human intervention. I can't even imagine how badly they hate on each other in a feral situation. The notion of pigs as intelligent or peaceful creatures is "hogwash", pun intended, because they are merely insistent and curious. They will keep hitting something over and over again until it finally works out, only to find out it wasn't what they wanted anyways because they didn't know what they wanted to start with.

Something else I've noticed which is interesting is the pigs we've placed into organic housing. This housing allows pigs more space and an exercise area. They also have contact with birds. Initially, I expected that pigs would've been super curious and nervous around birds since they do not naturally encounter them during their lifespan. However, they sleep and just let the birds hop all over them, like animals at the zoo, as if they had always been around birds. I learn something new ever day.

Credit to Disciple of INDYCAR Weblog for the picture which I'm sure was borrowed from elsewhere.

Loving Lab Help (duplicate post)

I married a saint. Don’t get me wrong, nobody’s perfect, but this woman brings light into the hell that was last week. She stuck with me through the worst I could drag her down into and she helped to get me back up out of it. For that I am grateful. Who knew that pipetting could stir such emotions in my cold, automated heart?

My grad research project officially started the beginning of August. It feels like I’ve been waiting for this forever, but now that It’s here I just can’t wait until it’s over. The way the past three weeks have flown by, I imagine this project will be a blur in my life so I’m going to need to find things like Pelotonia to brighten and accent this high speed pursuit of a couple of letters after my last name. Since I’m doing most of the work by myself without any employees to help me, I would be remiss to not mention those who have volunteered to help me out of a few pickles so far: Lucien, Dare, Dan, Frank and Mike.

Lab work has never been my specialty and I seem to have forgotten that when I wrote the protocol for this experiment. I’ve suddenly been submersed into the dark world of basement labs, working in four different labs and gaining access to BSL2 over at the vet school for culturing of pathogens. The amount I’ve learned in the past week has rivaled all of last year’s classwork, making me question why I ever took classes in the first place because I’m such a hands-on learner. But last week was an extreme baptism into the hellfires of bloodwork.

When Amanda called, I told her to go to her exercise class because I wouldn’t be home for a long time that night. Everything I’d tried to do that day kept dragging out. I’d been at work since 7 am and it was already 6 pm. I still had to do all the hematocrit, plasma and serum spinning and storage, and didn’t even know how long it would take me since I hadn’t done 200 blood samples at once before in my life. I’d memorized protocol and gathered supplies, just starting when the phone rang. Amanda immediately asked if I wanted her help. Her company was more what I wanted, but her help was great too. But I didn’t want to ruin her evening, insisting that she didn’t come down.

She came down anyways, bringing pizza and a hug for the hapless, absent-minded genius who had forgotten to lock down some hematocrit tubes before spinning and was cleaning up broken glass glitter. It’d been over an hour and I’d gone nowhere. We ate and she learned how I wanted samples labeled and pipette and she got straight to work. And we worked, and we worked. This was a bloodwork marathon I don’t intend to duplicate any time soon. Thursday is looming up on me already. Last week we didn’t leave the lab until midnight but it was long before that when I realized I married a saint. Such self-sacrifice doesn’t come easy or often and I really appreciated it. I love you, Amanda.

Bi-weekly Update (duplicate post)

The past couple of weeks have once again been an absolute whirlwind. Starting my thesis has turned out to be the single greatest writing endeavour of my life and I think I started it none too soon. Besides trying to write about 1,000 words per day, I’ve also been trying to get amendments in for my protocol and other items around. Combine this with the state fair coming into play and there has been a lot of busy rushing going on.

The vegetables are growing well, with the best cantaloupe plants I’ve ever had. We trained the pumpkins to climb this year and the strength in their trailers is amazing! I’ve included a picture of the trainer a few weeks ago which has not totally filled out with leaves and blooms. I’m not sure how well the vines will hold the pumpkins on, but it’s a fun thing to try anyways. Those little wispies that come out from the vine have been reaching out and pulling the vine along every day, strengthening its position on the cage and providing a lot of entertainment for me.

4-H camp was this past week and over all, I think we’re pretty lucky. With all the heat and enough rain to canoe without damming up the creek, it’s really amazing that we were able to run all of our sessions without being cancelled out by rain except by night. Each day was blazingly hot with stifling humidity (heat indexes well over 100), but we made it through and only lost 1 dehydration patient over the week who had to go home to recover from losing too much fluid. On a funny note, we created a video to instruct campers about the 2 biggest problems we had at camp this year and I will plan on getting that posted as soon as I can get ahold of a copy of it.

I’ve got a bunch of different articles open on my browser, so hang tight and I’ll get them all out this week, but with the state fair and my position as a judge, a volunteer, an employee, a researcher, a sibling and a husband – it’s going to be a fast-paced next couple of weeks. Hang in there with me and stay cool and shady from all the hot weather.

Antibiotics Paper Online

Finally, I have figured out a way to put my paper on antibiotic use in pigs online. You should see it now on the right of the blog above the archive. My paper on antibiotics is a small work in the great mix of science in this world, but people say I do a good job of explaining concepts in anyone's terms. I hope you find the paper a good read and I encourage you to ask questions or pose corrections to the argument.

Nobody should be above learning unless they are below society.

Time Flies...

...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.

Diets

The experiment that I’m working on is pretty commonly referred to as a feeding trial. Basically what this means is that our experiment will consist of different diet adjustments. These diet adjustments try to only change one specific thing between diets in order to be able to attribute differences observed during the experiment to these diet changes, thus increasing our understanding of what impact the things we feed has on product quality, product safety, animal health and the environment. It is a very rewarding area of animal science to be researching for me because I feel like the knowledge we can gain in this field is limitless in its potential real-world applications. In our case we will be formulating one diet from which different additives will be put in. We hope to determine which added ingredient is best for encouraging healthy growth and behavior of pigs while improving the safety of our human food supply. Keep in mind that all of the ingredients we are testing have already been proven to be safe and beneficial for consumption by animals, and also safe for ultimate human consumption. We just want to know which is most beneficial.

A struggle with feeding trials over the years is that occasionally something other than just the treatment gets inadvertently changed. In my field of study, I’ve seen growth performance of pigs attributed to a diet ingredient and then people later discovered that they gave extra protein or energy to one of the groups. This can have a big impact on what happens during the experiment! These confounded results can have very little value to science if the variables cannot be sorted out and I don’t want this to happen to me. To avoid this, we spent last week balancing diets based on current ingredient listings that we have available to us. We made the diets as simple as possible and used a programmed spreadsheet to ensure that every requirement of the pig is met in the diet. Then we edited ingredients between treatments to make sure that they were balanced as well. By balancing for energy, we created “isocaloric” diets which we also balanced for protein.

But it’s much more complicated than that. Feed ingredients also have different digestibility values once fed and can have interactions between ingredients. This is where it becomes important to understand feed ingredients and to have properly analyzed the feed for the values we used in the calculations. Scientific research over the years has established a lot of ratios that we need to follow to ensure that the animals we are feeding have the nutrition they need to be healthy for the trial and also balanced between treatments in the experiment.

All sounds kind of complicated, right? Well this is a simplified version of what really goes on, and this same nutrient balancing is what is done for all of the animals that live on farms today. Some people think that we should return to the “natural” way of producing animals, that we have overcomplicated the issue and that this isn’t good for the animals. While I understand peoples’ concerns about complicated diets, simple things aren’t always good. Pasture and free range doesn’t provide everything that an animal needs to live, just like vegetarianism cannot provide all of the nutrients that humans need to be healthy. We need to supplement this intake with protein, vitamins and minerals (naturally found in animal products) in order to be as healthy as we can be. And the same kind of supplementation is important for animals.

Now, we could just throw out a mineral block and call it good, but with all of the science and knowledge that we have today, that would be underutilizing technology. By using the technology we’ve developed, we can provide so much better care to the animals we raise. And this is why farmers go to great lengths to balance out nutrients with proper analysis to make sure that they are providing everything that an animal needs to be healthy and survive. They go to complicated lengths to make the right decisions for the animals which ultimately put food on your table.

Approval! (duplicate post)

Great news came in today! My project has been approved by the IACUC review committee. I was getting pretty skeptical since we hadn’t heard anything recently and I was starting to get worried about how long we would have to wait to hear back. Then this morning we got a query about correcting a typo and I was even more worried. Were we going to have to go through correcting every typo before the protocol was finally approved? But thankfully it finally came in this afternoon. And none too early.

Logistical issues have already caused us to need to readjust the plan a few times. Nothing ever can work out quite as planned and there is a plethora of research projects out there. Each one says something just a little bit different with slight changes in methods and results. In an effort to streamline the project and eliminate animal stress (including the humans working on this project), and to make sure that this project has real benefit and applicability to society and animals, we keep reevaluating the project details. And while the animal care protocol is approved, this is only the beginning.

The animal care protocol is only for assuring the least harm to the animal and appropriate care and contingency planning for the whole project. Although it is very important to make sure that research projects responsibly minimize impact on the lives of animals, it is also very important to make sure the project has important meaning to the furthering of science. So what still remains are all of the little details. Details that include the exact percentages of feed ingredients, the exact measurements to the inches of the pens, the exact times and camera positions for observations. And again, all of this is based on the literature and findings of all the people before me. As things go on, I will try to keep you updated on the different parts that go into a simple research project.

No more videos!

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.

De-barking

This was a concept I had barely even heard about before we discussed it yesterday in the animal issues class that I TA. As a little side note, I would like to congratulate all of the students in that class for taking it upon themselves to enroll in a non-required class (but fulfills a GEC) that discusses such complicated topics. These are students who truly show for the most part an interest in learning things in college instead of just checking off requirements before they leave. Yesterday, I talked to an aviation major in the class, just one example of the diversity we have in the class and hopefully that will lead to a lot of healthy discussion.

Debarking dogs can be done for many reasons. First on my mind was a beagle or the deaf dog in our house last year, but apparently there are more complex interests in debarking of dogs than just the annoying metronome of dogs who haven't learned to shut up. Most interesting to me was the fact that Ohio is the only state to have a law that prohibits the debarking of vicious dogs. It would seem that there were actually people who debarked attack/guard dogs in order to still protect themselves but give the dog the benefit of surprise. Law enforcement officers found this especially troublesome for obvious reasons.

What bothers me about the debarking of dogs is the surgery and the fact that it permanently inhibits the dog's ability to vocalize. I understand this is the goal of the procedure and I'm sure there are dogs which this procedure must be performed on, dogs that have no self-control and raise complaints from neighbors, etc. There does come a point where the dog will either have to be given up or debarked for its own good. And when you reach that point and there has been no way to prevent the dog from incessant barking, then I think that debarking becomes a justifiable procedure. There was no way to previously predict the dog would behave this way and to get rid of the dog would provide less quality of life than the alternative of just removing the ability to misbehave in a way in which will result in the dog's movement to a shelter or unfamiliar home. This is just one more of those tough choices that has to be made by the people who have taken the responsibility of caring for the animal. The animal depends on these people to do the best that they can for it, and sometimes they might determine that debarking is necessary. That's just one more fact of life, and it's better than the dog having to settle into a new home or shelter.

Finals Week Fun

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 scape 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...

Corn harvesting?

It does seem a bit early doesn't it? However, John in his blog says that they started out his direction this weekend. I hope that turns out to be a good thing, but I can't imagine this heat's a good thing. And then just read the first line of this article and pretend to be surprised. What, you didn't expect to hear that?



Meanwhile, we've signed a new deal to collaborate with Israel to research food production. Frankly, I can't think of a better place to working with to research food production. They're exporting out a desert, anyone else think they might know a few things about growing excess food to feed people with limited resources? And let's face it, we're all going to have limited resources eventually. Even Michigan... sorry guys, but you know it's true. I would link you to the release about the agreement, or to the article discussing the linkage between Zinc deficiency and pneumonia, but the ARS website just doesn't seem to be working tonight. You'll have to look for those yourself.

Anyhow, I'm off for the night and back to work tomorrow after finally having to concede a sick day on Friday.

Week 2, Post 4

My first day on the kill floor was today. I have to say that up until last night I wasn't too nervous about it, but more anxious that I would be effective and safe. I was pretty nervous this morning, however, once people started showing up and I realized how little slaughter experience I have had before now.

I credit some of the co-workers and my advisors for making the learning process so much more accelerated. Quickly I was able to fit into the stunning and bleeding stage, and I was able to add my sheep experience to the mix to help sort the sheep smoothly. Frankly, I thought it went pretty well for my first day and I have to say that after doing stunning myself, there is little excuse for some of the videos I've seen online of people failing to do this correctly. I was properly trained, and capable of doing it within 20-30 minutes of being on the kill floor. Knock on wood, I made no stunning mistakes this morning and will plan on continuing in that trend.

All-in-all, this is not something I would want to do as a profession, but it definitely something I think I can be good at. I just need a lot of practice.