I would like to take this opportunity to express my pleasure with our new ozone air purification system your company installed in our 10,000-head hog finisher unit in New Brunswick.
We were faced with a lot of opposition to our facility mainly due to odour, after months of intensive research into technologies to reduce odour associated with barn air emissions, we selected your ozone systems our best possible choice.
I am pleased to inform you I am not disappointed with the results. As a matter of fact we are experiencing benefits from our system in exeeedence of our expectations. Our main concern was odour reduction and we certainly have accomplished this with your system.
Our employees, our neighbors and ourselves have all noticed a dramatic reduction in odour. Our feed truck driver, for example, remarked to me about one month after we installed the system that his wife could no longer smell “pig smell” on his clothes after delivering feed-to our farm. An inspector with the Provincial Environment Department stated that he could not believe the “amazing drop” in odour levels at our farm. Your claims 75%+ odor reduction from barn air emissions was certainly not an exaggeration. I hope to provide you with actual scientific data in the future on emissions, but for now all I can say is “Problem Solved”.
I would like to bring to your attention other benefits that I am noticing since having your Ozone system installed, while these were not the reason we chose the equipment, it was certainly an added bonus. We are experiencing a marked difference in the comfort levels of both ourselves and our animals in the-barn; Our employees continue to remark on how much more they enjoy working in the barn with the new system and can tell immediately if it turns off for any reason. Our animals are also more comfortable and seem to be performing better.
Some of the side benefits we have noticed are an almost complete halt to tail biting; indicating our animals are more contented. Our feed consumption seems to have increased slightly-while our average daily gain has also increased. This has corresponded with a small drop in mortality rates and in a reduction of noticeable coughing in the barn.
As we had a high-health herd to begin with I did not expect to see any noticeable improvement in production; I was wrong.
Another benefit we noticed after about one month of operation was a decrease in airborne dust particles. Fine dust particles in the air seem be “clumping together” and settling to the ground instead of remaining airborne. We believe this accounts for the decrease noticed in coughing.
With the benefit of the odour reduction effect and increased human and animal comfort, we think that this unit makes good economic sense in the long run. Even slight increases in production will help offset the initial investment of around $10.00 US / hog space in a few short years. This allows us to control odors in an economically viable manner. I can easily see us installing your systems in our other barns in the not so distant fixture. Our operating cost in Canadian dollars is around $0.18 per hog marketed, or about $0.06 per hog space per month.
I have also begun experimenting with using your system in between batches of hogs as a disinfectant tool as we do not like to use chemicals on our farm.
I would like to express my appreciation with the way your company handled themselves during this installation. As with any new system there were a few “start-up bugs”, but you handled them in a quick and efficient manner without hesitation or question.
Thank you for bringing this product to our operation and we look forward to dealing with you again in the future. If any of your potential customers would like to ask us questions from a farmer’s perspective or even have a firsthand look at our system, please do not hesitate to ask, weare always pleased to meet farmers from different areas.
