What Swine Producers Are Looking For Next in Mortality Management: Insights from World Pork Expo
By Jim Eadie · Originally published by SwineWeb on 1 October 2026
Conversations at World Pork Expo showed that mortality management is increasingly being considered as part of the way a modern swine operation works — not simply as a disposal task after the main production work is complete.
Producers are asking how mortality systems can reduce unnecessary labour, strengthen day-to-day biosecurity, provide the right capacity and operate predictably at scale. For Agri Incineration Systems (AIS) and its North American partners, that means helping farms select a system around their real operational needs rather than simply choosing a machine.
From Disposal Method to Production System
Mortality management affects employee time, carcass movement, storage, outside site traffic and operating costs. Looking at these factors together turns the choice of disposal method into a wider systems-management decision.
Questions for each operation include:
- How much employee time does the process require?
- How often must mortalities be moved, and where are they stored?
- Does an outside vehicle or service need to enter the site?
- Can the system handle both normal mortality and periods of elevated need?
- How predictable are its operating costs?
- Does the process support the farm's overall biosecurity strategy?
Biosecurity Is Driving the Conversation
Biosecurity remained a major theme at World Pork Expo 2026. Every movement of people, vehicles, equipment and biological material around a production site deserves consideration within the farm's biosecurity plan.
Rendering, composting and other approved methods each have a place depending on the location and production system. On-farm incineration provides another option by allowing mortalities to be handled at the production site through a controlled process, rather than relying on decomposition or routine off-site removal.
Labour Changes the Equation
The true cost of mortality management includes the time employees spend moving carcasses, maintaining compost piles, preparing storage areas, coordinating collections, cleaning equipment and managing the disposal area.
Repeated throughout the year, these activities become a meaningful part of the farm's labour requirement. The objective is not automation for its own sake, but a workflow that lets people spend more time on animal care and other high-value production work.
Capacity Has to Match the Farm
Bigger is not automatically better. A suitable system must reflect normal mortality volume, animal size, loading frequency, available fuel, planned growth and the way material moves through the site.
An undersized unit may create a bottleneck, while an unnecessarily oversized system can add capital cost without equivalent value. Effective model selection begins with understanding the farm.
Efficiency Designed into the Equipment
Modern agricultural incinerators are being developed around heat retention, burner management, loading and control systems — not simply a chamber capable of reaching high temperatures.
AIS uses monolithic refractory-concrete construction rather than a traditional brick-lined chamber, with the aim of improving durability and heat retention through repeated heating and cooling cycles. Temperature-controlled burners and automated controls are designed to manage combustion and avoid unnecessary fuel use.
These engineering details connect directly with practical producer questions about fuel use, maintenance, equipment life and the amount of employee attention required.
Mortality Management Is Becoming Connected
Remote monitoring, operating data, temperature information and fuel-use tracking are beginning to enter mortality-management technology, reflecting a broader change across agricultural equipment.
Producers increasingly want useful information without having to stand beside a machine. Over time, the question may move from whether an incinerator is running to how efficiently the complete mortality-management process is performing across one or several sites.
What Producers Are Really Buying
The strongest message from World Pork Expo was that producers are looking for outcomes:
- Less labour
- Stronger biosecurity
- Reliable capacity
- Predictable operation
- Better information
- Equipment that fits the farm's workflow
Successful technology is not necessarily the most complicated. It is the technology that quietly becomes a reliable part of how the farm works.