Mark Knauer is no stranger to the “grind culture.” As a Division I wrestler at Iowa State University during the legendary Cael Sanderson era, Knauer knew making it out onto the mat required a daily discipline that could only be achieved through doing hard, repetitive work until it’s perfect. Whether it was a 6 a.m. workout or a 3 a.m. trip to the North Carolina State University swine research farm, the discipline to be successful remains the same.
Walking On to a Legacy
After a heartbreaking loss in his high school state finals by one point, Knauer says he felt like he wasn’t done wrestling. After attending the University of Wisconsin-Platteville for a year, he transferred to Iowa State University with a goal of walking onto the wrestling team.
“Coach Bobby Douglas allowed me to walk on and probably thought I would keep or cull myself over that first semester,” Knauer says. “I remember one of my first practices was a morning practice at 6 a.m. The Iowa State indoor track was maybe 300 meters or something. I gave that first lap everything I had to come in first, but then the next laps after that, I did not come in first. I was just trying so hard to make an impression on the coach.”
His wrestling season went well from there. He walked onto the team and started three years, winning more matches than he lost. Although he admits wrestling was his main focus during his undergrad years, he developed a passion for his animal science classes which led to a graduate student assistantship with Kenneth Stalder at Iowa State for his master’s and Todd See at North Carolina State University for his Ph.D.
The Danger of “Barn Blindness”
Growing up on a 50-sow purebred, commercial-focused, farrow-to-finish operation in the ‘80s and ‘90s, Knauer grew up with a passion for agriculture, but his experience at Iowa State helped guide him specifically to the swine industry.
Early on in his career, he invented the sow caliper, a tool many people use today in the U.S. and across the world. The caliper has moderate correlations with muscle, fat and sow weight, Knauer explains. It measures the angle of a sow’s back. As a sow gets fatter, her top gets wider and more level, and that’s what the sow caliper measures.
Trusting your eyes to measure backfat visually is challenging, he adds.
“You can get barn blind,” Knauer points out. “It happens to the best of us. That’s the nice thing about the sow caliper – it helps you stay on track and takes the argument out of it.”
Knowing a sow’s body condition is critical for maximizing reproductive performance, ensuring herd longevity and reducing feed costs.
Sow Caliper: The Barn Referee
Like wrestling, producers win or lose based on points and performance.
“In wrestling, some people win the same way every time, and some people win different ways,” Knauer says. “Sometimes you get a reversal and win in a defensive match, or sometimes you get back points.”
Similarly, the sow caliper is a useful tool because there are different ways producers can use it to “win.”
“If somebody has a good livestock background, they may just have the sow caliper on hand to settle any arguments,” Knauer says. “If a consultant comes in and says, ‘Your sows are too fat or too thin,’ a good production manager can pull the caliper out and be like, ‘Well, according to this, they’re in ideal sow body condition.’ If you have young stock people who don’t have a lot of background in stockmanship and evaluation, they can use the sow caliper as a tool to get them dialed in for what an ideal sow looks like.”
Just like there are multiple ways to win a wrestling match, Knauer says there are multiple ways to use that sow caliper when it’s being implemented in the field. Ultimately, it’s about changing how pork producers manage the biology of the animal to ensure longevity and profitability.
Pig Livability: The Stakes are High
Unlike wrestling, working harder to help improve sow longevity isn’t enough these days. It requires working smarter through research into sow livability, piglet survival and the intersection of nutrition and health. Knauer says there are a few management levers that producers can pull to improve sow livability.
“Those gilts that have the best pre-weaning average daily gain, or best weaning weights when they are on the sow, are the gilts that go on to be the best when they grow up,” he says. “They grow up to be the best mothers.”
That’s challenging to identify, he says. It requires finding which gilts are the biggest at a very young age and then determining from a cost standpoint, what percentage you will keep.
“That early growth rate of that gilt in the very first 21 days of her life, really sets her up for her lifetime productivity,” he says. “Another piece of the puzzle that’s somewhat related is recent reports saying early puberty is favorable for longevity. That makes me feel good, because the data we ran 20 years ago said the same thing.”
From a management standpoint, that requires more hard questions.
“If you bring in your gilts, are you going to keep the first 80% that come into heat and ship the late ones because they’re not going to have as good a lifetime performance?” Knauer asks.
He’s starting new work now looking at more of these early predictors. Based on some of the work coming out of South Dakota State University on sow hemoglobin, Knauer is doing some of his own work on the impact of raising a gilt’s hemoglobin level at selection on subsequent lifetime retention.
Regaining No. 1 Status in the U.S.
Improving sow livability is not only a good idea from an economic and animal welfare standpoint, but it’s necessary to help the U.S. regain its status as the world’s lowest-cost producer, he says.
“If we look at cost of production for pork across the world, the U.S. is not ranked No. 1,” Knauer says. “Brazil is. It is in our best interest to close that gap in cost of production between Brazil.”
The U.S. is losing too many pigs along the way to disease and other challenges. He believes there are opportunities, especially as genotypes have advanced, to do better.
“On the sow side, we’ve made a lot of progress just in the last year or two, showing that nutritional interventions can help solve livability,” Knauer says. “Improving our pig livability across our system is going to help close the gap with Brazil, but to do that, we need research dollars behind this nutrition by health interaction piece.”
Researchers must listen to the data, the pigs and the producers to do this, he says.
“You learn when you’re listening,” he says. “That’s why it’s so important to move this industry forward.”
Discover more about Knauer’s experiences from the mats to the slats by watching “The PORK Podcast” on YouTube or by listening to it anywhere podcasts are found.
