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The Leopold Center's Hoop Group research team has received $210,000 from the U.S. Department of Agriculture to continue and expand its work on hoop barns for livestock production.
The Hoop Group, created by the Leopold Center in 1997, built one of the first hoop research facilities for hogs at the ISU Rhodes Demonstration Farm. Like other Leopold Center research teams and initiatives, the Hoop Group takes a multi-disciplinary approach in its work.
The USDA funds will launch or sustain projects in several ISU departments:
- Tom Richard, agricultural and biosystems engineering, and Jim Kliebenstein, economics, will look at hoop barns as a total production system to develop a planning and assessment tool to optimize agroecological sustainability.
- Steve Lonergan, animal science, will continue his meat quality study of hogs finished in hoops.
- Clare Hinrichs, sociology, will examine the linkages between producers and small to medium meat processors in Iowa.
- Mark Honeyman, ISU Research and Demonstration Farms, and Jay Harmon, agricultural and biosystems engineering, will compare the effects of group gestation in bedded hoop structures to conventional confinement systems, and set up a demonstration hoop for finishing beef cattle.
- Brad Thacker, from the ISU College of Veterinary Medicine, will complete his study of the use of hoops for finishing disadvantaged swine, an alternative intervention strategy for reducing mortality.
In 2002, the Hoop Group received its first federal support, a $187,000 USDA grant to further the development and adoption of hoop structure technology. The grant was used to begin work on a producer manual, explore how the technology is being used by farmers in other areas of the United States, interview hoop producers about animal care and welfare issues, and lay the groundwork for the disadvantaged swine and meat quality studies. A national workshop on hoops is planned for 2004.
- Hoop Barn Swine Production##[pdf format], a 2002 fact sheet that summarizes work of the Hoop Group. To get a paper copy, contact the Leopold Center, (515) 294-3711, leocenter@iastate.edu.
- Hoop Group home page, http://www.eng.iastate.edu/abe/hoop_structures
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