Ron Ness has one food court style barn and two FAST II Alley facilities. He says he likes FAST II Alley because remodeling is less costly and time-consuming than renovating food court style facilities. He also likes the fact that feeders are distributed throughout the barn.

When Ron Ness, Hinckley, IL, heard about Farmweld’s FAST II Alley Design in early 2004, he was immediately intrigued because he had built or remodeled several buildings on his farm in the late 1990s, and they weren’t in need of new equipment. With FAST II Alley, Ness could take advantage of sorting technology without having to invest a lot of time or money into overhauling buildings. The design leaves feeders and water cups in place and only minor gating adjustments are required. Today, Ness has three automatic sorting facilities – one food court style facility and two FAST II Alley barns.

Ness’ first FAST II Alley facility was originally built as a 1,400-head, wean-to-finish barn in 1998. It is a single, 50’ x 220’ tunnel-ventilated room with a center alleyway and radiant heat. It was originally designed with 14 pens of 100 pigs. There are two separate feed systems, and it is equipped with Farmweld Jumbo Feeders.

To transform the facility into a FAST II Alley barn, Ness created openings between the 100-head pens and installed six FAST II one-way gates along the outer walls on each side of the barn. He added brackets to some of the fixed gates so they could be attached to the one-ways during sorting. The barn is now divided into two super huge pens with 700 pigs each. When pigs are first loaded into the barn, Ness can move the gating back to create smaller pens to allow for easier handling of weanlings.

			Ron Ness made minor adaptations to gating when he transformed two barns into FAST II Alley facilities. Here he shows the brackets that were added to fixed gates so they can be moved and attached to one-way gates for sorting.

At the load-out end of the barn, there are two sell pens. Because feeders and water cups are distributed throughout the barn, a load can be put together and held for as long as Ness desires. If a second load is needed, the second sell pen can be used.

Though Ness says training pigs in a FAST II Alley barn requires less dedicated effort than training pigs in a food court style barn, there are some things to keep in mind. He learned that pigs should experience walking through the scale and being sorted both right and left during the feeding period in order to achieve good scale throughput during sorting. This can be done by using the scale in the Train Mode.

Ness’ other FAST II Alley facility is a 48’ x 103’ barn with 630 head. Originally, the barn had 20 pens of 30 head, and it now has five pens of 126 head. Ness gained approximately 30 pig spaces by removing some of the alley gates. In addition to the alley style barns, Ness converted a 37’ x 144’ room in one facility using a food court style layout. The room has 700 head, which represents a gain of 57 pig spaces due to removing the alley.

Early results in Ness’ automatic sorting facilities look promising. “The first groups sorted were extremely uniform – the scale is doing its job,” Ness says. He is looking forward to being able to deliver tightly sorted loads to Meadowbrook Farms, the new cooperative owned by Illinois producers. (See sidebar.) He says FAST II will allow him to improve sorting accuracy beyond what he can do in conventional facilities. “I like to think I do a good job with eyeballing, but with automatic sorting, I can do a better job than my good job,” concludes Ness.