Penn Vet’s Swine Teaching and Research Center Celebrates 25 Years of Inspiring Careers and Creating Positive Change

Jeremy Maurer is a city kid, so when he started at Penn Vet, pigs were about the last thing on his mind.

“I’m originally from Philadelphia, so my exposure to livestock was basically zilch,” said Maurer, a 2016 grad. “My interaction with livestock was going to Merrymead Farm in Montgomery County, Pa., and seeing a couple of dairy cows.”

But in the summer of his second year, Maurer, still undecided about what to do with his veterinary degree, got an internship with a major animal health and pharmaceutical company. There, he got introduced to precision livestock technologies. It really lit a spark. But how to get experience in farm animal medicine?

Maurer turned to Penn Vet’s Swine Teaching and Research Center. He found a faculty willing to help him, people who cared. He also found a progressive approach to animal welfare and production animal medicine that inspired him.

Maurer now has a career he loves with Merck, working in precision livestock technology to help farmers and their animals.

“I know that without there being a swine medicine division at Penn Vet, I never would have found my way into this career,” Maurer said. “I am very thankful that the faculty and crew I now consider colleagues and mentors allowed me to find my way into this industry.”

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 percent 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.

“I look at the work they’ve done as really helping change the way hogs are raised in America and the world,” Herr said. “The strides that have been made related to animal welfare are some of the most significant changes in animal husbandry in the last 15 years.”

And it’s not just Pennsylvania. The influence of the Center and its Founder and Director Thomas D. Parsons “has been substantial” nationally, said Hillary Dalton, senior research manager for Compassion in World Farming, an international farm animal welfare organization.

Parsons “has been a pioneer and a key leader in the U.S. movement to end the routine confinement of sows in gestation crates,” Dalton said. “His work adapting electronic sow feeding systems for the U.S. market, combined with practical management guidance and a very hands-on approach, has supported many producers in transitioning from full gestation crate systems to open pen sow housing.”

But 25 years ago, Parsons, whose family has been farming for ten generations, had no way to know what the future would hold. 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. 

“This has exceeded my wildest dreams,” said Parsons, Marie A. Moore Professor of Animal Welfare and Ethnics. “We really had no idea. It’s opened so many doors. It’s just been a really amazing opportunity.”

“Our living lab’’ leading agricultural innovation for Pa. – and beyond

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. Althouse, now associate dean of sustainable agriculture and veterinary practices and Marion Dilley and David George Jones Endowed Chair in Animal Reproduction, was recruited from the University of Illinois back in 2001. He was lured by the opportunities of, in his own words, “our living lab” – a working swine farm owned and operated by a research institution.

 “Dr. Althouse has been probably the most important, influential person in my business,” Mac Magee, general manager of Pennsylvania-based Commercial Concepts AI, the largest independent, commercial boar stud operation in the country. “I don’t know if we would exist if it wasn’t for Dr. Althouse. That’s a pretty bold statement, but it’s just the research that goes out into the industry” that has led to real innovation. 

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. It’s a collaboration with AgriGates, a Philadelphia-based agri-tech firm.

“Without the swine center, I don’t think we would be where we are in unlocking animal behavior through AI,” said Daniel Foy, AgriGates co-founder and CEO. “That’s because of the center itself and its vision of being the future’s farm.”

There’s more. Parsons, who is also director of the Center for Stewardship Agriculture and Food Security, recently returned from Taiwan, where he was invited to provide information and advice about group housing for swine to representatives of government, pork producers, and animal welfare organizations.

“This was a critical and influential step in leading Taiwan’s group sow housing transition,” said Jen-Yun Chou, a consultant to the Environment & Animal Society of Taiwan (EAST).

A legacy of nurturing careers and creating advocates

But as significant as the Center’s reputation as an animal agriculture leader has been, its first goal – it’s right in its name – 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.

Some graduates have gone on to become swine or farm-animal veterinarians, like David “Bucky” Buckwalter, V’26. Growing up in rural Pennsylvania, Buckwalter came to Penn Vet already knowing he wanted to work with food production animals. But he thinks all students find a special learning space at the Center.

“Even if you have zero swine experience coming into vet school, like some of my classmates, they loved being at the Swine Center,” said Buckwalter. “(The faculty) really allowed us to be hands-on. They were open to any questions we might have, and they were really involved in our learning experience.”

And that has nurtured a wide variety of interests. Through a partnership with Merck, international swine veterinary practitioners have come for the Center’s unique learning experience. Its pigs have been the starting point for a wide array of career paths.

“There have been some years that we have produced more swine veterinarians than any other school in the United States, and it’s because we have this swine unit,” Althouse said. “And we have students who had never been exposed to pigs, and they find out they love pigs and end up getting a career in swine.”

Joseph Fent, V’05, jokingly calls the Swine Center “the gateway drug” for lots of Penn Vet students, himself included.

“My plan was to do equine medicine. I grew up with horses outside of Scranton,” Fent said.

But he found opportunities for direct animal experience as well as mentorship at the Center. At the end of his second year, he got a summer job there, and other externships followed. He now works as a health assurance veterinarian, focusing on biosecurity and disease prevention, for PIC (the Pig Improvement Company), which provides genetically superior breeding stock and support to the swine industry.

The Center’s progressive ethos, he believes, was a valuable educational experience he wouldn’t have gotten elsewhere.

“It was a good perspective to have,” Fent said. While students at other institutions received the prevailing views of the swine industry, “we had an outside view – where the industry was heading, versus where it was currently at.”

Like Jeremy Maurer, Heather Fowler, V’10, was a city kid. Raised in Trenton, she’d considered a career in small animal medicine.

“I don’t think I ever touched a pig until vet school,” Fowler said.

But at the end of undergraduate school, a class in public health seized her imagination.

“I started to explore opportunities in that space as I entered veterinary school. It totally spun my world around, but for the good,” she said. “It got me looking at food animal species and that tie to public health. I recognized the importance of the veterinarian in protecting public health, food safety, and promoting good animal welfare.”

So at Penn Vet, Fowler took a rotation at the Swine Center. She found support and mentorship.

“I remember having very positive memories, learning to work with pigs and learning behavior and welfare and everything else,” she said. “It’s what really pushed me to continue that route in public health.”

Today, Fowler is director of producer and public health for the National Pork Board. She oversees education, outreach, and research for public health and worker safety and health in the swine industry. She was the graduation speaker for Penn Vet’s Class of 2022. Her work brings her into the thick of not only public health education and outreach, but also zoonotic disease prevention, vaccination, responsible antibiotic use, and antibiotic stewardship, worker safety, and One Health.

She does all that proudly as a woman of color in an industry dominated by men, many with backgrounds different from hers.

“I am here through those experiences and opportunities I was afforded at the Swine Center at Penn Vet,” said Fowler.

Meghann K. Pierdon, V’05, a Vermont native, had planned on a career in dairy cattle when she first came to Penn Vet. But she needed a summer job, and the dairy barn at New Bolton Center wasn’t hiring. The Swine Center was. She learned she really liked pigs and that the Swine Center was a special place.

Now Pierdon, an associate professor of clinical production medicine, is a key member of the Center team. In addition to pursuing research and teaching in Penn Vet’s Animal Behavior and Welfare master’s degree program, Pierdon is one of the Swine Center’s chief educators and mentors. She has inspired many Penn Vet students, but also undergraduates – and even younger.

“I’ve started having high school students come through the barn to do labs,” Pierdon said, “trying to stimulate the younger generation to think about food animals but think also about Penn Vet.”

Pierdon was Tara Gaab’s mentor. Now an assistant professor of animal science at the University of Delaware, Gaab, V’17, brings her pre-veterinary and animal science students to the Center to learn and do research. Lots of them get as hooked as she did.

“It has a way of converting you,” Gaab said. “It’s this model for what the industry could be if we are creative and clever and caring enough. We don’t have to just be what we’ve always been.”

That’s the vision for the Center’s future that founder Parsons had in mind 25 years ago. It continues today. With all it has accomplished – the innovations, the careers, the veterinary and agricultural leaders it has nurtured – the Center’s director was hard-pressed to say what he takes the most pride in.

“It’s like my children. I love them all,” Parsons said. “I think what I’m most proud of is the body of work in total, the number of different ways we’ve been able to touch people with this facility. I think that is to me the biggest accomplishment.”