A new approach to gestation housing, known as "free access", is being implemented in much of the Murphy-Brown Western Operations. While the system has been around for several years in Europe, its use at the Murphy-Brown Circle Four Farms site will be a first in North America.

Smithfield Foods announced in 2007 that it would begin phasing out individual gestation stalls at all of its company-owned sow farms and replacing them with the group housing system. The Humane Society of the United States called the announcement "perhaps the most monumental advance for animal welfare in the history of modern American agribusiness."

The Circle Four location in Milford, Utah is the first operation to switch to the new housing system. The company has constructed two new 5,000-head housing sites where animals are able to use individual stalls to eat, drink and rest, but can also back out into a more open pen area.

"It's called a free access system because the animals get to choose whether they want the privacy and protection of their individual stall where they won't be bothered by other animals, or they are free to wander around and socialize with the other sows in the pen," said Carl Maples, construction and maintenance team leader at the site.

The new system is easy to manage and is entirely automated, including feeding. Murphy-Brown has sent several teams to Denmark, where the design originated, to study production practices there and implement them at company sites.

In addition to the new construction in Utah, Maples is overseeing several pen gestation retrofitting projects at the Murphy-Brown of Yuma operation in Colorado. At those sites, the company is converting the gestation portion of existing barns to new pen-type housing.

"We are using several different styles at these sites depending on the existing penning type, layout of barns and the conditions we are converting from," said Jose Rojas, operations manager at Yuma.

The Eastern Division of Murphy-Brown has also begun to convert farms to the new pen gestation system. The first farm selected was the Squires sow farm in Bladen County, North Carolina. In addition to renovating to pen gestation, the Squires project includes adding farrowing crates to achieve 24 days of weanage and replacing existing older, worn farrowing crates with wider ones.

For the past two years, Murphy-Brown has been conducting a side-by-side trial of gestation crates versus quarter stall pens at a farm in Laurinburg, North Carolina. To date, there has been no reported difference in productivity between the two housing methods. Murphy-Brown East plans to renovate eight more farms in the next fiscal year.