Penn Vet’s Swine Teaching and Research Center celebrates 25 years

Penn Vet’s Swine Teaching and Research Center at New Bolton Center in Chester County, Pa., celebrates its 25th anniversary this year. For a quarter of a century, it has been inspiring careers, including those that might never have happened if not for this unique institution.

The Swine Center has also had an outsized impact on agriculture in Pennsylvania, as well as elsewhere, industry experts say. Ethical treatment of food animals was a Swine Center founding principle.

In Pennsylvania now, about 80% of sows are kept in open pen housing, as opposed to confined gestation crates, according to Chris Herr, executive vice president of the PennAg Industries Association, a major agricultural advocacy organization representing the state’s hog and poultry farmers. That’s a change he credits to the Swine Center and its faculty’s influence.

Thomas Parsons, founder and director of the Swine Teaching and Research Center, comes from a family that has been farming for 10 generations. Recruited from a research position in Germany, he set out to create a working hog barn of the future, built on animal welfare practices already in place in Europe but not yet embraced in the U.S. It was a vision then-Dean Alan M. Kelly shared and supported. The Center was to be a living laboratory, where students could learn and grow in a forward-thinking environment. It became all that—and more.

While the Center is well-known for its advocacy of open pen housing and electronic feeding systems for gestating sows, other advances, like professor of reproduction and swine health Gary Althouse’s work on reproduction, toxicology, and disease control, have brought important innovations for agriculture and the swine industry.

And the Center’s work continues. In May, a ribbon-cutting was held at New Bolton Center to celebrate what Parsons calls “the next chapter in the Swine Center’s journey”—the opening of DAT-AI-LAB, a new initiative that uses AI to better understand animal behavior and aid farmers.

But as significant as the Center’s reputation as an animal agriculture leader has been, its first goal has been teaching. Alumni speak enthusiastically of an animal-centered educational experience from the time they walk into the barn. They say they found opportunity and encouragement to pursue their passions through a porcine entry point.