Crystal Spring’s Wet/Dry System Continues to Influence Global Pig Performance by Pairing Behavioral Insight with Durable, Precision Built Engineering.

By Andrew Joseph

When Tom McAdams talks about Crystal Spring Hog Equipment, he doesn’t sound like a man selling feeders. He sounds like someone who has spent decades watching how pigs behave, how barns function, and how small design decisions ripple through an entire production system.

His explanations are plainspoken, grounded, and often disarmingly simple—like comparing pig feeding behavior to kids rushing through a bowl of cereal before school. But simplicity is deceptive.

Crystal Spring’s wet/dry feeding system, now used in more than 36 countries, is the product of nearly 50 years of incremental refinement, field observation, and manufacturing discipline applied consistently.

What began as a practical solution to a local feeding challenge has become one of the most influential feeder designs in modern hog production worldwide today.

The company’s origins trace back to a small Hutterite community in southern Manitoba, Canada, where early versions of the wet/dry feeder were first built. Crystal Spring’s ownership structure includes members of the nearby farming community, but McAdams was quick to emphasize that the business has long served customers and partners around the world.

The early innovation was straightforward: create a feeder that allows pigs to eat dry feed or mix it with water directly in the trough. That flexibility mimicked the performance benefits of traditional slop feeding—high palatability, faster intake, and reduced stress—while fitting into modern bulk‑feed systems.

The design worked. Producers saw pigs eating more in less time, gaining weight faster, and wasting less feed. Academic researchers in the US Midwest and Canada began studying the system in the 1980s and 1990s, validating what barns were already showing. As the research spread, so did the feeders.

Today, Crystal Spring has customers and partners using and selling their equipment across North and South America, parts of Europe, and select regions in Asia and Africa. The company’s core business remains within the western hemisphere, but it is committed to serving its customers no matter where they are in the world.

INDUSTRY CHANGES SHAPED THE FEEDER

The pigs of the 1970s were not the pigs of today. Back then, they grew more slowly, started heavier, and were raised in smaller, farmer‑managed barns.

“There was a willingness to pursue marginal gains at high effort,” McAdams recalled to Benchmark, adding that producers tinkered, adjusted, and customized equipment with consistent effort.

Crystal Spring originally built three feeder lines—nursery, grower, and finisher—to match the traditional three‑stage production model. But as genetics improved and production systems consolidated, the company also evolved and adapted.

Crystal Spring observed that the production lines began to blur, with some regions adopting wean-to-finish systems, others reinforcing the three-stage model, and still others transitioning to a two-stage approach. From it, the start weights dropped, and market weights went way up.

At the same time, barn labor changed. Instead of multi-role farm families, barns increasingly relied on specialized staff with tight schedules and standardized procedures. Integrators wanted equipment that behaved identically across dozens of sites operating consistently.

“An integrator expects the 24 feeders going to [a hypothetical] Site 1 to work exactly the same as the ones going to [a hypothetical] Site 10,” McAdams noted. “They can’t afford to tweak things. It all has to work.”

That expectation pushed Crystal Spring toward tighter manufacturing tolerances, more consistent performance, and designs that required less hands‑on adjustment.

“Our feeders are made in a precision manufacturing shop,” McAdams said. “They’re going to look and act the same whether you ordered them 10 years ago or order them next year.”

WHAT DEFINES A CRYSTAL SPRING WET/DRY FEEDER

For readers unfamiliar with the concept, the wet/dry feeder is built around a simple behavioral insight: pigs eat more—and eat faster— when feed is moistened. The feeder allows pigs to nose dry feed from an adjustable floating shelf into a trough, then activate water nipples to create a gruel.

Adams explained it with a kitchen‑table analogy. “Try eating dry cornflakes fast when your kids have to hit the bus,” he says. “Then imagine the milk is already in the bowl. You can eat a bowl of cereal pretty quickly. That’s the root idea.”

The design leverages several natural behaviors:

• Competitive feeding: Pigs eat more aggressively when others are nearby. The feeder’s layout encourages a steady flow of pigs through the space.
• Self‑regulated mixing: Pigs adjust the water‑to‑feed ratio themselves. “They’ll mix it to their preferred consistency,” McAdams said.
• Faster consumption: “On a wet/dry feeder, consumption happens faster, and it’s easier,” he explained. “The pig eats more in the same amount of time.”

That matters. Faster intake means faster growth. Faster growth means fewer days to market.

At scale, those days translate into major economic gains.

“If you need a 120‑kilogram (~265 lb) animal, you get there four to 10 days earlier,” McAdams explained.

“For an integrator with millions of pigs, that’s the equivalent of adding extra barns.”

SMALL PART, BIG IMPACT

One of the feeder’s defining features is the floating feed shelf.

It controls feed flow, keeps the shelf dry, and ensures pigs can consistently create the right gruel texture during feeding.

The company said that it lets them manage the consistency of the gruel, manage waste, and manage the competitive eating cycle.

Producers, according to Crystal Spring, can run anywhere from seven to 19 pigs per feed space, depending on management style. The key is balance: enough pigs to keep feed moving, not so many that competition suppresses intake.

Water management is one of the biggest challenges in wet/dry feeding. Too much water creates waste, slurry, and pit volume. Too little reduces intake and performance.

Crystal Spring spent years trying to standardize water flow across barns with wildly different plumbing systems—municipal supply, gravity tanks, variable-pressure pumps, and everything in between.

The breakthrough came with the company’s Adaptive‑Flow drinker nipples, built around an elastic polymer insert that reacts to supply-side pressure and normalizes output.

The system targets flow rates the company has validated through decades of research:

• Nursery: ~ one liter per minute;
• Grow‑finish/wean‑finish: 1.5–2.5 liters per minute.

The impact is significant, pointed out McAdams. “Our systems can help reduce water consumption on a finisher site by 50 to 60 percent.”

He mentioned how one vertically integrated customer documented a 7‑kilogram feed savings per pig per turn after standardizing on the use of Crystal Spring feeders and Adaptive‑Flow nipples.

And it’s not just water savings; it’s feed savings, manure volume reduction, and less all-around mess.

SUSTAINABILITY THROUGH ENGINEERING, NOT SLOGANS

Crystal Spring doesn’t market itself as a sustainability company, but its equipment naturally supports sustainability goals.

“When a producer moves from a traditional dry or tube feeder to a wet/dry feeder, they see a significant reduction in the volume of their pits or lagoons,” McAdams said.

Less wasted water means:

• Lower manure volume;
• Lower pumping and hauling costs;
• Lower environmental load; and
• More consistent barn conditions.

And because pigs eat more efficiently, producers see improved throughput without increasing barn size or resource use.

SHIFTING TOWARD APPLIED SCIENCE

In the 1980s and 1990s, universities across the Midwest and Canada conducted foundational research on wet/dry feeding.

Today, most of the feed research is applied and conducted by integrators, nutrition companies, and large producers.

Crystal Spring, itself, once operated its own 600‑sow farrow‑to‑finish barn but discontinued it in the late 1990s due to regional moratoriums, labor dynamics, and facility age. But nowadays, the company relies on customer research, field trials, and decades of accumulated experience.

The company gathers data from all of them to help them devise the next-gen additions to its technologies.

“We know intimately what each change and each feature does,” McAdams related. “We’ve brought this feeder from its genesis all the way through.”

As barns become more data-driven, Crystal Spring sees a shift in how producers think about feeders—not as static hardware, but as controllable variables in a larger performance system.

“Our clients know their feeders work well when the water flow is a liter and a half, when this part of the SOP (standard operating process) is followed, when the pigs hit certain benchmarks,” McAdams said. “They’re controlling the variables instead of reacting to them.”

He said that trend is shaping the company’s next generation of equipment:

• More predictable performance;
• Tighter tolerances;
• Designs that integrate into standardized management systems;
• Components that reduce human error.

“It’s doing the little things right,” McAdams pointed out. “If the feeder functions consistently, they can train people at the head office and know it will work the same in barns 500 miles away.”

A COMPANY BUILT FOR LONG‑TERM RELATIONSHIPS

McAdams said that he and the company tend to avoid corporate titles—and it certainly isn’t a me-me-me organization—but he has grown to become one of the company’s key product and business development leaders. He started on the shop floor, learned CNC machining, helped implement ERP systems, and gradually took on responsibility for guiding the brand.

“I had the opportunity to stand on the shoulders of giants,” he said, noting that he didn’t do any of the heavy lifting the company had to do early on.

Regardless, his generation played a role in helping to modernize the company, expand its global reach, and refine its manufacturing processes. They also helped maintain a culture built on long‑term thinking.

“We’re here for a long time,” McAdams explained of the Crystal Springs company. “We’re not trying to scale and sell and retire. We look to find long‑term customer relationships. We try to model the behavior we want from our customers by treating our suppliers well.”

That philosophy—steady, practical, relationship‑driven—has helped Crystal Spring navigate industry consolidation, global competition, and shifting production models.

“We’re doing quite well,” he mentioned. “We’re globally known, and we’ve got a strong network of distribution partners.”

Even with Crystal Spring customers on every continent but Antarctica, the company continues to enjoy strong partnerships and demand in the Americas and in regions where producers prioritize throughput, consistency, and long‑term equipment value.

Crystal Spring’s success is not built on flashy reinventions. It’s built on decades of small, thoughtful changes—each one tested, observed, and refined.

The company developed its products in small evolutionary ways, rather than big bangs—calling it the sum of minor observations and gradual operational changes.

That philosophy—steady, practical, grounded in real barn behavior—has made the Crystal Spring wet/dry feeder one of the most enduring designs in modern hog production. And it all started with a simple question: How do you get slop‑like performance out of bulk dry feed?

Nearly 50 years later, Crystal Spring is still refining the answer. www.crystalspring.com