Freedom is best house
EASTON LODGE PIGS
Freedom is best house
THE second batch of sows will soon be weaned from our new fully-slatted, eight-crate freedom farrowing house put up by A M Warkup last December, writes Jasper Renold.
We now have 86 farrowing crates and six different types of farrowing house all of which have their own idiosyncrasies in terms of getting the best performance out of them.
We are now learning the peculiarities of the freedom farrowing system and that is certainly proving to be the least time-consuming and cleanest house to use. The first batch of piglets weaned averaged 8.56kg at 26.4 days old compared with others on the same day that weighed 7.42kg at 23.8 days old. The latter figure was better than we normally achieve.
The plan view of the new house shows the main features of the design. Most similar systems have the sows facing the centre passageway partly for ease of feeding. But we wanted them facing the other way so that the business end of the sow was nearest to the feed passageway for easier observation and access. It would also be easier to keep this area clean and bedded up around farrowing time when the crate is closed up. We also knew assistance during farrowing would be much easier, either with the back panel removed or by opening the side of the crate.
However, the crate is a more complicated and expensive structure since both sides, front and back, can be opened. One of the sides opens right out for entry and exit of the sow. In the open, or freedom position, the sides open out to the walls and are locked in place with a pin. With the creep area to the centre passageway that permits easy access to the piglets. At farrowing time we have been using shredded paper in the area behind the sow and over towards the heat pad. A Philips 175Watt infra red lamp is hung midway between the sow and the pad to provide a comfortable focal point for the piglets to sleep away from the sow and to help them find the heat pad.
Wanderers
Even so, we have found that some litters wander all over the pen and have to be manually trained to use the heat pad, much as we shut piglets in the creeps of the other houses before the sows first feed after farrowing. The freedom pen seems spacious but is actually only 5% bigger in total area than most of our other farrowing pens.
A Dicam electronic controller monitors and regulates room and heat pad temperatures Those can be set at a constant level or start at a high temperature and reduce on a pre-determined curve as the piglets get older. We initially made the mistake of putting the lamps too near the heat pads and that made the control pad turn itself off and all the other ones in the process, so they were warm only in the immediate area of the lamp.
Its too early to talk meaningfully about mortality figures but so far we havent had a spate of overlays when opening up the crates at 10 days. However, we have found that underweight piglets are not so happy with fully slatted floors; they seem to do better with the more well defined creeps and solid floors in the other houses.
We have left the lamps and heat pads on longer in these cases or swapped the small piglets for bigger ones from elsewhere. But normal and larger piglets visibly benefit from the clean and controlled environment and, after a day or two, are happy with just the heat pad.
With the crates opened up sows can be found lying and suckling in almost any part of the pen and the action of walking round soon treads their dung through the slats. At weaning piglets are readily herded out of the pen into the passageway and thence moved to one end of the building for loading and weighing in the transport barrow. *