Leopold Center for Sustainable Agriculture

Hoops: The Iowa-Ukraine connection

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Each year the Ukrainian company Agro-Soyuz raises 160,000 feeder pigs to market weight in 225 hoop barns. When company owners Volodymyr Khorishko and his son Dmytro took over a former farm collective in 2004, they sought assistance from Iowa State University’s “Hoop Group” to set up the low-cost hooped buildings.

The father-son duo returned to the United States in April to get advice on their next phase: hoops for gestating sows and baby pigs. Their stop in Ames was Curtiss Hall, where they met with ISU Research Farm coordinator and Hoop Group member Mark Honeyman, and one of his former graduate students, Pete Lammers. The Ukrainians also traveled to North Carolina, South Dakota and Minnesota.

Currently, the company raises about 275 pigs in every barn. The hooped structures are inexpensive to build and have no exterior source of heat (even during below-zero Ukraine winters). Bedding is required in the hoop barns and in the Ukraine wheat straw is plentiful.

The Leopold Center sponsored the Hoop Group by providing an annual stipend for meetings and funds to conduct research between 1997 and 2002. Research expanded under a special USDA grant until 2006 and continues in various forms today, such as feeding beef cattle in hoop barns and niche pork production. The Center continues to support alternative livestock production systems. A new research grant will explore the use of insulated tents (or yurts) for sows and pigs.

Lammers continues to coordinate the Pork Niche Market Working Group and will be teaching at Illinois State University at Normal in the fall.

Back to Leopold Letter Summer 2012