Growing up in southern Wisconsin, Mark Knauer was heavily involved in livestock judging and meats judging. He still remembers lessons he learned from his livestock judging coach and county Extension agent Bob Ziegler.
“He taught us the fundamentals of evaluating body composition,” Knauer recalls. “For example, as animals deposit fat along their loin edge, the top of the animal becomes wider, flatter and appears more ‘table topped.’”
Developing his eye for livestock evaluation could be put to test in his parents’ seedstock swine operation where they were early adopters of using real-time ultrasound to estimate backfat and loin eye area.
“Exposure to real-time ultrasound technology helped me develop a further understanding of how top shape is related to backfat and muscling. These early events likely helped set the stage for development of the sow caliper 20 years later,” Knauer says.
Fast forward to his first job at the National Pork Board, Knauer says he was able to tour several sow farms throughout the country. After seeing the variation in sow condition across the country, he thought the industry would benefit from better tools to help producers estimate sow body condition score.
“We started putting together new, subjective body condition tools. Then one day the idea for the sow caliper just hit me,” he explains. “At the time I happened to be living with my best friend who happened to be an agriculture engineer who happened to have the CAD program necessary to draw up the first prototypes.”
They sat down at the kitchen table and Knauer sketched out the concept and an initial design. Around that time, Knauer was in the process of accepting a swine Extension position at North Carolina State University.
“Once I got to North Carolina State, we were able to finalize the sow caliper design based on research at both Prestage Farms and Goldsboro Milling,” Knauer says. “I’m not sure we would have been able to develop the tool without help from the industry.”
