Air filtration and ventilation design, facility drafting, and ag product development for commercial swine and poultry facilities.
In commercial livestock facilities since 1991: production, maintenance, and construction. In 2007, that experience brought us onto one of the first filtered commercial sow farms in the country. Since then swine filtration work has continued in the US, Spain, and Japan, alongside poultry filtration consulting in China, North Africa, and the Middle East.
Air filtration design, facility drafting, and product development for companies selling into live animal production. The three overlap more than they look like they should, because all three come down to the same question: will this work in a working barn.
Disease-control filtration for swine and poultry: new construction, conversions, and buildings already in production. The airflow is modelled before anything is specified, because filters change what the fans can deliver.
Send us your barn and your fans. We’ll tell you what it can move.
Full facility design for swine, poultry, and general ag, drawn by someone who has raised animals in these buildings, built them, and maintained the systems inside them.
Planning a build or a remodel? See how the drafting work runs.
For companies bringing a product into live animal production: what has to change before it survives a barn, and how it reaches a market that does not buy from brochures.
Got a product headed for a barn? Here’s how that work runs.
Every other biosecurity control on a site addresses something you can see arriving: people, trailers, semen, feed, replacement stock. Airborne introduction is the route left open after all of them are working correctly.
In a dense production region that gap is the difference between a herd health plan that holds and one that gets rebuilt every year. Filtration closes it. The engineering question was never whether filters remove pathogen. It is whether the building can still ventilate once you put them in front of it.
PRRS cost the US industry an estimated $664 million a year across 2005-2010. For 2016-2020 the figure is $1.2 billion, an 80% rise that market prices, production cost and herd size together explain less than a fifth of. Two thirds of the loss now sits in grow-finish, not the sow farm.Holtkamp et al. 2013 and Osemeke et al. 2025, Preventive Veterinary Medicine
A seven-year comparison of 20 filtered and 17 unfiltered sow herds in a swine-dense region cut the risk of a novel PRRSV introduction by roughly 80%. Unfiltered herds ran about 0.5 breaks a year; filtered herds, 0.06 to 0.22.Alonso et al. 2013, Preventive Veterinary Medicine
Across 245 unfiltered and 178 filtered US sow farms tracked from 2009 to 2024, filtered herds ran roughly half the PRRS incidence rate. That held for both year-round and seasonal filtration, and for both negative- and positive-pressure systems.Yue et al. 2026, Animal
The 2015 US avian influenza outbreak reached 232 farms across 15 states, killed over 50 million birds and cost $3.3 billion. Modelling of the Iowa cases found inlet air filtration one of two measures that markedly reduced airborne risk. The other was depopulating infected flocks within 24 hours.Zhao et al. 2019, Scientific Reports
Most disappointing installations are not filter failures. The filters do their job. Unfiltered air gets into the barn without ever reaching a filter, pulled through gaps and leaks as static pressure increases, or backdrafted through fans and louvers not fully closing.
A filtered barn only filters the air it pulls through the filters. The tighter the filter, the harder the building pulls on everything else, so a leak that was tolerable before filtration becomes an unfiltered inlet after it. Air tightness is part of the filtration system, not a finishing detail.
An idle exhaust fan is an open hole in the pathogen boundary. On a filtered barn, backdraft protection stops being a heat-retention item and becomes part of the air boundary. It gets specified with the fan bank, or it gets retrofitted later around a barn full of animals.
A system sized on clean filters in mild weather meets its target in April and misses it in July. The design point is maximum summer ventilation with filters near end of life, which is both the hardest condition and the one where falling short costs production.
Every project starts with measurement. What the fans actually deliver at real static pressure, what the inlets actually pass, what the building does today rather than what the original drawing said it would.
From there the corrected system gets modelled against the pressure the filter bank will add, so the ventilation target still gets met with filters loaded. Those numbers produce the drawings, and the details come from someone with a construction background, so what gets specified is what a crew can build. Then we stay on it through the build, because site conditions disagree with drawings, and that is when having the calculation and the drawing in the same hands is worth the most.
Fan inventory and delivery at real static pressure, inlet type and total inlet length, air speeds taken in the space, room volume and head count. The starting point is current performance, not design intent.
Target CFM by animal type and stage, air exchange, curtain and inlet velocity, and exhaust capacity against the static pressure the filter bank will impose. Options compared side by side before anything is specified.
Fan banks, inlet counts and placement, filter quantities by size and room, plenum and attic box detail. Drawings a contractor can price and install from.
Design decisions get revisited when a site condition disagrees with the drawing. That is normal, and it is exactly when having the calculation and the drawing in the same hands is worth the most.
The concept was proven in poultry before it was proven in pigs. What swine got, and poultry did not, was two decades of commercial adoption to work out what it costs and how it fails.
The deepest evidence base for any livestock species: controlled demonstration in 2005, herd studies through the 2010s, and a sixteen-year record across 423 farms published in 2026. Roughly a fifth of monitored US sow farms now filter.
Our poultry filtration consulting has been largely international. Both regions combine high bird density, high-value breeding stock, and avian influenza pressure severe enough to justify filtering incoming air ahead of the economics that govern US commercial houses.
Filtered air under positive pressure kept Marek's disease out of a chicken house for 741 days while the disease was enzootic in flocks on the same farm. That was 1975, three decades before the first controlled swine result. It has stayed in vaccine-egg and specific-pathogen-free production ever since.
Wild waterbird DNA has been recovered from the air entering high-biosecurity poultry houses through their inlets. Separate work measured particulate and insects entering inlets, with the load rising sharply in wind-facing openings during storms.
The published objection to poultry filtration is cost and air exchange, not whether filters remove pathogen. That cost has been evaluated against buildings designed for conventional ventilation. Whether it holds for a facility designed around filtration from the start is a different question, and one we are positioned to answer.
Modelling of the 2015 US outbreak found inlet filtration at 75% particulate reduction lowered airborne risk but did not remove it, and put the requirement at 90% or better. A field trial at a commercial layer house measured up to 75%, varying by season. The gap is the design problem.
Fifty-seven studies behind both sides of this, including the case against poultry filtration. Read the library.
Filtration decisions get made on rules of thumb that were true for one building and repeated ever since. This is where we write down what the research supports and what it does not.
What a MERV number measures, mechanical versus charged media, pre-filter economics, and the construction that has to outlast the media.
DesignStatic pressure, fan curves, and why rated CFM stops describing your building the day filters go in.
ObservationsWhere the test standard, the barn, and the published numbers do not quite line up.
LibraryEvery study behind these recommendations, each with a note on what it established, where the evidence stops, and where to read it.
Everything in the library on air filtration, airborne transmission, and ventilation in swine and poultry, each written up with what it actually established and where the evidence stops. Ask it a question and the answer comes back with the sources named.
Most conversations begin with an existing site that is not performing the way it should, disease pressure in the area that has changed the calculation, a new build where the filtration decision is still open, or a product that needs to work in a barn before it can be sold into one.
Serving producers, integrators, and suppliers nationwide.