Sliding-side farrowing crate helps boost profits per pig

Monday, August 9, 2010

This farrowing pen design reduces sow confinement at farrowing to just three or four days and improves performance with no mortality penalty.

by NORMAN DUNN

A new farrowing pen design claims to increase profits per hog by combining the advantages of free farrowing systems with those of the conventional farrowing crate.

The 360° Freedom Farrower, so-called because it gives space for the sow to turn in a full circle, has been developed by Midland Pig Farms in England, a company with seven production units and a total of 3,500 Yorkshire x Landrace sows.

"The central idea is a farrowing crate split longitudinally with each half hung from overhead rails," explains the company's managing director Martin Barker. "The sides can be slid wide apart to allow the sow lots of room, or together and locked in position to form a conventional crate."

A sow is brought into the pen usually two to three days before farrowing and the sides of the crate are kept open so that the animal can turn around when it wants. About 24 hours before farrowing starts, the crate sides are joined up and the sow is confined. After about a day, the sides are slid apart a little so that the sow can get to her feet or lie down more easily, while still offering protection for the litter. Three to four days after giving birth, the crate's sides are pulled fully apart so that the sow once again has complete freedom of movement.

"We've been trying out 20 of the pens on one of our farms for the past year and we can say that piglet mortality is the same as with conventional farrowing crates on our farms," says Barker. "Even more important, the piglets at 28-day weaning from the 360° Freedom Farrower system have consistently weighed around eight kilograms, at least one kilogram more than those from our conventional farrowing houses."

This flying start means that hogs are ready for slaughter a week or even 10 days earlier, earning an extra C$8 per head, according to Barker.

The reason for the higher weaning weights? "The sows seem much more relaxed when they've got room to move about. They are feeding better and so naturally have more milk for the litters."

Another advantage of the concept is that it is designed to fit into a conventionally sized farrowing pen, which in Britain is 1.8 x 2.4 metres.

Earlier, Midland Pig Farms had built a new farrowing house for one of their sow herds fitted with another free farrowing system marketed by a large hog equipment firm. "We get the same good results in weaning weights with acceptable mortality," reports Barker. "But each pen in the bought-in system is around 25 per cent larger than conventional ones and this meant the cost was much higher."

The new design features a sloping wall on one side so that, when free, the sow can use this to slide down more slowly for suckling and give piglets time to get out of the way. There's also a protected piglet creep with water-heated floor pads.

On the Midland Pig Farms unit, each pen is part-slatted with a flushing system under the slats for removal of dung every 48 hours. One reason for the flushing system is that Martin Barker believes in encouraging his sows' nesting instinct just prior to farrowing. The sows are given paper to start making "nests" and the material then falls through the slats. "If we did not have the flushing system under our slats, the paper would probably cause blockages," says Barker.

Another bonus for a flushing system: the regular below-slat cleaning reduces odour and flies by at least 70 per cent.

Barker emphasizes, though, that his staff have found that it is important to keep at least partial sow restriction for the three to four days after farrowing. "Anything less than this and we can face a much higher mortality rate."

Make lifetime sow production your key performance figure
Slaughter hogs produced per sow per year or annual weaner production are among the most common benchmark efficiency factors used nowadays. But more attention should also be paid to lifetime performances, according to Giles Christie, a marketing expert with leading swine breeding company JSR Genetics.

Farmers should go for the bigger picture when judging herd performance, he felt, and should be paying much more attention to "tonnes of meat per sow lifetime" (TMS) and "meat produced per tonne of feed" (MTF) as stepping-stones to extra efficiency and profit.

Speaking at this year's British Pig & Poultry Fair, he stressed that farmers should relegate large litters or numbers weaned per sow per year a little bit lower down the comparison ladder. This approach means paying more attention to longevity and buying breeding gilts with a background that offers the possibility of six litters in a lifetime. Gilts should be capable of producing an average 11 or 12 born alive, with 13 or 14 born alive in subsequent farrowings. A realistic aim per sow should be 80 piglets born alive and 5.5 tonnes of pork produced.

Equally important is feed conversion efficiency, and here the big picture should come from MTF. What should an efficient producer look for here? Christie reckoned that a commercial target should be 325 kilograms of meat produced per tonne of feed. "With feed representing 55-60 per cent of input costs in Europe, this is the true measure of swine production efficiency," he commented, adding that calculation of MTF should be a simple task requiring only feed invoices (and costs for home-grown feed components) and returns from the slaughterhouse.

A commercial farrow-to-finish herd with JSR Genetics recently achieved a MTF of 329 kilograms with 1,754 tonnes of feed producing 6,799 slaughter hogs averaging 85 kilograms deadweight (U.K. hogs are killed at comparatively light weight). The result in saleable meat totalled 578 tonnes.

Christie agreed with farmers that there are efficiencies to be made with the details, too – such as weaners per sow. But he felt that the bigger picture of lifetime performance represented a more useful key to management control nowadays.

Hog rations: Can canola and rye replace some soya?
Why buy relatively expensive soya meal for hog rations when cheaper homegrown dried canola pulp and rye are available?

The difference in an early 2010 German trial was around C$1.12 less per 100 kilograms weight gain in feed costs for canola and rye. The figures were feed costs of $83 per 100 kilograms weight gain for a control group of 43 female and castrated hogs with most of the ration corn/wheat and soybean meal, and $81.88 for a similarly large group on rations with canola and rye content that started at five and 10 per cent respectively (26 to 45 kilograms), moved on to 10 and 30 per cent (45 to 75 kilograms) and ended at 15 and 50 per cent of the ration from 75 kilograms to slaughter at 120 kilograms.

Researchers at the state livestock research station in Quackenbrück, Lower Saxony in Germany, ran trials on the cheaper ingredients. They found rations with higher amounts of canola and rye were more profitable, even though feed consumption was higher and daily gain and feed conversion slightly poorer. Carcass quality was rated as the same between the two groups.

At each feeding phase, the control group on conventional feed also had a proportion of canola and rye in the rations – but only half that of the trial group. This represented the smaller amounts sometimes included in conventional rations in Germany. One thing was clear from the consumption figures; the hogs had nothing against the taste of canola and rye!

Part of the argument for looking more closely at hog feed ingredients that can be grown in northern Europe is the lingering fear that North and South America will, in the end, no longer be able to supply a high enough tonnage of non-GMO soybeans at the purity still insisted upon by the European Union.

But soybean growers need have little fear of this market disappearing. The German researchers noted that most hog producers in at least their country far preferred the security of using the tried and tested and highly-regarded imported soybean meal in their rations.

A Danish first for carbon-neutral hog production?

Denmark's first carbon-neutral swine production unit is planned to begin production in 2012. The C$20.7 million project in Jutland features a 750-sow farrow-to-finish unit and a 1,100 tonne per year tomato production greenhouse complex to utilize the manure.

It is expected to produce up to 23,000 slaughter pigs per year and, because animal welfare is to be an important factor in the concept, a slaughterhouse is planned on-site to avoid travel stress for the animals.

The design – by architect Nee Rentz-Petersen, who won a national prize for her concept under the theme "Agricultural buildings of the future," – is aimed at achieving a complete balance of carbon input and output, and sustainable and almost odour-free pig production.

Waste from the abattoir and manure are to be fermented in the unit's own biogas plant, producing heat and electrical power for the entire complex. The plan comprises separation of manure first of all, with the resultant liquid filtered and used for irrigating the tomato crop.

One of the planners is Danish pig farmer Søren Hansen, who says building should be started in 2010. Hansen reports that the space per sow and feeding pig is to be larger than average in Denmark. Dry sows will not only be loose-housed, they will also be bedded with straw – or at least have access to the material to encourage natural rooting behaviour. He adds that total area for pigs with feed preparation, manure treatment and slaughtering/processing in the same floor will be 27,000 square metres. Upstairs will be rows of glass houses for tomato production.

Finance is coming from a consortium that includes the architects involved and the Danish government organisation AgroTech (Institution for Agri Technology and Food Innovation), which has requested that the complex be opened to the public as far as possible and that a farm shop be incorporated for sale of tomatoes and perhaps other greenhouse produce. BP