For certain, individual sow crates are becoming increasingly difficult to defend, a tag team of experts based in Nebraska said during their presentation to the 2016 Banff Pork Seminar in January.

Veterinarian Larry Coleman from Vet Care and Tim Friedel, manager of Thomas Livestock, shared the stage for a discussion of factors they had encountered when setting up a group housing system in a new sow barn.

The push toward group housing came home for Coleman about two years ago, when the production company he works for was about to expand. The plan had been to continue with crates until one of its owners came back from a meeting suggesting that group housing might be a better option.

Coleman said he felt at the time that the performance they were seeing with sow crates was up to standard, so there didn’t seem to be an obvious reason to change something that did not seem to be broken.

“Me, being a veteran of the swine industry, I had literally spent my entire career trying to talk people from groups into stalls, so that was really fearful for me, I have to admit,” he said.

Finding an effective and efficient feed system would be one of the biggest factors in designing the new barn, and there would be a need to figure out the optimum number of sows for each group.

Coleman said he has been in the industry long enough to have built a wealth of experience in group housing before the push in the 80s to put sows in crates.

“Back in the 80s, I had some experience with ESF (electronic sow feeding), and it wasn’t a positive experience, and so we decided that this was 20 years later and maybe we needed to investigate what was new out there, what would be some technology solutions to what was new out there, what would be some of the technology solutions to part of the problems with group housing.”

Coleman listed the problems he had identified that would need to be solved in the design and setup of a group housing system: Inaccurate feeding, social stress, training difficulties, heat detection and sow management.

Friedel said he has seen a variety of systems since the early 70s, when he first started working in swine production. Feeding on the floor has been disastrous, with dominant sows getting too fat while others do not get enough to eat. The decision in Coleman’s barn was to use an electronic system that would feed each sow individually.

Nutritional allotments are created for each animal, with scope in the near future to set up a combination of two separate rations for each one, creating an infinite number of available rations. A distinct advantage to the system is that each animal is weighed in the feeding station, giving further opportunities to tailor its rations on a weight gain curve.

Based on the way groups of sows interact, Coleman and Friedel have determined that 275 is the optimum number of animals to keep in a unit, eliminating fighting and allowing them animals to form smaller social groups that rest and eat together. They found that the sows nest together in groups of 10 to 15.

They remarked that sows remember a pecking order in groups of up to 100 animals, therefore putting them in larger groups eliminates the issues that are raised with 100 or fewer sows.

A race-track system was created to push sows from resting areas through the feeders in a big circle so they could not double back for extra feed. While some systems provide as little as 18 square feet of space per sow, Coleman and Friedel said that did not seem adequate, raising the space allotment to 23-24 square feet. Training begins at 10 weeks by acclimating gilts to a scale sorting system, teaching them that there is a food reward for moving through a pneumatic gate.

Animals are given a chance to play with roller gates in the grower unit, so they are accustomed to what can be quite an intimidating apparatus by the time they reach the sow barn.

Coleman said part of the secret to good training is to have a competent “hog whisperer” working with the gilts; someone who has the understanding and patience to establish strong connections with the animals.

“We were told just do it with three or four people to help with the gilts and push them into the feeder,” said Friedel. After about three to four weeks, they discovered that the method was not working. The pushing made the gilts nervous, with the result that they wouldn’t eat once they got to the feeder, he said. “It doesn’t do you any good to have the gilt in the feed station if she won’t eat.”

Raised on a farm with the benefit of 4-H, Friedel said he learned that animals learn best when they trust the people working with them, not when they are frightened or hungry. Friedel said he worked with about eight different staff before finding someone who had a knack for working with animals.

“He just has a knack for putting gilts at ease. They will follow him anywhere and he can coax them into these stall without them being fearful and they just go in there and start eating,” said Friedel.

Friedel said they have developed a heat detection system, including exposure. A boar is penned at the exit to the feeding station. An electronic chip in the female’s ear tag sends information to a computer, which tracks any interactions that would indicate that she is beginning to cycle.

Parameters within the system are set to measure how many times the animal visits the boar and for how long at a time, and then separate the animals that fall within those parameters. “We don’t ever have an animal that gets by us,” said Friedel.

From a management perspective, said he and Coleman, running large numbers of sows in a single unit has the advantage of easing the introduction of new animals.

Production numbers from the new barn are quite comparable with those of the two older units, said Coleman. All three farms have a capacity of 5,400 sows.

Farrowing rates are running at 95.8 per cent in the two older barns and 95.5 per cent in the new one, while the sows are producing an average of 34.5 pigs per year in the stalls compared with 34.8 pigs per year in the loose housing unit. Sow mortality, however, is somewhat higher in the loose housing units, at 5.4 per cent compared with 3.7 per cent in the older barns.

The bottom line, said Coleman, is that a loose housing system meets production standards while providing for society’s expectations concerning animal welfare. •

— By PHC Staff