By Doug Graves

Ohio Correspondent

FORT RECOVERY, Ohio -— At Cooper Farms in northwestern Ohio, there’s a lot of moving going on. The company, which started its hog business in 1994, moves up to 700,000 pigs a year from barns to trailers to packing plants.

Most hog operations use chutes to move the animals into the back of a trailer. As most in the business will tell you, that’s a lot of physical work for employees and an abundance of stress to the animal.

Thanks to an ingenious idea by Alan Evers, a hog grow-out manager for Cooper Farms, a hog loader was born. Evers’ loader is an apparatus that improves the daunting process by reducing stress on both the pigs and the people loading them.

“The idea for the hog loader began from observing the loading process on a daily basis and brainstorming ways to improve,” he explained. “It was mainly for our employees, because that’s a lot of physical work for those guys. Pushing 280-pound pigs, chasing them up the ramps to the trailers, is a lot of physical work.

“And there’s the stress of the pigs when they have to move uphill. They don’t like to go, and they’re in no hurry. They can be quite contrary sometimes."

Evers said the transfer process for the pigs can be likened to humans running a marathon. “The lactic acid in the pigs’ muscles builds up. If you and I were to run a marathon, we would be trained for it, but these pigs are not prepared for the loading process. They don’t like being in a different environment and not with their pen mates.

“The truck has vibrations, turns and more. For the hogs, standing up in these trailers involves exerting some energy just to keep their position during the ride. Reducing stress on the pigs improves the end product,” he said.

Evers’ patented idea involves an apparatus including a first and a second compartment through which livestock move. The first compartment includes a first extension that is horizontally extendable and retractable. The second compartment is vertically movable and includes a second extension that is horizontally extendable and retractable.

This process includes positioning a first end of an apparatus near a doorway of a building that contains multiple animals and extending a first extension to the doorway while positioning a vehicle near the second end of the apparatus.

Each animal is moved from the building into the first compartment, moving the animal from the first compartment to a second compartment and then vertically moving the second compartment to a level of a deck of the vehicle. A second extension is extended to the deck, finally moving the animal from the second compartment onto the vehicle deck.

“It prevents meat quality issues,” Evers noted. “If the hogs are stressed, the meat quality certainly isn’t as good as a pig that’s well-rested upon arrival at the packaging plant. We also wanted to go away from electric prods when loading. It eliminates any exposure to inclement weather and offers consistent, controlled lighting.

“This hog loading system is on wheels so we can pull it down the road and hook it up to the back of a pickup truck. It’s backed up to the door of the barn, and a hydraulic extension slides out of the back, like a slider on a camper. Once extended, it seals up to the barn and there is no escape of air and no light, and the loader essentially turns into a continuation of the barn.”

With the loader connecting the barn and the trailer, a group of up to 15 pigs is moved into the back bay of the loader. Once the first group is in, the next resting area in the middle of the loader is opened and the pigs move forward.

The front bay of the loader is hydraulic and once the group is secured there, the pigs will be loaded through the open side of the trailer. The bay is raised if they are going on the top deck.

“There are no stairs or ramps, saving the energy that it takes that pig to go up those steps,” Evers pointed out. “And, there are no safety issues with the lift and no employee pinch points.”

Cooper Farms employees engineered and carried out the idea from start to finish. “It took us about six to nine months to come up with the actual design and a few months to build,” Evers said. “Currently, we have four hog loaders, and are working on the fifth one this year.”

The cost of constructing the first loader was approximately $100,000, but through the first five years of use, transport death loss was reduced by 37 percent.

The idea to change the hog loading process revolutionized the way Cooper Farms loads hogs, said Jenessa Huftel, safety manager at the Fort Recovery site of Cooper Farms.

“A lot of our guys will have strains, sprains, knee injuries or be sore at the end of the day,” Huftel said. “From a trend standpoint, this hog loader has definitely been a positive thing – the complaints and issues brought to us in the past have decreased a lot. There has definitely been an improvement since the new hog loader came into place.”

In 2016 the company took its loader to the Safety Innovation Contest held by the Ohio Bureau of Workers Compensation and won first place throughout the state of Ohio. Cooper Farms also received the People’s Choice award.

To contact Cooper Farms, visit www.cooperfarms.com or call 419-375-4619.